Sandra Hines

Natalie Oppliger, Taylor Biaggi and Ryan Steele take measurements in an old-growth stand during a trek up Mount Si.

Along the way they learn how climate, elevation, disturbances such as fire and insects and other factors shape the forests. Tom Hinckley, professor of environmental and forest sciences,  originated the course 12 years ago and has taught it every year since, even now that he’s retired.

Students don’t just learn from Hinckley, but from each other as well. Part of the homework involves researching assigned topics and explaining about plants – from the diminutive avalanche lily to towering Pacific silver fir tree – and processes – such as how long-ago glaciers and volcanoes shaped the topography and how topography then influences soils, water and vegetation.

The class is offered through the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, part of the College of the Environment, but the graduate and undergraduate students enrolled this year were studying everything from human physiology to fisheries.

Your trusty UW Today reporter snapped photos and survived all three field trips, including the final journey in the Teanaway region near Cle Elum, where the 2.5-mile climb involved an elevation change of 2,400 feet. Half the climb was in snow. (O.K., so your reporter wasn’t intrepid enough to make it to top of Iron Peak. She didn’t want to risk a newspaper, or UW Today, headline saying, “UW undergraduates carry 59-year-old woman off mountain.”)

The shrinking lake and prolonged drought were initially blamed on overgrazing and bad agricultural practices. More recently, Lake Chad became an example of global warming.

U.S. Library of Congress

Sulfate-laden aerosols coming out of a U.S. smokestack in 1942. Emissions rose steadily until legislation was passed in the late 1960s and ’70s.

New University of Washington research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, shows that the drought was caused at least in part by Northern Hemisphere air pollution.

Aerosols emanating from coal-burning factories in the United States and Europe during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s cooled the entire Northern Hemisphere, shifting tropical rain bands south. Rains no longer reached the Sahel region, a band that spans the African continent just below the Sahara desert.

When clean-air legislation passed in the U.S. and Europe, the rain band shifted back, and the drought lessened.

Related research by the UW researchers and their collaborators shows that global warming is now causing the land-covered Northern Hemisphere to warm faster than the Southern Hemisphere, further reversing the pre-1980s trend.

Previous research has suggested a connection between coal-burning and the Sahel drought, but this was the first study that used decades of historical observations to find that this drought was part of a global shift in tropical rainfall, and then used multiple climate models to determine why.

“One of our research strategies is to zoom out,” said lead author Yen-Ting Hwang, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences. “Instead of studying rainfall at a particular place, we try to look for the larger-scale patterns.”

Wikimedia / Annabel Symington

The road to Timbuktu, in the Sahel region, during more normal conditions.

To determine that the Sahel drought was part of a broader shift, the authors looked at precipitation from all rain gauges that had continuous readings between 1930 and 1990.  Other places on the northern edge of the tropical rain band, including northern India and South America, also experienced dryer climates in the 1970s and ’80s. Meanwhile, places on the southern edge of the rain band, such as northeast Brazil and the African Great Lakes, were wetter than normal.

To understand the reason, authors looked at all 26 climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Researchers discovered that almost all the models also showed some southward shift, and that cooling from sulfate aerosols in the Northern Hemisphere was the primary cause.

“We think people should know that these particles not only pollute air locally, but they also have these remote climate effects,” Hwang said.

Light-colored sulfate aerosols are emitted mainly by dirty burning of coal. They create hazy air that reflects sunlight, and also lead to more reflective, longer-lasting clouds.

People living in the Northern Hemisphere did not notice the cooling, the authors said, because it balanced the heating associated with the greenhouse effect from increased carbon dioxide, so temperatures were steady.

UW / Y.-T. Hwang

Global precipitation change between 1931-1950 and 1961-1980. The African Sahel, center, is much drier, while east Africa and east Brazil are wetter.

“To some extent, science messed this one up the first time around,” said co-author Dargan Frierson, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences. “People thought that a large part of that drought was due to bad farming practices and desertification. But over the last 20 years or so we’ve realized that that was quite wrong, and that large-scale ocean and atmosphere patterns are significantly more powerful in terms of shaping where the rains fall.”

The models did not show as strong a shift as the observations, Frierson said, suggesting that ocean circulation also played a role in the drought.

The good news is that the U.S. Clean Air Act and its European counterpart had an unintended positive effect beyond improved air quality and related health benefits. Although shorter-term droughts continue to affect the Sahel, the long-term drought began to recover in the 1980s.

“We were able to do something that was good for us, and it also benefited people elsewhere,” Frierson said.

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation. Sarah Kang at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea was a co-author.

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For more information, contact Hwang at 206-543-0333 or yting@atmos.washington.edu and Frierson at 206-685-7364 or dargan@atmos.washington.edu.

Uneven sidewalks are hazardous for older or disabled pedestrians. These are one of the obstacles to outdoor walking for exercise explored in a recent study.

It sounds simple: get outside and take a walk. Walking on its own is known to offer numerous health benefits, everything from lower blood pressure to less aches and pains. For some people, though, getting outside and taking that walk can be a challenge. This is especially true for the elderly or those with disabilities. How will I get to my destination? Is it a safe place to walk? Are there street lights? Will sidewalk cracks make it harder for my walker to roll?

These questions are pondered by millions of Americans who live with physical mobility challenges. After all, more than 40 percent of adults  age 45 or older have difficulty with physical movement, and 58 percent of adults age 65 or older have a disability, according to a recent paper appearing in The Gerontologist

The report covers study findings from the University of Washington schools of nursing and public health. The work was led by Basia Belza, professor of biobehavioral nursing and health systems, and Dori Rosenberg, a postdoctoral fellow in rehabilitation medicine and an affiliate assistant professor of health services, based at Group Health Research Institute.

Their research team sought to  better understand the needs of adults with mobility disabilities related to neighborhood walkability. The investigators interviewed older adults with mobility disabilities about their experiences and impressions of trying to get about in built environments – the settings in which human activities take place.  The researchers learned that poorly lit neighborhoods, lack of public transportation, sidewalks in disrepair, and unmarked or poorly marked intersections prevent people with disabilities from taking advantage of the benefits of walking.

Belza said that older adults, who are the fastest growing demographic, are also the most physically inactive group and the age group most likely to face chronic disease due to inactivity.

“People who are inactive in general have a higher incidence of chronic disease such as stroke, heart disease, arthritis,” Belza said. “Regular engagement in physical activities leads to better health outcomes, including improved mobility, weight loss and fewer  falls. This is especially important in older adults who may already be dealing with health challenges.”

Belza noted that one study participant who lives in the Phinney Ridge neighborhood of Seattle has already approached the Seattle City Council to ask for neighborhood improvements.

In another related project, Belza partnered with an Easter Seals project, called Accessible Community Transportation in Our Nation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Healthy Aging Research Network to create a Neighborhood Wayfinding Pocket Guide. This guide was designed to show people ways to check out their neighborhoods and assess the state of sidewalks, transportation, street lights and other factors that could encourage or discourage neighborhood walking.

A talk UW nursing professor Basia Belza gave at Aljoya Thornton Place April 30 encouraged older adults to get active.

“The guide is a great way for people to get out in their neighborhoods and learn to be more active in general while also helping others,” Belza said.

The guide encourages people to consult with their city and town governments to share ideas for  improvement, with the hope that this will encourage cities to invest more in communities. Belza continues to look for ways to improve access to the built environment and increase physical activity in older adults. She and her colleagues in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Healthy Aging Network are doing a systematic review to better understand how older adults use technology to find their way.

Belza believes that with improved information and resources, older adults who have mobility disabilities will reap the benefits of walking, which has long been reported by adults as the most preferred way to be physically active and applauded by health experts as one of the best ways to improve overall health.

“Walking is a great way to decrease your risk for many chronic conditions, including heart disease, obesity and other health challenges,” she said. “We hope that our guide will help people improve their health by finding new and safe places to walk.”

The project was funded by the UW Health Promotion Research Center, a CDC Prevention Research Center.

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Download a wayfinding guide and supplement.

The event, to be held June 19-22, is being hosted at Gould Hall by the Department of Urban Design and Planning in the UW College of Built Environments, with help from local cycling agencies, enthusiasts and clubs — all to encourage widespread bicycle use in 21^st century cities.

The international symposium will feature speakers and discussions on creating bicycle-friendly cities as well as group discussions on issues of health and safety, rider education, biking with babies, environmental awareness and working with elected officials and many other topics.

There will also be guided bicycle field trips and a four-hour disaster relief simulation demonstrating how cargo bikes can be used to respond in the event of disaster.

UW research to be featured in the symposium includes:

• A feasibility study by students and faculty working with planners and advocacy groups that has found sufficient demand in Seattle for a public bike-sharing program, and offers recommendations on implementation.
• An extensive literature review created by students and faculty that focusing on best practices in bike-related planning, policy and design as well as counting bicycle commute activity.
• Studies on reducing conflicts between cyclists and trucks, making improvements to better serve UW resident students who cycle, and retrofitting Seattle infrastructure based on lessons learned about bicycle use in The Netherlands.

The symposium’s main faculty organizers are Don Miller, UW professor of urban design and planning; and Alon Bassok, affiliate assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, collaborating with several other students and faculty.

Miller said the UW seems a perfect place for such a meeting, with the City of Seattle planning initiatives to encourage bike use and the UW striving to have 20 percent of its daily commuter trips to campus by bike by the year 2020. Plus, he notes that the League of American Bicyclists named Washington as the most bike-friendly state in the nation.

“A major purpose of this international symposium is to look ahead 20 to 30 years,” Miller said, “to explore innovations in urban spatial structure and design and new policies and programs that hold promise for greatly increasing the use of bicycles as a part of daily life.”

The symposium kicks off with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. June 19, in Gould Hall that is open to the public for $20, and to which people are invited to bring well-loved family or cargo bikes to show off.

Find a complete agenda online and more information in an ongoing blog about the event, or on Twitter @BicycleUrbanism.

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For more information, contact Miller at 206-543-7355 or millerd@uw.edu; or Bassok at
206-356-1331, or abassok@uw.edu.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s standard for emissions from wood-based transportation fuels requires a 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to using fossil fuels. The standards don’t just concern greenhouse gases generated when biofuel is burned to run vehicles or provide energy: What’s required is life-cycle analysis, a tally of emissions all along the growing, collecting, producing and shipping chain.

The special Forest Products Journal issue does just that for energy produced in various ways from woody biomass. For instance, two processes for making ethanol reviewed in the issue – one a gasification process using trees thinned from forests and the other a fermentation process using plantation-grown willows – reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent or better compared with gasoline.  In contrast, producing and using corn ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions 24 percent compared to gasoline, according Argonne National Laboratory research published in 2011.

