Posts tagged science
Happy Trails Riding Center – Summer Camps and Activities
May 21st
We talk with Chris about all the great things they offer at the Happy Trails Riding Center facility. Their main focus is children and helping provide a natural atmosphere and educational environment to not only ride horses but and build a foundation for leadership with other peers. The riding center offers a full boarding center and 3 large riding and training areas, as well as many summer camps that involve horse training, care, riding, science discovery, fun with animals, camping, horse shows and lots of other great outdoor activities for the kids.
CU study: Melting glaciers are largely responsible for sea level rise
May 16th
While 99 percent of Earth’s land ice is locked up in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the remaining ice in the world’s glaciers contributed just as much to sea rise as the two ice sheets combined from 2003 to 2009, says a new study led by Clark University and involving the University Colorado Boulder.
The new research found that all glacial regions lost mass from 2003 to 2009, with the biggest ice losses occurring in Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes and the Himalayas. The glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic sheets lost an average of roughly 260 billion metric tons of ice annually during the study period, causing the oceans to rise 0.03 inches, or about 0.7 millimeters per year.
The study compared traditional ground measurements to satellite data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, missions to estimate ice loss for glaciers in all regions of the planet.
“For the first time, we’ve been able to very precisely constrain how much these glaciers as a whole are contributing to sea rise,” said geography Assistant Professor Alex Gardner of Clark University in Worcester, Mass., lead study author. “These smaller ice bodies are currently losing about as much mass as the ice sheets.”
A paper on the subject is being published in the May 17 issue of the journal Science.
“Because the global glacier ice mass is relatively small in comparison with the huge ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, people tend to not worry about it,” said CU-Boulder Professor Tad Pfeffer, a study co-author. “But it’s like a little bucket with a huge hole in the bottom: it may not last for very long, just a century or two, but while there’s ice in those glaciers, it’s a major contributor to sea level rise,” said Pfeffer, a glaciologist at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research
ICESat, which ceased operations in 2009, measured glacier changes using laser altimetry, which bounces laser pulses off the ice surface to determine changes in the height of ice cover. The GRACE satellite system, still operational, detects variations in Earth’s gravity field resulting from changes in the planet’s mass distribution, including ice displacements.
GRACE does not have a fine enough resolution and ICESat does not have sufficient sampling density to study small glaciers, but mass change estimates by the two satellite systems for large glaciated regions agree well, the scientists concluded.
“Because the two satellite techniques, ICESat and GRACE, are subject to completely different types of errors, the fact that their results are in such good agreement gives us increased confidence in those results,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, a study co-author and fellow at the university’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
Ground-based estimates of glacier mass changes include measurements along a line from a glacier’s summit to its edge, which are extrapolated over a glacier’s entire area. Such measurements, while fairly accurate for individual glaciers, tend to cause scientists to overestimate ice loss when extrapolated over larger regions, including individual mountain ranges, according to the team.
Current estimates predict if all the glaciers in the world were to melt, they would raise sea level by about two feet. In contrast, an entire Greenland ice sheet melt would raise sea levels by about 20 feet, while if Antarctica lost its ice cover, sea levels would rise nearly 200 feet.
The study involved 16 researchers from 10 countries. In addition to Clark University and CU-Boulder, major research contributions came from the University of Michigan, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, Trent University in Ontario, Canada, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies in Boulder, NASA’s ICESat satellite was successfully operated from the CU-Boulder campus by a team made up primarily of undergraduates from its launch in 2003 to its demise in 2009 when the science payload failed. The students participated in the unusual decommissioning of a functioning satellite in 2010, bringing the craft into Earth re-entry to burn up. ICESat’s successor, ICESat-2, is slated for launch in 2016 by NASA.
-CU media release-
CU: New colleges, including a J-School are proposed. Others are environment and sustainability
May 1st
University of Colorado Boulder Provost Russell L. Moore today announced the campus will be taking the first steps needed to formally propose the creation of the first new colleges on the campus in 50 years: a college focused on media, communication and information, and a college designed around CU-Boulder’s strengths in the environment and sustainability. Both would require the approval of the Board of Regents.
“These proposed new colleges will create exciting synergies among related disciplines,” said Moore. “They will build on CU-Boulder’s programmatic strengths and excellence, attract new high-quality students and faculty, and facilitate scholarship and teaching that will prepare students for careers in a wide range of exciting fields.”
Moore said the college or school devoted to media, communication and information would house programs in journalism, advertising and design, communication, film production and film studies, media studies and a new department in information studies.
“If approved by the Board of Regents, this college will create exciting opportunities for our students and will bring together a dynamic and creative faculty in these disciplines,” said Moore. “From this college, we will create working journalists, editors and media professionals, communication scholars, media experts, advertisers and media designers, filmmakers and film theorists, and experts in the emerging field of information architecture and design. The possibilities are truly exciting.”
A college of the environment and sustainability, Moore said, if approved, will “bring together some of the finest researchers and teachers on the campus” in disciplines and programs that include environmental science, environmental policy and environmental design while “drawing upon assets from some of the campus’s most dynamic institutes,” including the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI).
“This will bring together in one college a concentration of faculty who represent some of CU-Boulder’s mostly highly ranked, and highly successful, research in environmental sciences,” said Moore. “The graduates of the college we envision will be highly sought after in fields ranging from design of the built environment to alternative energy development to the formation of environmental and energy policy.”
In both cases, said Moore, the move to create the colleges is supported by three years of work, by recommendations from internal and external committees who reviewed existing programs and structures on the campus, and above all, “by the clear economic, workplace and research demands of the world around us.”
“This isn’t adding to an ivory tower – it’s breaking apart the ivory tower and investing in a bright and very real future for our students and our faculty,” said Moore. “This will challenge us to rethink how we teach, how we organize ourselves as a research and scholarly community, how we generate and use resources, and how we deliver graduates into the job market or into realms of further scholarship.”
Moore said the next step in this process is to form implementation committees to create blueprints for forging the colleges, examining such issues as funding and fundraising, administration, curriculum development and how to integrate the work of the institutes with the role and mission of the new colleges. The goal is to submit proposals to form the colleges to the CU Board of Regents within the next 12 months, and to form the new colleges and begin enrolling students by 2015.
Moore also thanked a host of individuals who drove the internal and external processes to help envision the colleges, including “Merrill Lessley, who chaired the ICMT Exploratory Committee, Andrew Calabrese who chaired the Information Communication Journalism Media and Technology Steering Committee, Helmut Muller-Sievers and Bob Craig who organized conversations in the social sciences and the humanities and arts around these issues last summer, Michele Jackson who conducted an online discussion group, and Sharon Collinge who chaired the Environmental Studies Visioning Committee.”
CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip DiStefano lauded the work of the committees.
“Forming new academic entities is no small task,” said DiStefano. “From the volunteer committee members who gave their time, to our faculty who gave their time and input into those committees, we have seen the best of what CU-Boulder is about: passion, vision, energy and ingenuity. We are confident our new colleges and schools will embody these same values.”
-CU press release-
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