Forest Products Society

A special issue of Forest Products Journal considers 15 processes where woody biomass was turned into liquid fuel, burned directly to create heat, steam or electricity, or processed into pellets for burning

For the publication, researchers from the 17 research institutions that make up the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials determined the life-cycle emissions of 15 processes where woody biomass was turned into liquid fuel, burned directly to create heat, steam or electricity, or processed into pellets for burning.

The common advantage of these processes over fossil fuels is that trees growing in replanted forests reabsorb the carbon dioxide emitted when woody biomass burns as fuel in cars or other uses, said Elaine Oneil, a University of Washington research scientist in ecological and forest sciences and director of the consortium. While fossil fuels cause a one-way flow of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when they burn, forests that are harvested for wood products or fuels and regrown represent a two-way flow, into and back out of the atmosphere.

The processes reviewed have the added advantage of using woody debris not only as a component of fuels but to produce energy needed for manufacturing the biofuel. The fermentation process to produce ethanol, for example, ends up with leftover organic matter that can be burned to produce electricity. Only one-third of the electricity generated by the leftovers is needed to make the ethanol, so two-thirds can go to the power grid for other uses, offsetting the need to burn fossil fuels to produce electricity.

This is among the reasons that ethanol from plantation-grown feedstock using the fermentation process approaches being carbon neutral, that is, during its life cycle as much carbon is removed as is added to the atmosphere, according to Rick Gustafson, UW professor of environmental and forest sciences and a co-author in the special issue.

The researchers looking at the fermentation process also took into account such things as water consumption. They found that the process – which among other things needs water to support the enzymes – uses about 70 percent more water per unit of energy produced than gasoline. A biofuel industry using woody material will be a lot less water intense than today’s pulp and paper industry – still, water use should be taken into account when moving from pilot biofuel production to full-scale commercialization, Gustafson said.

“The value of life-cycle analysis is that it gives you information such as the amount of energy you get in relation to how much you put in, how emissions are affected and the impacts to resources such as land and water,” Oneil said.

In the U.S. last year, some 15 facilities produced about 20,000 gallons of fuels using cellulosic biomass such as wood waste and sugarcane bagasse, according to a U.S. Energy Information Administration website. The administration estimates this output could grow to more than 5 million gallons in 2013, as operations ramp up at several plants.

In the special issue, the biofuels analyzed came only from forest residues, forest thinnings, wood bits left after manufacturing such things as hardwood flooring or fast-growing plantation trees like willow. That’s because, from a greenhouse emissions perspective, it makes no sense to produce biofuels using trees that can be made into long-lived building materials and furniture, said Bruce Lippke, UW professor emeritus of environmental and forest sciences, who oversaw the contents of the special issue.

“Substituting wood for non-wood building materials such as steel and concrete, can displace far more carbon emissions than using such wood for biofuels,” Lippke said. “It’s another example of how life-cycle analysis helps us judge how to use resources wisely.”

The modeling and simulations used for life-cycle analysis in the special Forest Products Journal issue can be used to evaluate other woody materials and biofuel processes in use now or in the future, with the models being refined as more data is collected. The data also will be submitted to the U.S. Life Cycle Inventory Database of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which has data available for everyone to use on hundreds of products.

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For more information:
Oneil, 206-543-6859, eoneil@uw.edu
Lippke, 206-543-8684,blippke@uw.edu
Gustafson, 206-543-2790, pulp@u.washington.edu

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Diesel exhaust contributes to traffic air pollution and may hamper one of the body’s protective mechanisms against heart and blood vessel disease.

Exposure to diesel exhaust may render friendly, cholesterol-fighting molecules incapable of performing their important job. A new study suggests that the traffic air pollutant may prevent good cholesterol from battling the bad, artery-clogging cholesterol that promotes heart attack and stroke.

The study’s team included environmental health scientists led by Michael E. Rosenfeld at the UW School of Public Health and heart disease specialist Jesus Araujo and his colleagues in the Division of Cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Their paper, published in the June issue of Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, is the first to report that exposure to traffic sources of air pollution — diesel exhaust from combustion engines — can alter the protective nature of normal high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, and set in motion biological mechanisms that lead to cardiovascular disease.

Best known for its ability to scavenge harmful “bad” cholesterol from blood vessels and excrete it from the body, HDL is also an antioxidant powerhouse. Set against bad cholesterol — low-density lipoprotein or LDL — HDL blocks oxidation, a process that induces inflammation in the blood vessels and leads to the hardening of arteries, explained Rosenfeld, professor of environmental and occupational health sciences. But that’s not all. An additional virtue of HDL’s “goodness” lies in its ability to prevent inflammation caused by white blood cell patrols honing in tissues antagonized by air pollution particulates.

All of this adds up. Scoring high levels of HDL in blood tests at the doctor’s office has generally been accepted as protective against cardiovascular disease. Higher levels of HDL mean less risk of heart attack and stroke. That is, until now.

Researchers found that exposure to diesel exhaust led to the loss of the anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory properties of the HDL.

“It turned the good cop into a bad cop,” said study co-author Timothy Larson,  UW professor of environmental and occupational health sciences.

HDL normally performs protective functions, but if the molecules are exposed to pollution, they lose their protective quality.

Environmental health expert Michael Rosenfeld studies the effects of air pollution on the heart and blood vessels.

In the arm of the study completed at the UW, mice were exposed to diesel exhaust over a two-week period at levels comparable to those we encounter everyday. The lab is one of the few in the country that can accurately simulate ambient air pollution exposures in a controlled environment. Results of the mice’s exposure were compared to a control group that received only clean filtered air. In a second experiment, a third group was exposed to diesel exhaust for two weeks and filtered air for an additional week. Researchers wanted to assess whether a week was sufficient time for the HDL to return to normal.

“What was really surprising: the one week of recovery time was not sufficient,” said Rosenfeld, who is also a UW professor of pathology. “This has some pretty significant implications for how exposure to air pollution can impact development of cardiovascular disease. Even short-term exposures to pollution can have pretty long-term effects.”

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, one of the National Institutes of Health, supported the research through grant number R01 ES016959/ES/NIEHS.

“The Return” is an illustrated story that portrays environmental health themes from a Native American perspective,

Through imaginative storytelling and art, “The Return” conveys environmental health from a Native American perspective.  A center within the UW School of Public Health worked with Native American tribes to create and publish the illustrated story as a 32-page comic book.

One of the goals of this Native Tradition, Environment and Community Health Project was to find out how Native American ways of understanding the world and our place in it differ from the Western concept of environmental health. Surveys, interviews, and talking circles identified three core themes of Native environmental health: community, wellness, and inter-relationship.

“The Return” was created from the findings. It is a dreamlike account of a Native woman and her baby, and tells how these three concepts are passed to the next generation.

Michelle Montgomery, senior fellow in the UW Department of Bioethics and Humanities at the UW Center for Genomics & Healthcare Equality, and Nicholas Salazar, a student at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M., developed the book. Montgomery is a tribal member affiliated with the Haliwa Saponi and Eastern Band Cherokee.

The UW Center for Ecogenetics & Environmental Health and the Northwest Indian College co-managed the project. The effort began in 2008 with a collaborative grant from the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences.

The book was distributed at the 2013 American Indian Higher Education Consortium Student Conference in Green Bay, Wisc. More dissemination opportunities are planned. The end of the book contains a discussion guide and suggestions for related art projects.

“The Return” comic book is posted as a PDF.

Created during the last two years, the video plunges viewers into the experience of building a new type of ocean observatory – one that will use fiber-optic cables to bring electrical power, high-speed Internet and modern instruments to the deep sea. The video takes viewers to one of the sites of the observatory now under construction: Axial Seamount, a volcano some 300 miles off the West Coast and a mile beneath the ocean’s surface.

UWTV

A deep-sea octopus makes a cameo appearance.

The documentary includes dramatic footage captured by high-definition video cameras operated by submersible robots. The non-human stars of the documentary include a deep-ocean octopus, bioluminescent jellyfish, and rarely seen microbial “snow blowers” that stream from the underwater volcano.

The goal of the National Science Foundation-funded observatory, part of the national Ocean Observatories Initiative, is “to have a permanent presence in the ocean via a new technology,” said principal investigator John Delaney, a UW professor of oceanography.

But realizing that goal is not an easy task.

“There is no book on how you lay a fiber-optic network over an active submarine volcano,” Delaney said in the video.

There are tense moments as the team uses underwater robots to survey the site of the observatory. One scene shows a cable placed across a volcanic hydrothermal site while the robotic arm measures the temperature inside and confirms it is much hotter than the cable can survive. (The contractor has since replaced that section of cable and moved it to another location.)

UWTV

A volcanic caldera at Axial Seamount appears in the UWTV documentary.

“The ocean really is the last unexplored frontier on the planet,” said Deborah Kelley, a UW professor of oceanography. “When we dive in places, even when we’ve been there before, chances are we’re going to make a discovery.”

The observatory will replace those yearly dives with a constant virtual window on the marine life and volcanic eruptions deep below the ocean’s surface.

The documentary also features Giora Prokurowski, a project scientist and UW alumnus; work from Mark Stoermer, who does visualizations for the project; and former educational director Allison Fundis. Communications coordinator Nancy Penrose co-produced the documentary.

One of the purposes of the 2011 cruise was to find sites for the observatory’s giant electrical outlets. Those outlets were installed last summer by a telecommunications contractor. This year Delaney, Kelley and their team of researchers and students will sail from Seattle to install the low-voltage electrical outlets, lay smaller cables and attach sensors that will, in a few months, begin to send real-time observations back to land-based computers.

Live video and updates will be posted throughout July and August at the project’s website. The observatory is scheduled to be commissioned and fully operational by early 2015.

Jeffrey Richey / UW

The team used rented boats to collect samples in the mouth of the world’s largest river.

Until recently people believed much of the rain forest’s carbon floated down the Amazon River and ended up deep in the ocean. University of Washington research showed a decade ago that rivers exhale huge amounts of carbon dioxide – though left open the question of how that was possible, since bark and stems were thought to be too tough for river bacteria to digest.

A study published this week in Nature Geoscience resolves the conundrum, proving that woody plant matter is almost completely digested by bacteria living in the Amazon River, and that this tough stuff plays a major part in fueling the river’s breath.

The finding has implications for global carbon models, and for the ecology of the Amazon and the world’s other rivers.

“People thought this was one of the components that just got dumped into the ocean,” said first author Nick Ward, a UW doctoral student in oceanography. “We’ve found that terrestrial carbon is respired and basically turned into carbon dioxide as it travels down the river.”

Tough lignin, which helps form the main part of woody tissue, is the second most common component of terrestrial plants. Scientists believed that much of it got buried on the seafloor to stay there for centuries or millennia. The new paper shows river bacteria break it down within two weeks, and that just 5 percent of the Amazon rainforest’s carbon ever reaches the ocean.

“Rivers were once thought of as passive pipes,” said co-author Jeffrey Richey, a UW professor of oceanography. “This shows they’re more like metabolic hotspots.”

Jeffrey Richey / UW

Nick Ward collects samples of Amazon River water.

When previous research showed how much carbon dioxide was outgassing from rivers, scientists knew it didn’t add up. They speculated there might be some unknown, short-lived carbon source that freshwater bacteria could turn into carbon dioxide.

“The fact that lignin is proving to be this metabolically active is a big surprise,” Richey said. “It’s a mechanism for the rivers’ role in the global carbon cycle – it’s the food for the river breath.”

The Amazon alone discharges about one-fifth of the world’s freshwater and plays a large role in global processes, but it also serves as a test bed for natural river ecosystems.

Richey and his collaborators have studied the Amazon River for more than three decades. Earlier research took place more than 500 miles upstream. This time the U.S. and Brazilian team sought to understand the connection between the river and ocean, which meant working at the mouth of the world’s largest river – a treacherous study site.

NASA

The mouth of the Amazon River has three main channels, with an island the size of Switzerland in the middle.

“There’s a reason that no one’s really studied in this area,” Ward said. “Pulling it off has been quite a challenge. It’s a humongous, sloppy piece of water.”

The team used flat-bottomed boats to traverse the three river mouths, each so wide that you cannot see land, in water so rich with sediment that it looks like chocolate milk. Tides raise the ocean by 30 feet, reversing the flow of freshwater at the river mouth, and winds blow at up to 35 mph.

Under these conditions, Ward collected river water samples in all four seasons. He compared the original samples with ones left to sit for up to a week at river temperatures. Back at the UW, he used newly developed techniques to scan the samples for some 100 compounds, covering 95 percent of all plant-based lignin. Previous techniques could identify only 1 percent of the plant-based carbon in the water.

Based on the results, the authors estimate that about 40 percent of the Amazon’s lignin breaks down in soils, 55 percent breaks down in the river system, and 5 percent reaches the ocean, where it may break down or sink to the ocean floor.

“People had just assumed, ‘Well, it’s not energetically feasible for an organism to break lignin apart, so why would they?’” Ward said. “We’re thinking that as rain falls over the land it’s taking with it these lignin compounds, but it’s also taking with it the bacterial community that’s really good at eating the lignin.”

The research was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Research Council for the State of São Paulo. Co-authors are Richard Keil at the UW; Patricia Medeiros and Patricia Yager at the University of Georgia; Daimio Brito and Alan Cunha at the Federal University of Amap in Brazil; Thorsten Dittmar at Carl von Ossietzky University in Germany; and Alex Krusche at University of São Paulo in Brazil.

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For more information, contact Ward at nickward@uw.edu or 858-531-1558 and Richey at jrichey@uw.edu or 206-368-1906.

Patrick Robinson

Boaters paddle on the Duwamish River while their dog wades in the mudflats.

In February, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a plan to clean up the Duwamish. The new Health Impact Assessment details changes in health that may result from the cleanup. The report also makes recommendations about how to minimize health impacts, maximize health benefits, and reduce health disparities.

“Our findings demonstrate that EPA’s cleanup plan will significantly impact particular communities,” said Dr. William Daniell, an environmental and occupational epidemiologist and associate professor in the University of Washington School of Public Health.

More than a century of industrial and urban waste has contaminated the river with a mix of 41 toxic chemicals. In 2001, the EPA placed it on the Superfund National Priorities List.  Of the chemicals most concerning to human health, polychlorinated biphenyls, more commonly known as PCBs,  carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, arsenic, dioxins and furans top the list. Exposure to these toxins comes from eating resident fish or shellfish and coming into contact with contaminated sediment.

The Health Impact Assessment report was produced by researchers at the UW School of Public Health in collaboration with community health researchers from Just Health Action and the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition/Technical Advisory Group.

In reference to prior assessments done by the agency, Daniell said: “EPA studies focused on disease outcomes and generally fail to identify and evaluate broader health implications. We hope that they will incorporate our findings and recommendations.”

EPA’s proposed plan will reduce health risks, but it will not succeed in meeting the levels obtained in Puget Sound. Nor will resident seafood be safe to eat for subsistence fishers or for Native American tribal members.

The UW report outlines recommendations to protect the health of the Duwamish, Muckleshoot and Suquamish Tribes, who are affected by the cleanup. In particular, the researchers suggest EPA collaborate with these tribes to address their health concerns and restore their safe access to natural resources and fish.

Sarah Fish

William Daniell, a UW environmental and occupation health epidemiologist, helped develop the report on the health impact of the Duwamish waterway cleanup.

In terms of the impact on local residents, construction-related activities and rail and truck traffic could increase air and noise pollution if not properly managed.  In addition, the cleanup may cause gentrification and displacement of local residents. If done correctly, cleanup may generate new jobs and revitalize the South Park and Georgetown neighborhoods.

“Disadvantaged people who have more life stress, such as poverty, exposure to crime, and less leisure time, are more vulnerable to contamination, which can explain some health disparities” said Linn Gould, executive director of Just Health Action. Gould  was the primary author of the Duwamish Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Analysis. It showed that, compared to King County residents, people who live in the Duwamish Valley have a shorter life expectancy, higher mortality from lung cancer, more hospitalizations for children with asthma, higher rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. In addition, more Duwamish Vally residents lack health insurance.

“Residents and other people who use the river have real and valid concerns about how to best protect their health during and after cleanup,” said BJ Cummings, community health projects manager for the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition/Technical Advisory Group, which serves as EPA’s Community Advisory Group for the Superfund site cleanup.

“This study helps identify ways we can improve the result, especially for those who are most affected,” Cummings said

A final version of the report, with findings and recommendations for mitigation measures, will be provided to the EPA in June.

Support for the health impact assessment was provided by a grant from the Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Read the full report.

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Aqqa Rosing-Asvid / Flickr

Fin whale surfacing in Greenland.

A carcass that washed up on a Seattle-area beach this spring provided a reminder that sleek fin whales, nicknamed “greyhounds of the sea,” are vulnerable to collision when they strike fast-moving ships. Knowing their swimming behaviors could help vessels avoid the animals. Understanding where and what they eat could also help support the fin whale’s slowly rebounding populations.

University of Washington oceanographers are addressing such questions using a growing number of seafloor seismometers, devices that record vibrations. A series of three papers published this winter in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America interprets whale calls found in earthquake sensor data, an inexpensive and non-invasive way to monitor the whales. The studies are the first to match whale calls with fine-scale swimming behavior, providing new hints at the animals’ movement and communication patterns.

The research began a decade ago as a project to monitor tremors on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, a seismically active zone more than a mile deep off the Washington coast. That was the first time UW researchers had collected an entire year’s worth of seafloor seismic data.

John Delaney and Deborah Kelley, UW (taken with remotely operated vehicle Jason)

A seismometer inserted into a hole drilled in seafloor lava. Eight of these instruments were installed at an ocean spreading-center volcano 150 miles off Vancouver Island. A data recording device is enclosed in the yellow sphere. In three years of operation the network detected nearly 40,000 small earthquakes, and hundreds of thousands of fin-whale calls.

“Over the winter months we recorded a lot of earthquakes, but we also had an awful lot of fin-whale calls,” said principal investigator William Wilcock, a UW professor of oceanography. At first the fin whale calls, which at 17 to 35 vibrations per second overlap with the seismic data, “were kind of just a nuisance,” he said.

In 2008 Wilcock got funding from the Office of Naval Research to study the previously discarded whale calls.

Dax Soule, a UW doctoral student in oceanography, compared the calls recorded by eight different seismometers. Previous studies have done this for just two or three animals at a time, but the UW group automated the work to analyze more than 300,000 whale calls.

The method is similar to how a smartphone’s GPS measures a person’s location by comparing paths to different satellites. Researchers looked at the fin whale’s call at the eight seismometers to calculate a position. That technique let them follow the animal’s path through the instrument grid and within 10 miles of its boundaries.

Soule created 154 individual fin whale paths and discovered three categories of vocalizing whales that swam south in winter and early spring of 2003. He also found a category of rogue whales that traveled north in the early fall, moving faster than the other groups while emitting a slightly higher-pitched call.

“One idea is that these are juvenile males that don’t have any reason to head south for the breeding season,” Soule said. “We can’t say for sure because so little is known about fin whales. To give you an idea, people don’t even know how or why they make their sound.”

UW outcompetes PAC-12 schools

Among all the 270 colleges and universities competing in the grand champion category, UW ranked 83. In the category for food services organics, which considers the weight of food waste composted per person on campus, UW was 38^th. Considering the total weight of paper and mixed containers recycled on campus, the UW was 35^th. And considering the weight of paper and mixed containers recycle per person on campus, UW was 183^rd.

In addition to the national competition, UW Housing and Food Services sponsored a competition between UW residence halls. During the two month period, McMahon had the highest waste diversion of all residence halls (highest recycling and compost combined, lowest garbage). Poplar came in second for the highest diversion rate even though it has no dining facility.  McMahon also had the highest compost rate of all the residence halls, followed by Terry/Lander. Hansee had the highest recycling rate of all residence halls.

MIT engineering professor to speak on research, career journey
Many seasoned academics can point to circuitous paths and serendipitous events that led to a successful, perhaps unexpected career in research. One professor’s take on this journey is the topic of this year’s annual Dean Lytle Electrical Engineering Endowed Lecture Series.

Alan S. Willsky, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will speak twice for the UW community. His first talk at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, May 14, in the Electrical Engineering Building (room 105) will be a more technical lecture titled “Learning and Inference for Graphical and Hierarchical Models: A Personal Journey.”

Then on Wednesday, May 15, Willsky will address a general audience with his lecture “Building a Career on the Kindness of Others” at 3:30 p.m. in the Paul G. Allen Center‘s Microsoft Atrium.

Both talks are free and open to the public.

Willsky’s work on large-scale data fusion has been applied in areas such as object recognition, oil exploration, remote sensing in the ocean and groundwater hydrology.

The Dean Lytle lecture series is the electrical engineering department’s largest annual event, usually featuring speakers in the field of communications and signal processing. Lytle came to the UW in 1958 and served for 40 years as a professor of electrical engineering.

Pharmaceutical science association recognizes Rodney Ho
Rodney Ho, professor of pharmacy, will receive the Research Achievement Award in Biotechnology from the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists at its annual May meeting. The award, among the highest the association confers, recognizes the quality of his work and its impact. Ho studies the relationship between drug localization in tissues and cells and the links to disease progression. His nanotechnology and device innovations have helped make anti-infective agents, such as anti-HIV drugs, pain medications and cancer drugs, more potent with fewer side effects.

Kathy Newell / UW

The R/V Barnes during a research cruise.

It’s a landmark trip for the vessel that has spent almost 30 years taking people from the UW and elsewhere out to the Sound, the Olympic Peninsula and nearby coasts to make discoveries about chemistry, currents and marine life.

All this from a boat that even its biggest fans admit has serious drawbacks.

The boat was never built to go into open seas, and adding 10 tons of scientific equipment to the stern did nothing to help with stability issues.

“It’s safe; it’s just miserable,” said Ray McQuin, the ship’s captain and supervisor. “Everyone gets seasick.”

(McQuin has a naturally strong stomach, he said, and suffers from seasickness only a couple of times each year.)

The scientists’ berths, two sets of triple bunks that hang from chains, make the undergraduate dorms seem plush by comparison. There’s only one bathroom and shower. And a 100-square-foot room serves as kitchen, dining room, common area and recreational room for up to six researchers (15 for short trips) and a two-person crew.

But most noticeable are the small scientist quarters, which were squeezed on after the fact. The small room is jam-packed during cruises with people, laptops and science equipment.

“It’s very — personal,” said Ginger Armbrust, professor and director of the UW’s School of Oceanography. Others describe it as “crowded” or even “controlled chaos.”

Still, Armbrust has fond memories. “It’s fun working on the Barnes. It’s very hands-on. You can get to your first station in five minutes, in contrast to when you’re working offshore and it takes you a day to get to your first station.”

The vessel was built in 1966 as a U.S. Coast Guard inland harbor tug that spent years towing boats, quenching fires and doing light ice-breaking out of Bellingham and Alaska.

The UW acquired the 65-foot boat at a bargain price in 1983 and converted it, replacing the original transmission with one that will go at the slower speeds needed for research, attaching a winch to lower instruments into the water, and adding a science cabin.

“It’s not a purpose-built research boat. There are a lot of compromises, but we get the job done,” McQuin said. “It’s a work boat, and that’s what we need.”

Logbooks show that in recent years, the Barnes has been out studying nitrogen near Neah Bay, algal blooms, marine food webs, effects of the Elwha Dam removal, and oxygen levels in Hood Canal.

The 1000th cruise will be a series of half-day trips May 7-9 from Shilshole Marina for Oceanography 201, an introductory lab course that lets students take oceanographic measurements.

“For oceanography majors, getting out on the water early is really important,” said instructor Susan Hautala, a UW associate professor of oceanography. “It gives students an idea of both what oceanographers do, and of why oceanography is so challenging: It’s taking limited measurements in a highly variable environment, and trying to piece together bits of evidence.”

Doug Russell / UW

A recent photo of the Barnes in dry dock. The boat will be decommissioned in 2016.

The boat’s namesake, Clifford A. Barnes, was a UW alumnus and professor of oceanography from 1947 to 1973 whose publications include “Circulation near the Washington Coast” and “An Oceanographic Model of Puget Sound.”

The millennial cruise will be one of the last for the vessel, which is nearing the end of its lifetime. The National Science Foundation will decommission the boat in 2016.

“You reach a point – and we’re getting there with this boat – where you can’t afford to keep it running. There are too many repairs,” McQuin said.

Plans are already under way to find a replacement. The School of Oceanography is looking for grants and private donations to fund a new vessel. Jensen Maritime Consultants created a custom design for an 86-foot vessel that would have more than four times as much lab space, carry twice as many people, and include modern navigation capabilities.

“The Barnes has been an incredible resource both for monitoring and understanding Puget Sound, and for giving our students an opportunity to do hands-on research, which is a core part of our program,” Armbrust said. “We’re looking forward to getting a new ship that will allow us to do this and more.”

###

For more information, contact Hautala at 206-543-0596 or susanh@ocean.washington.edu.

It turns out that scientists may have been looking for the starting line in the wrong places.

U of Texas at Austin/U of Washington

Newly discovered fossils, and those from existing collections, were considered from five basins in the south of what was once a single large land mass known as Pangea, and today are part of (from left to right) South Africa, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Antarctica.

Newly discovered fossils from 10 million years after the mass extinction reveal a lineage of animals thought to have led to dinosaurs taking hold in Tanzania and Zambia in the mid-Triassic period, many millions of years before dinosaur relatives were seen in the fossil record elsewhere on Earth.

“The fossil record from the Karoo of South Africa remains a good representation of four-legged land animals across southern Pangea before the extinction event. But after the event animals weren’t as uniformly and widely distributed as before. We had to go looking in some fairly unorthodox places,” said Christian Sidor, University of Washington professor of biology. He’s lead author of a paper appearing the week of April 29 in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new insights come from seven fossil-hunting expeditions since 2003 in Tanzania, Zambia and Antarctica, funded by the National Geographic Society and National Science Foundation, along with work combing through existing fossil collections. The researchers created two “snapshots” of four legged-animals about 5 million years before and again about 10 million years after the extinction event at the end of the Permian period.

Marlene Donnelly/Field Museum of Natural History

The pig-size Dicynodon was part of a large, dominant group of plant eaters found across the southern hemisphere until the mass extinction event weakened their numbers so that newly emerging herbivores could compete.

Prior to the extinction event, for example, the pig-sized Dicynodon – said to resemble a fat lizard with a short tail and turtle’s head – was a dominant plant-eating species across southern Pangea. Pangea is the name given to the landmass when all the world’s continents were joined together. Southern Pangea was made up of  what is today Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India. After the mass extinction at the end of the Permian, Dicynodon disappeared and other related species were so greatly decreased that newly emerging herbivores could suddenly compete with them.

“Groups that did well before the extinction didn’t necessarily do well afterward,” said Sidor, who also is the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the UW’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. “What we call evolutionary incumbency was fundamentally reset.”

The snapshot 10 million years after the extinction event reveals, among other things, that archosaurs were in Tanzanian and Zambian basins, but not distributed across all of southern Pangea as had been the pattern for four-legged animals prior to the extinction.  Archosaurs are the group of reptiles that includes crocodiles, dinosaurs, birds and a variety of extinct forms. They are of interest because it is thought they led to animals like Asilisaurus, a dinosaur-like animal, and Nyasasaurus parringtoni, a dog-sized creature with a five-foot tail that scientists in December 2012 announced could be the earliest dinosaur, or else the closest relative found so far.

Marlene Donnelly/Field Museum of Natural History

Ten million years after the mass extinction, members of the archosaur reptiles – such as the 10-foot (3 meter) long Asilisaurus pictured – had more restricted geographic ranges compared to the communities of four-legged animals that existed before the extinction.

“Early archosaurs being found mainly in Tanzania is an example of how fragmented communities became after the extinction event,” Sidor said. And the co-authors write: “These findings suggest that . . . archosaur diversification was more intimately related to recovery from the end-Permian mass extinction than previously suspected.”

A new framework for analyzing biogeographic patterns from species distributions, developed by co-author Daril Vilhena, a UW biology graduate student, provided a way to discern the complex recovery, Sidor said.

It revealed that before the extinction event 35 percent of four-legged species were found in two or more of the five areas studied, with some species having ranges that stretched 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers), encompassing the Tanzanian and South African basins. Ten million years after the extinction event, the authors say there was clear geographic clustering and just 7 percent of species were found in two or more regions.

The techniques – new ways to statistically consider how connected or isolated species are from each other – could be useful for other paleontologists and modern day biogeographers, Sidor said.

In the early 2000s Sidor and some of his co-authors started putting together expeditions to collect fossils from sites in Tanzania that hadn’t been visited since the 1960s and in Zambia where there’d been little work since the ’80s. Two expeditions to Antarctica provided additional materials, as did long-term efforts to examine museum-held fossils that had not been fully documented or named.

Other co-authors from the UW are graduate students Adam Huttenlocker and Brandon Peecook, post-doctoral researcher Sterling Nesbitt and research associate Linda Tsuji; Kenneth Angielczyk of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; Roger Smith, of the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town; and Sébastien Steyer from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

Funding was also received from the Evolving Earth Foundation, the Grainger Foundation, the Field Museum/IDP Inc. African Partners Program and the National Research Council of South Africa.

###

For more information:

• Sidor, on sabbatical from UW, spending year at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, office: 312-665-7637, casidor@uw.edu
• Angielczyk, phone: 312-665-7639,  kangielczyk@fieldmuseum.org
• Smith, phone: +27 0 21 481 3879, rsmith@iziko.org.za
• Steyer, phone: +33 662 697 643, steyer@mnhn.fr

***********************************

The following fact sheet was developed by the co-authors.

 FAQ : Provincialization of terrestrial faunas following the end-Permian mass extinction

 Major Findings

• The end-Permian mass extinction permitted a significant reorganization of the land-living animal communities living in southern part of the supercontinent of Pangea.
• In addition to causing high levels of extinction, the mass extinction brought about an emptying of ecological niches, which then promoted the diversification of various groups at different places.
• Mass extinctions can have unpredictable long-term effects (e.g., on the makeup of communities and biogeographic provinces).
• Traditional sources of data regarding the effects of the end-Permian extinction on land (viz. Russia and especially South Africa) might not provide as complete a picture of the extinction and subsequent recovery as previously thought.
• The radiation of archosaurs, including dinosaurs, was probably more closely tied to the recovery from the end-Permian extinction than previously realized.

 Facts about the end-Permian mass extinction (AKA Permo-Triassic mass extinction)

• The end-Permian extinction was the largest in Earth History. Nearly 90% of life disappeared.
• The end-Permian mass extinction event is poorly known on land. Most of the data available today come from the marine realm.
• The end-Permian mass extinction is dated to 252.3 Ma (based on radiometric dates from marine beds in China).
• On land, many diverse groups of Permian animals went extinct. The groups that radiated after the extinction in the Triassic include recognizable members of many of the groups of land vertebrates we still have today: mammals, crocodilians, turtles, lizards, and dinosaurs (which include birds).

 Species involved in the analysis

• Archosaurs.  Archosaurs are a group including modern crocodiles, modern birds, their common ancestor and all of its descendants, including the dinosaurs. Many of the oldest known archosaurs, including the oldest close relatives of dinosaurs and possibly the oldest true dinosaur, are known from the Middle Triassic of Tanzania and Zambia.
• Cynodonts.  Cynodonts are the group from which mammals later evolved.  If this group had perished at the end-Permian extinction, mammals wouldn’t be around today.
• Dicynodonts.  These were the dominant herbivores of the Permian. They were cat- to hippo-sized and distantly related to mammals. They survived the extinction and re-diversified in the Triassic, before becoming extinct at the end of the Triassic.
• Temnospondyls.  These amphibians, which could reach giant sizes, were mostly freshwater top predators like crocodiles today. They survived the extinction but underwent a drastic faunal turnover in the Triassic, with many species going extinct and new species originating.
• Pareiasaurs and other reptiles. Pareiasaurs were mostly large-bodied terrestrial herbivores with robust skulls ornamented by bosses or horns. They were victims of the end-Permian extinction. However, other reptiles like procolophonids survived the extinction and went on to diversify in the Triassic.

 Age

• The Permian Period lasted from 300 to 252 million years ago.  The Permian fossils in this study are about 257 Ma (i.e., Late Permian).
• The Triassic Period lasted from 252 to 201 million years ago. The Triassic fossils in this study are about 242 Ma (i.e., Middle Triassic).

 Geography

• During most of the Permian and Triassic, the continents were coalesced into a single landmass named Pangea.
• The southern portion of Pangea is called Gondwana, and included what is now Africa, Madagascar, South America, Antarctica, Australia, and India.
• The areas in which we collected fossils in Africa were much farther south in the Permian and Triassic than they are today. For example, the Ruhuhu Basin of southern Tanzania is currently ~10.5° S latitude, but in the Late Permian it was about ~50° S.

 Fossils and fieldwork leading to this paper

• Tanzanian fossils were collected in the Ruhuhu valley of southern Tanzania in 2007, 2008, and 2012. They are temporarily on loan to our team for research but will eventually return to be housed at the National Museum of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam.
• Zambian fossils were collected in the Luangwa valley of northeastern Zambia in 2009 and 2011. They are temporarily on loan to our team for research but will eventually return to the National Heritage Conservation Commission in Lusaka.
• Antarctic fossils were most recently collected in 2003 and 2010 are housed at the Burke Museum (Univ. Washington).
• South African fossils are the product of long-term fieldwork projects and are stored at a variety of museums in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, etc.

Our paper DOES NOT say:

• Anything about the causes of end-Permian mass extinction.
• Anything about the extinction in the marine realm.
• Anything about global climate change at the end of the Permian.

Funding:
National Geographic Society (to C.A.S.)
National Geographic Society (to J.S.S.)
National Science Foundation (to C.A.S.)
Evolving Earth Foundation (to S.J.N.)
The Grainger Foundation (to K.D.A.)
Field Museum/IDP, Inc. African Partners Program (to K.D.A.)
NSF Graduate Research Fellowships (to B.R.P.)
National Research Council (to R.M.H.S.)

Potential Commentators (not affiliated with this research):
Robert Reisz, University of Toronto (robert.reisz@utoronto.ca)
David Jablonski, University of Chicago (djablons@uchicago.edu)
Paul Olsen, Columbia University (polsen@ldeo.columbia.edu)
Randy Irmis, University of Utah (irmis@umnh.utah.edu)
Hans Sues, Smithsonian Institution (suesh@si.edu)

Co-author emails:
USA
Christian Sidor (Univ. Washington): casidor@uw.edu
Daril Vilhena (Univ. Washington): daril@uw.edu
Kenneth Angielczyk (Field Museum): kangielczyk@fieldmuseum.org
Sterling Nesbitt (formerly UW, now Field Museum):
Adam Huttenlocker (Univ. Washington): huttenla@uw.edu
Brandon Peecook (Univ. Washington): bpeecook@uw.edu
Linda Tsuji (Univ. Washington): latsuji@uw.edu

South Africa
Roger Smith (Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town): rsmith@iziko.org.za

France
J.Sébastien Steyer (CNRS and Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris): steyer@mnhn.fr

Goodchild/Wygonik

This diagram shows how a delivery truck can save on mileage when compared with personal vehicles driving to and from a store.

University of Washington engineers have found that using a grocery delivery service can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half when compared with individual household trips to the store. Trucks filled to capacity that deliver to customers clustered in neighborhoods produced the most savings in carbon dioxide emissions.

“A lot of times people think they have to inconvenience themselves to be greener, and that actually isn’t the case here,” said Anne Goodchild, UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. “From an environmental perspective, grocery delivery services overwhelmingly can provide emissions reductions.”

Consumers have increasingly more grocery delivery services to choose from. AmazonFresh operates in the Seattle area, while Safeway’s service is offered in many U.S. cities. FreshDirect delivers to residences and offices in the New York City area. Last month, Google unveiled a shopping delivery service experiment in the San Francisco Bay Area, and UW alumni recently launched the grocery service Geniusdelivery in Seattle.

Goodchild/Wygonik

A comparison of carbon dioxide produced per customer for personal vehicles and delivery vehicles. The bars on the left represent a system in which customers choose their delivery times. The right side shows a more efficient system whereby the delivery service sets delivery times.

As companies continue to weigh the costs and benefits of offering a delivery service, Goodchild and Erica Wygonik, a UW doctoral candidate in civil and environmental engineering, looked at whether using a grocery delivery service was better for the environment, with Seattle as a test case. In their analysis, they found delivery service trucks produced 20 to 75 percent less carbon dioxide than the corresponding personal vehicles driven to and from a grocery store.

They also discovered significant savings for companies – 80 to 90 percent less carbon dioxide emitted – if they delivered based on routes that clustered customers together, instead of catering to individual household requests for specific delivery times.

“What’s good for the bottom line of the delivery service provider is generally going to be good for the environment, because fuel is such a big contributor to operating costs and greenhouse gas emissions,” Wygonik said. “Saving fuel saves money, which also saves on emissions.”

The research was funded by the Oregon Department of Transportation and published in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum.

The UW researchers compiled Seattle and King County data, assuming that every household was a possible delivery-service customer. Then, they randomly drew a portion of those households from that data to identify customers and assign them to their closest grocery store. This allowed them to reach across the entire city, without bias toward factors such as demographics and income level.

They used an Environmental Protection Agency modeling tool to calculate emissions at a much more detailed level than previous studies have done. Using factors such as vehicle type, speed and roadway type, they calculated the carbon dioxide produced for every mile for every vehicle.

Emissions reductions were seen across both the densest parts and more suburban areas of Seattle. This suggests that grocery delivery in rural areas could lower carbon dioxide production quite dramatically.

“We tend to think of grocery delivery services as benefiting urban areas, but they have really significant potential to offset the environmental impacts of personal shopping in rural areas as well,” Wygonik said.

Work commuters are offered a number of incentives to reduce traffic on the roads through discounted transit fares, vanpools and carpooling options. Given the emissions reductions possible through grocery delivery services, the research raises the question of whether government or industry leaders should consider incentives for consumers to order their groceries online and save on trips to the store, Goodchild said.

In the future, Goodchild and Wygonik plan to look at the influence of customers combining their grocery shopping with a work commute trip and the impact of the delivery service’s home-base location on emissions.

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For more information, contact Goodchild at annegood@uw.edu or 206-543-3747.

It turns out that in sultry weather condensation on the outside of a canned beverage doesn’t just make it slippery: those drops can provide more heat than the surrounding air, meaning your drink would warm more than twice as much in humid weather compared to in dry heat. In typical summer weather in New Orleans, heat released by condensation warms the drink by 6 degrees Fahrenheit in five minutes.

“Probably the most important thing a beer koozie does is not simply insulate the can, but keep condensation from forming on the outside of it,” said Dale Durran, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences.

He’s co-author of results published in the April issue of Physics Today that give the exact warming for a range of plausible summer temperatures and humidity levels. For example, on the hottest, most humid day in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, condensation alone would warm a can from near-freezing temperature to 48 degrees Fahrenheit in just five minutes.

The investigation began a couple of years ago when Durran was teaching UW Atmospheric Sciences 101 and trying to come up with a good example for the heat generated by condensation. Plenty of examples exist for evaporative cooling, but few for the reverse phenomenon. Durran thought droplets that form on a cold canned beverage might be just the example he was looking for.

A quick back-of-the-napkin calculation showed the heat released by water just four thousandths of an inch thick covering the can would heat its contents by 9 degrees Fahrenheit.

“I was surprised to think that such a tiny film of water could cause that much warming,” Durran said.

Though he’s normally more of a theoretician, Durran decided this result required experimental validation. He recruited co-author Dargan Frierson, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences, and they ran an initial test in Frierson’s little-used basement bathroom, using a space heater and hot shower to vary the temperature and humidity.

The findings corroborated the initial result, and they embarked on a larger-scale test.

“You can’t write an article for Physics Today where the data has come from a setup on the top of the toilet tank in one of the author’s bathrooms,” Durran said.

Univ. of Washington

A test subject being weighed to measure the amount of condensation. The cap prevents air from moving through the opening on top.

First they recruited colleagues in Frierson’s beachside hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, to duplicate the experiment and compare results with those taken on a hot, dry Seattle day. But they decided they needed to test a wider range of conditions.

Finally, last summer undergraduates Stella Choi and Steven Brey joined the project to run a proper experiment in the UW Atmospheric Sciences building. They unearthed an experimental machine with styling that looks to be from the 1950s, last used decades ago to simulate cloud formation.

With funding for educational outreach from the National Science Foundation, the students first cooled a can in a bucket of ice water then dried it and placed it in the experimental chamber dialed up to the appropriate conditions. After five minutes they removed the can, weighed it to measure the amount of condensation, and recorded the final temperature of the water inside.

The phenomenon at work – latent heat of condensation – is central to Frierson’s research on water vapor, heat transfer and global climate change.

“We expect a much moister atmosphere with global warming because warmer air can hold a lot more water vapor,” Frierson said. Because heat is transferred when water evaporates or condenses, this change affects wind circulation, weather patterns and storm formation.

Durran’s research includes studies of thunderstorms, which are powered by heat released from condensation in rising moist air.

As for his demonstration of the heat released during this process, he and Frierson are now working with the National Center for Atmospheric Research to develop an educational tool that will let students around the world try the experiment and post their results online for comparison.

The example promises to become as classic as a cold drink on a hot summer day.

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For more information, contact Durran at 206-543-7440 or durrand@atmos.washington.edu and Frierson at 206-685-7364 or dargan@atmos.washington.edu.

Every year the United States alone uses about 300 million cubic yards of ready-mix concrete to make streets, bridges, buildings, dams and driveways — and it lasts a very long time.

But, what if concrete could be made “greener”? What would the global energy savings be if concrete had a 50 percent smaller carbon footprint?

Concrete is typically made of a combination of cement, rock, sand and water. To produce cement, materials are heated in a large kiln that emits greenhouse gases through the burning of fossil fuels and a chemical reaction termed calcination.  Rock and sand also must be processed and transported, and all these processes have environmental impacts.

That’s the question being addressed by the University of Washington-led Carbon Leadership Forum, an alliance of researchers, associations and companies in the building industry formed to develop what are called environmental footprint standards for building materials, especially concrete.

Those standards, also called product category rules, are designed to meet goals expressed by Architecture 2030, an industry nonprofit working to dramatically reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in the manufacture and transport of construction materials. More specifically, Architecture 2030 came from the group’s 2030 Challenge for Products, which seeks a 50 percent reduction in carbon-equivalent product footprint by 2030.

The standards alone don’t create energy savings, of course — they’re designed to enable direct comparisons of building materials from different manufacturers.

Methods already exist for reducing concrete’s environmental impact, such as replacing cement with ash from coal-fired power plants, called fly-ash. Innovative manufacturing methods and materials also are being developed.

But before now, there was no method to consistently compare different concretes to ensure selection of a lower environmental impact concrete.

“We already know how to specify concrete for a lot of performance characteristics — strength, shrinkage, permeability,” said Kate Simonen, UW assistant professor of architecture and director of the forum. “Now, people who want to specify environmental performance as a different performance characteristic will have a method to compare it.”

Simonen said that the results of these standards, called Environmental Product Declarations, help users understand and compare the environmental impacts related to product manufacturing, use and disposal, roughly the same way a nutrition label shows the ingredients in a food product.

She said the standards also will provide “quantifiable life-cycle information” to enable comparisons among products fulfilling the same function. Life-cycle assessment measures a project’s total environmental impact from design and construction through its entire use and end of life.

The standards will have practical applications, such as helping a city or company set and meet specific targets for reducing carbon use. Cities trying to push their carbon use even lower will be able to specify low-carbon concrete. Users who might be willing to pay a higher price for a lower-environmental-impact concrete could provide financial incentive to advance developing technologies.

Ed Mazria, Architecture 2030 founder and CEO, praised the standards. “Reducing the carbon footprint from concrete is one of the most significant actions that the building sector can take. The Carbon Leadership Forum recognized this issue, and its members set in motion a process for developing clear rules to govern the environmental reporting for concrete mix designs.”

###

For more information or interviews, contact Simonen at 415-641-1421 or ksimonen@uw.edu. A copy of the new product category rules and environmental product declarations is available on request.

Husky Green Awards announced

The award, now in its fourth year, recognizes students, faculty and staff who have demonstrated leadership, initiative and dedication to environmental stewardship and sustainability. A new award this year, the Husky Green Legacy Award, went to the UPass Advisory Board.

Other winners are:

• Duncan Clauson, graduate student, Evans School
• Sunni Wissmer, undergraduate student, College of Built Environment
• Victoria Rice Bean, operating room nurse, surgical department, UW Medical Center
• Brenda Nissley, Harborview Medical Center
• Green Wall, College of Built Environment
• Facilities Construction Shop 54, Facilities Services

Oceanbound on Earth Day
Oceanographers with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory leave on Earth Day aboard the UW’s Thomas G. Thompson to redeploy two ocean monitoring buoys in the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary. Two teachers will join the cruise and share the experience via blogs and Skype chats with their classrooms in Lake Quinault and Bainbridge Island.

Chief scientist Matthew Alford will be collecting data on deep-ocean waves, while Jan Newton will be gathering real-time data on ocean acidification. Six UW graduate students are also onboard. Follow Alford’s blog for updates on the cruise that runs through April 26.

Annual ‘UW Trash-In’ Wednesday
April 24, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Red Square, volunteers will suit up and sort through one day’s worth of trash from around the UW campus. The annual UW Trash-In is a fun and insightful way to explore how much compostable and recyclable material is still being thrown away on campus.

After a brief introduction to the sorting process, volunteers are given cover-up suits, gloves and shoe covers, and sent to a sorting station. Bags of trash are emptied onto tables and volunteers sort materials by type into nearby bins for compost, mixed containers, mixed paper and garbage. There’ll be  music, sorting games and challenges.

“Even avid recyclers or composters can learn a lot at this event,” said Jennifer Perkins with the UW Environmental Stewardship and Sustainability office. “Plus, there is a lot of laughing and dancing. I never knew how fun sorting trash could be.”

 Don’t just save everything: Tips to spring-clean your inbox

We tend to keep nearly all email thinking it will be useful someday. But usually old emails are just obsolete clutter that slow our Outlook accounts and make it hard to find what we actually need.

For most UW employees, 70 to 80 percent of email messages can be deleted, according to email policies provided by UW’s Records Management.

Taking a closer look at how to comply with the university’s requirements for keeping records,  UW Human Resources staff have come up with some tips for downsizing inboxes:

• Click on “Rules/create rule” to automatically move mail into designated, organized folders.
• Create “Quick Steps” and apply them with one click to do things such as create a task with a start and end date, change a message’s status, or flag a message.
• Use the “Clean up” function to remove redundant emails whose content is included in other messages.
• Once an email has been read or acted on, file it or delete it immediately.
• On the File tab, periodically check the bar under “Mailbox Cleanup,” and if you don’t have much storage left do a more extensive purge of email folders and messages, especially those with attachments.

Read more tips on records management in an article by UWHR’s Human Resources Records Management Group.

• U.S. Ocean Observatories Initiative
• UW-led regional cabled observatory
• UW Applied Physics Laboratory work building the observatory

The basement lab near the University of Washington campus is, literally, buzzing. High-voltage machines produce energy that will soon run through cables snaking along the seafloor. A dozen engineers hunch over electronics, making alterations or running checks. In one corner, a nitride-coated titanium shaft has been sitting in a bucket of saltwater for four months to test the coating for corrosion. A glass-walled cleanroom prevents contaminants from interfering with seals on housings designed to keep out seawater pressing in at 4,200 pounds per square inch.

This is crunch time for University of Washington preparations to build the world’s largest underwater observatory. The National Science Foundation in 2009 launched the $239 million effort, pending availability of funds and Congressional approval. John Delaney, UW professor of oceanography, leads the project to create a cabled observatory that will bring power and Internet to the ocean floor. This new concept will use remote-controlled instruments and high-bandwidth video to create an enduring, real-time presence in the deep ocean.

Researchers in the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory were tasked by Delaney to build and test the equipment that will make up the observatory. Much of that equipment will be installed this summer. This is the biggest project the 70-year-old marine engineering institute has ever undertaken, said project lead Gary Harkins, a principal engineer with the lab.

“This concept of a real-time observatory will change what we do as ocean engineers, what we will learn how to do, and what ocean scientists can do with these systems now and in the future,” Harkins said.

The cabled observatory, known as the Regional Scale Nodes project, is part of the national Ocean Observatories Initiative, an effort to integrate U.S. measurements of the ocean and seafloor. Other partners will build coastal and global observing networks, manage the data and conduct educational outreach. The Pacific Northwest observatory will span the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off the Washington and Oregon coasts, the likely source of the next large regional earthquake.

Most of the regional network’s components will be built from aircraft-grade titanium because the material is strong and resists corrosion, which is crucial for electronics that will spend decades in saltwater.

“We are having a notable impact on the non-aircraft market for titanium,” remarked Applied Physics Laboratory engineer Geoff Cram.

Even so, most components must be designed to be switched out for possible repairs or upgrades during the observatory’s projected 25-year lifespan.

Over the past two summers, the backbone cable and high-voltage junction boxes were laid by telecommunications contractors. This summer’s deployments venture into uncharted territories. The team has booked 60 days of ship time on the UW’s Thomas G. Thompson research vessel for three cruises in July and August. Researchers will install lower-voltage cables that run from high-voltage nodes closer to the areas of scientific interest: deep-ocean volcanoes, seismically active plates, and an underwater ridge that seeps energy-rich methane gas.

While the engineering team readies the components, the science team is mapping out the science plan and finalizing the cruise details.

“The timeline isn’t forgiving on this one,” Cram noted.

In design work over the past four years, the engineers have considered how to protect the infrastructure from a possible failure by any of the components – some of which are experimental, and none of which has operated for this long at these pressures. They also have created a common time stamp for all the data, since scientists might want to make precise comparisons of measurements taken by different instruments at opposite ends of the network. They will do their best to protect all the instruments from ships, waves, marine animals and corrosion.

As the team finalizes the design, engineers have to ensure the sensors don’t interfere with each other. They also have to dissipate heat from the electronics, which give off about as much heat as a 60-watt light bulb but, in a tightly sealed housing, could still fry instruments.

“This is a highly integrated system operating in a very challenging environment,” said Applied Physics Laboratory engineer Dana Manalang, who oversees the sensor group. “From an engineering perspective, that makes this a challenging project.”

The team this summer will install about 40 sensors, of 13 different types, now being assembled and tested at the UW. The instruments include:

• A high-definition video and still camera that will provide live footage, starting this summer, to researchers and the public.
• Seismometers to provide early warning of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.
• Commercial oceanographic sensors, including three precision pressure sensors built by Sea-Bird Electronics of Bellevue, Wash.
• Water samplers built by UW oceanographer David Butterfield. Some samples will be stored until researchers collect them; others will be analyzed in place to detect the seawater’s chemical and genetic contents.
• A deep-water mass spectrometer, developed by Harvard University oceanographer Peter Girguis, that will be installed near the volcano’s caldera
• Chemical sensors, developed by UW oceanographer Marv Lilley, that will go inside the hydrothermal vents. These will be inserted slowly so fragile ceramic parts survive the transition from near-freezing water to 570 ºF (300 ºC) temperatures inside the vent.
• Seafloor pressure and tilt sensors, developed by Bill Chadwick at Oregon State University, that detect pressure buildup below the ocean floor.

UW engineers have designed the system to digitize all this data and send it back to land via the cables in a few thousandths of a second.

Miles of underwater cable will arrive during coming weeks to a UW storage facility on Lake Washington. The engineering team will expand there as it builds components and outgrows its campus lab space.

The next few months will be hectic, said Harkins. Some of the UW researchers will join the telecommunications contractor to run a month-long final check of the backbone cable system from the Newport, Ore. shore station. UW engineers will build and test 10 secondary nodes to drive the instruments that will be installed this summer. Members of the engineering team will work with contractors and scientists to run pressure tests and perform final checks on their instruments.

Yet another team is developing a profiling system that records data in the upper 650 feet (200 m) of the ocean. That system is perhaps the most technically challenging aspect of the whole observatory, researchers said, and won’t be installed until summer of 2014, but initial testing will begin this summer at the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories.

Forty-six UW faculty and staff members are putting in long hours on the cabled observatory, including 15 on the science team and 31 on the engineering side.

Whoever you talk to, there’s one common refrain: “This is going to be a very busy summer.”

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For more information, contact Nancy Penrose, UW’s OOI Communications Coordinator, at 206-221-5781 or penrose@ocean.washington.edu.

WA Dept. of Fish and Wildlife

A dock washed away by the tsunami that made landfall in December in Olympic National Park.

Remnants of the wreckage continue to reach the Pacific Northwest: A 65-foot Japanese dock washed up in December on a beach near Forks, Wash., a fish hitched a ride on a 20-foot boat that washed up in March in Long Beach, Wash., and pieces of a Japanese shrine washed ashore in March and April in Oregon. Japanese sports balls, foam insulation and other flotsam regularly wash up on the coast to provide a reminder of the lasting effects of the disastrous earthquake and tsunami.

Ian Miller, a coastal hazards specialist with Washington Sea Grant, a UW-based center that’s part of the national Sea Grant network, co-authored a report on possible scenarios for debris accumulation in Washington state and has recently given public talks about the debris found to date.

“So far there still hasn’t been a big wash-up significantly above and beyond our normal debris load,” he said. He and hundreds of volunteers will comb the beach April 20 to see if that remains true after the largest annual beach cleanup of Washington’s coast.

Immediately after the March 11, 2011, tsunami, one of the concerns was that huge amounts of garbage would wash up on the U.S. coastline.

“What became obvious early on was that nobody had a clue,” Miller said. “There was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of contradictory information, and that caused anxiety.

“That tells me we need to focus on what is happening now, so that next time we have a more factual basis to make projections.”

To officially be designated as tsunami debris, an item must have an identifying marker and get verification of its origin from the Japanese government. However, pieces of plastic foam believed to have probably come from Japan are common, as are pieces of lumber that observers say are unlike their American counterparts.

A widely reported pulse of suspected tsunami material washed ashore in early summer, Miller said, and then things quieted down. Winter storms in recent months have been bringing more items.

Miller’s review of oceanographic literature, published in the fall, predicted that most of the debris would wash up in Alaska, and that most would land within four years of the tsunami. Anecdotal reports and media coverage suggest that most material so far is in fact hitting Alaska, Miller said.

Computer models from the University of Hawaii suggest that most of the tsunami material has washed ashore by now. Models from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration show a large patch still offshore. But those are probably items that don’t catch the wind, such as plastic bags or pieces of wood, that likely will follow currents to what’s known as the garbage patch in the center of the North Pacific Gyre, Miller said.

He is studying the actual debris accumulation and working with colleagues at the National Park Service, NOAA and other agencies to monitor the beaches and dispose of the dock and other large items.

It’s not until the big annual cleanup that many of the more remote sections of beach are combed for litter. To document possible tsunami debris, a team from Western Washington University will be sorting and weighing collected material.

That cataloging effort is a step in the right direction, Miller said.

“We know that we get debris on our coast, but we don’t know what is a quote-unquote ‘normal’ load,” Miller said.

He hopes documentation will broaden awareness and knowledge of washed-up ocean garbage.

“The tsunami has highlighted the issue. On a global scale, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of trash that’s out in the ocean and the amount that’s added to the ocean every year,” Miller said. “If this gives us more information about where it washes ashore we can focus [cleanup] investment accordingly.”

If you plan to spend the lead-up to Earth Day cleaning up the Washington coast, register online and arrive early Saturday. No special tools are required, but volunteers may want to bring a sharp knife, hacksaw or small shovel to deal with tenacious debris items. Cleanup takes place at beaches along the coast, and some organizing groups host volunteer barbecues or chowder lunches afterward.

The annual event is a chance to help clean the coast and experience a connection with other nations around the Pacific Rim.

“Last year I can remember sitting down with a bag of plastic bottles, and I think I ended up counting eight different languages,” Miller said. “You find things from all over the world.”

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For more information, contact Miller at 360-417-6460 or immiller@uw.edu.

A University of Washington class is using the nation’s first controlled-ocean research tool to study the effects of increased acidity on marine ecosystems.

“The goal is to study the impact of ocean acidification on biological community structure in seawater from the San Juan Islands,” said James Murray, a UW oceanography professor.

On the main dock at the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories until April 29 the team will start at 8:30 each morning by lowering bottles six feet (two meters) into each reservoir to collect water samples. Students enrolled in a research apprenticeship class then analyze the seawater to see how acidity affects chemistry, bacterial communities, and marine animal and plant life.

“The biological impacts of ocean acidification are the big unknowns,” Murray said. “We know that CO₂ is going up, and we know that the oceans are going to be more acidic, but what we don’t know, and everyone is concerned about, is the possible impact on the biology.”

Jim Murray / UW

The nine test tanks, on the left, attach to the main dock at the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island.

Murray led development of the experimental facility over the past five years with funding from the Educational Foundation of America and the National Science Foundation. In recent years the group has worked out some tweaks – adding floats to each reservoir to keep from straining the dock, and shading the covers to slow down biological blooms in the reservoirs.

This is the first spring that the reservoirs will be used to carry out experiments, launched April 9, to simulate more acidic oceans. Four faculty members, four technicians and two teaching assistants will help the students perform chemical tests, conduct microscope analyses and do simple genetic tests of biological diversity on the seawater.

The reservoirs, called mesocosms, are water enclosures that provide a controllable section of the natural ocean. They allow researchers to conduct studies that are midway between a controlled lab test and an open-ocean experiment.

Jim Murray / UW

Students prepare the frames for the April 9 start of the experiment.

The Friday Harbor structures are 18-foot-tall plastic bags that hang from metal rings. For two days seawater near the dock was coarsely filtered to remove jellyfish and other large pieces of marine life before gradually filling the bags. Each bag holds 3,000 liters (790 gallons), enough water to fill more than 35 bathtubs. Three of the bags stay at the natural acidity, the other six have carbon dioxide pumped inside to increase acidity to the levels projected under climate change.

“This experiment is a way to look at all interactions between the components of the food web, including some of the more complex biological interactions that happen in the real ocean,” Murray said.

The acrylic domes are actually loose covers that prevent seagulls or other debris from landing in the tank.

The UW aquatic mesocosm was modeled after similar structures to study ocean acidification in Bergen, Norway, and Pohang, South Korea. Researchers from both countries are also involved in the experiments this spring at the Friday Harbor facility.

Korean scientists are interested in dimethyl sulfide, the chemical that helps give ocean air its characteristic smell. The concentrations of this gas may differ under climate change, and some scientists believe it plays a role in cloud formation.

“This year’s experiment has gone really smoothly so far, and I think we’re on track to have some interesting results,” Murray said.

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For more information, contact Murray in Friday Harbor at 206-251-5220 or jmurray@uw.edu. Sampling will take place on the dock each day from 8:30-10 a.m. Visitors are welcome.

UW Burke Museum/High Country Apps

The wildflower app splash page that appears as the application is loading.

The app for iOS, Android and Kindle mobile devices – complete with images, species names , range maps, bloom period and technical descriptions – was produced by the University of Washington Herbarium at the Burke Museum and the two authors of “Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest” with High Country Apps, a Montana-based company that creates mobile wilderness guides.

Designed for both budding wildflower enthusiasts and experienced experts, the app is for individuals who travel to wildflower areas and are interested in knowing the names and natural history of the plants they encounter. It’s primarily meant to be a plant identification tool, but it also provides educational information about ecological regions, plant communities and botanical terms.

The majority of species included are native, but introduced species common to the region are covered as well in order to expand the usefulness of the resource. Once downloaded, the app does not need an internet or network connection to run so you can use it no matter how remote your wanderings.

A free introductory version of the app that features 32 Washington wildflowers is available at stores and online outlets selling the full, 870-plant app for $7.99. A portion of revenues from the app supports conservation and botanical exploration in the region.

UW Burke Museum/High Country Apps

There are nine ways to search for the identity of wildflowers including the four shown here.

“The number of species covered and wealth of information included sets a new standard for wildflower identification apps,” said David Giblin, collections manager of the herbarium.

Users can browse the species list by common or scientific name, or by family, to locate a plant and access the related information. However, most users will likely use the identification key that is the core of the app. Giblin and herbarium informatics specialist Ben Legler provided the technical data for the key including the scientific names, species distribution, whether each plant is native or an introduced, time of bloom and more.

The tool was inspired by the Burke Museum’s Plants of Washington Image Gallery, a comprehensive online image collection of the state’s plants and lichens.

Amy Snover, director of the UW’s Climate Impacts Group, is one of four co-authors of a national report released this week that outlines the state of adaptation to climate change in the United States. She wrote the chapter on adaptation in the urban environment.

“The past is an increasingly poor guide to the future,” Snover writes. With changes in temperature, precipitation patterns and sea level, she writes: “plans, policies, infrastructure and expectations… must be adjusted accordingly.”

Overall, the report concludes that despite widespread interest in climate change, most public projects do not take climate change into account, and those that do are still in the risk-assessment and planning stages – be they building higher seawalls to deal with rising seas, changing zoning codes in anticipation of bigger floods, or including climate change in strategies for municipal water supplies.

“If you want to talk about something that’s changed on the ground to prepare for a changing climate, there are few examples nationwide,” Snover said. But she believes things are changing. “Funders are beginning to put a high priority on implementation, rather than just planning.”

The new report provides a snapshot of current climate adaptation work and resources. It was sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and written by university researchers and lead author EcoAdapt, a Seattle nonprofit that maintains a database of adaptation tools and case studies.

Snover’s chapter draws on her 15 years of experience working with scientists, government agencies and community groups. Examples come from Chicago, San Francisco, Florida and the Pacific Northwest, which Snover describes as a leader in preparing for climate change. For instance:

• King County has been concerned about climate change effects for more than a decade, and has integrated climate change into wastewater treatment plant design, flood protection and other projects.
• The City of Olympia began in 1993 to look at climate change impacts to its downtown, including sea-level rise and flooding, and has recently included ocean rise in the city’s comprehensive plan.
• Seattle Public Utilities has examined how to protect drinking-water supplies from climate change, and created an early warning system for extreme precipitation and urban flooding. The agency works on climate-change preparations with municipal drinking water utilities nationwide.
• The Swinomish Tribal Community has examined climate change’s impact on shellfish, fish, cultural sites, flooding hazards, wildfires and road access to its Fidalgo Island tribal lands. It is evaluating ways to protect key low-lying areas from sea-level rise.
• The Washington State Department of Transportation is part of a federal pilot program to consider climate change’s impacts on critical transportation routes.

Many of the Northwest projects used analyses done by the UW’s Climate Impacts Group.

Snover is also speaking this week at the first National Adaptation Forum in Denver, Colo. Her session, “Adaptation in the Coastal Context,” considers strategies and goals in coastal areas.

“With sea-level rise, there’s inevitable loss,” Snover said. “So what does successful adaptation to climate change look like? We know the risks we’re planning for, but do we know where we’re trying to end up?”

She will also describe at least one project that has reached the implementation stage: A 237-acre redevelopment project at the Port of Bellingham designed to accommodate sea-level rise.

The meeting is being put on by EcoAdapt, the MacArthur Foundation and other nonprofit organizations.

“We have the knowledge, data and tools necessary for understanding local impacts and developing local strategies,” Snover said. “Preparing for the inevitable impacts of our changing climate, and strengthening our resilience to variability and extremes, are the key challenges for this decade.”

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For more information, contact Snover at 206‐849-0639 or aksnover@uw.edu.

So starts the book “Saved in Time: The Fight to Establish Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Colorado“ co-written by University of Washington biology professor emeritus Estella Leopold, who was a key player in the process.

Denver Post

Estella Leopold (to right of stump) and visitors stand by what’s called the “Big Stump” in this newspaper photo from 1969. Estimated to weigh 60 tons, the petrified stump is from the extinct redwood, Sequoia affinis.

“Your Honor, to allow building of summer homes on 34 million year-old fossils like these is like using the Dead Sea Scrolls to wrap fish in,” proclaimed the lawyer defending Florissant at the time.

Leopold and her friends filed court cases four times that summer to hold the line while Congress and finally President Richard Nixon acted on a bill establishing the monument.

Leopold answered a few questions about the book, co-written with National Park Service paleontologist Herbert Meyer, for UW Today.

What’s so special about these fossil beds?
No question, these are among America’s premier fossil beds. There is nothing like them anywhere. The preservation of the diverse insects and plants is incredible, and the fossils are abundant. Scientists have identified more than 1,700 species of organisms there, making it one of the richest fossil sites in the world.

The fossils are from the late Eocene when the climate of the Northern Hemisphere was tropical and amazingly warm from low latitudes to high. Then the climate began to cool and vegetation started to change. Much of Florissant’s significance comes from what it tells us about this period of change. The fossils fill a gap in the Eocene record found nowhere else.

Estella Leopold

Photos of fossilized fern spores (top row) and pollen from conifers (second row) and flowering plants were collected by Estella Leopold, who used them to describe what the ancient forest was like at the site.

What work did you do there?
As a botanist working for the U.S. Geological Survey, I wanted to identify the fossil pollen to amplify what we could learn from the plant leaves and fruits about the vegetation and the climate. To do that we built a modern pollen reference collection as an aid for botanically identifying the pollen in fossil floras to decipher what the ancient forests were like.

In my first report for the USGS, I expressed my wonderment that, in a single small piece of rock half an inch square, I found beautiful and abundant pollen grains, thousands of them. The data yielded an enticing picture of the vegetation and flora that existed then. It was exhilarating. It showed evidence of conifers, many familiar hardwoods, aquatic plants such as cattail, herbs such as evening primrose, grasses and ferns, and shrubs such as greasewood and soapberry.

What happened in 1962 when the National Park Service announced its interest in the area?
Well, of course real estate values went up, anticipating a government buyout. Real estate developers began buying plots at a pretty price for summer cottages along the margins of the proposed monument. Ranchers saw an opportunity to cash in.

What happened in 1969?
About the half of the proposed monument on the east was sold and we went to court. Hanging in the balance was whether the courts would – or even could –successfully protect the fossil beds while the plans for the monument were put into place.

We were lucky and the courts stopped the development long enough for Congress to pass a bill and the president to sign it. In many important respects, it’s a benchmark case in U.S. environmental and constitutional law.

Coast Guard Museum NW / Frye Collection

The U.S.S. Bear patrolled Alaska’s coast.

Changes in the Arctic climate are bringing new interest in those historic explorers’ observations. A volunteer effort launched last fall, headed by University of Washington climate scientist Kevin Wood with the support of the National Archives, enlists the help of citizen-scientists to examine digitized scans of the log entries and transcribe the information.

While the handwriting is too difficult for computers to decipher, human volunteers can extract the meaning from the decades-old pen strokes to add them to the climate record.

This month, for example, volunteers transcribing pages from their home computers completed the logbooks from the doomed U.S.S. Jeannette expedition, which left San Francisco in the summer of 1879 bound for the North Pole. The ship soon became trapped in thick ice and drifted for almost two years, during which time the 33-member crew maintained the boat, hunted seals and polar bears – and recorded hourly scientific observations.

The observations help to reveal past weather and climate.

“When we see events like Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Katrina and the recent melt in the Beaufort Sea, people want to know: Has this ever happened before? And that turns out to be a hard question to answer,” Wood said.

Before arriving at the UW in 2004, Wood worked for 25 years as a merchant mariner, so he has firsthand knowledge of maritime weather observations. He also has a longtime interest in studying the Arctic as a climate scientist at the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, a research center that is a partnership between the UW and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In 2010, Wood attended a scientific meeting and met Philip Brohan, a climate scientist at the U.K.’s national weather office who had just launched the Old Weather project to transcribe World War I-era Royal Navy logbooks. The two discussed extending it to the U.S. fleet.

Wood approached the National Archives, and an interagency collaboration to allow NOAA access to the logs was established in 2011. OldWeather – Arctic launched last October.

Two interns now work at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., taking archival-quality digital images of each page. So far, the team has photographed more than 275,000 pages containing some 23 million new oceanic, atmospheric and sea-ice observations. The team is ready to add more than 20 ships to the existing fleet of 16. Wood expects that all of the logbooks from 60-some Navy, Coast Guard and Coast Survey ships that traveled to the Arctic before 1950 will be scanned by the end of this year.

National Archives

Log entry of the U.S.S. Bear from June 22, 1884.

Transcriptions are under way thanks to more than 16,000 active Old Weather volunteers, mainly science and history buffs from the U.S., the U.K. and other countries. Volunteers first create an account with Zooniverse, a site that hosts citizen-science projects, and then select Old Weather. A tutorial explains where to find the weather and other information and how to enter it into the database. Volunteers begin as cadets, and then move up through the ranks to lieutenant and captain as they complete transcriptions.

The site’s community forums are active, Wood said. When volunteers discover an unusual incident – say, somebody trying to jump ship through a porthole – they head to the forum to compare notes to find out where that person eventually ended up.

“A lot of people are motivated by being able to see the history unfolding in real time,” Wood said. And there are other surprises – the interns recently discovered pressed flowers collected on Whidbey Island, Wash., wedged between the pages of an 1891 entry.

Wood and Brohan will analyze the weather observations in completed transcriptions, focusing on the period between 1854 and 1950.

The climate data comes when it’s badly needed, and when it can be particularly useful to scientists. Just five years ago, Wood said, researchers relied on gridded weather observations, so a few new data points gleaned from ship records would be nice, but only a drop in the bucket. Now, sophisticated computer programs can use observations to reconstruct the whole Earth’s atmosphere, and even sparse data points can recreate the weather for an entire region.

Wood is also collaborating with polar scientists at the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory to add historic sea-ice observations that will help to extend their Arctic sea ice model back into the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Wood notes that the U.S.S. Jeannette became encased in 20-foot-thick sea ice in water that is now ice-free in summer.

“I think these logbooks may change people’s perspective on just how dramatic the current melt back is,” he said.

As with other citizen-science projects, volunteers will be credited on publications. The data is also being added to the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set for use by scientists worldwide.

The crowdsourced transcriptions are the biggest component of the Arctic Rediscovery Project, a broader investigation led by Wood into historic records of Arctic sea ice and climate.

Related projects include:

• A UW Information School Master’s student who last summer created a digital gallery of photos from Seattle’s Coast Guard Museum Northwest.
• New York high school students looking to see whether housings used around thermometers in the past could have skewed the temperature measurements (so far, luckily, it looks like they don’t).
• An upcoming project that will hire students to turn sea-ice descriptions transcribed by Old Weather volunteers into data points.

Ships that spent time in the Arctic represent less than one-third of the National Archives’ collection of more than a quarter-million logbooks, which Wood hopes will someday be fully transcribed. A recent collaboration with the New Bedford Whaling Museum will add whaling logbooks to the Old Weather project.

“I think the U.S. has the largest reservoir of marine meteorological data in the world,” Wood said. “This is an opportunity for people to contribute, in a meaningful way, to understanding the global climate.”

Old Weather-Arctic is funded by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce through the North Pacific Research Board and by the National Science Foundation.

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For more information, contact Wood at 206-526-6862 or krwood@uw.edu.

University of Washington researchers have discovered Dolly Varden, a kind of trout, eating just that way in Alaska’s Chignik Lake watershed.

Organs such as the stomach and intestines in the Dolly Varden doubled to quadrupled in size when eggs from spawning sockeye salmon became available each August, the researchers found. They were like vacuums sucking up the eggs and nipping at the flesh of spawned-out salmon carcasses.

J Armstrong/U of Washington

Brightly colored sockeye salmon surge by as a Dolly Varden waits its chance to binge on salmon eggs.

Then, once the pulse of eggs and spawning salmon ceased, the guts shrank and the fish lived for nearly a year off the reserves they’d built up because there is little else to eat.

Certain snakes, birds about to migrate and Atlantic cod in the laboratory are known to grow and shrink their digestive track in response to gorging, but this is the first time researchers have documented wild fish doing so, according to Jonathan Armstrong and Morgan Bond, UW doctoral students in aquatic and fishery sciences when the work was conducted. They are the authors of a paper in the Journal of Animal Ecology published online March 20.

Dolly Varden, bull trout and brook trout are among the North American members of the char family, part of the larger trout and salmon lineage. These particular Dolly Varden live where insects and other prey are scarce because of the long, cold winters. The fish can’t do without the yearly egg “subsidy.” Survival depends on there being lots of returning salmon, spawning naturally.

Depleted runs or rivers full of salmon returning to hatcheries just won’t do it, a factor for managers to consider if it turns out other fish have evolved the ability to grow and shrink their guts to take advantage of food pulses.

“Wild salmon runs have been dramatically reduced across much of the lower 48 states and often are replaced with hatchery fish,” Armstrong said. “When salmon are spawned in hatcheries, bull trout – which are threatened in the Pacific Northwest – as well as juvenile coho salmon and other species of concern to conservationists no longer have the opportunity to feed on salmon eggs, which are an incredible food source.

M Bond/U of Washington

Although the same length, a specimen of Dolly Varden collected in August when salmon eggs are available weighs 50 percent more than a specimen from June when there is no egg subsidy.

“Our society invests heavily in restoring stream ecosystems. Our study emphasizes the importance of conserving food webs. You can pay millions of dollars to add wood to a stream and take other steps to restore habitat but if there’s nothing for fish to eat, you might not see positive results,” Armstrong said.

It appears that Alaska is protecting coastal watersheds and conserving the inherent productivity of salmon runs, the authors said, and there are enough salmon to support commercial fisheries that harvest half, or more, of the returning fish as well as upstream consumers like Dolly Varden.

“The intact ecosystems of the Bristol Bay region produce staggering amounts of salmon. Even after half of the sockeye run is harvested, there are still enough fish left over to produce the iconic image of a stream turned red by aggregations of salmon in their bright spawning colors, salmon are so abundant that we can count them from airplanes.”

In the Alec River, where the work was conducted, so many sockeye salmon return that as females dig nests in the stream they unearth caches of eggs left by earlier spawners, Bond said. The eggs roll along the stream beds, get caught in crannies along banks and concentrate in swirling eddies where Dolly Varden and other animals chow down on them.

A 2-foot-long (60-centimeter) adult Dolly Varden can eat one-third to one-half pound (150 to 230 grams) of eggs a day.

“For a long time Dolly Varden were vilified as being bad for salmon, in part because they eat the eggs,” Bond said. “But they don’t dig up eggs, other salmon do. Dolly Varden are eating eggs that aren’t viable.”

M Bond/U of Washington

The color of Dolly Varden trout, this one a 16-inch (40-centimeter) adult, deepens when it’s time to spawn.

After the monthlong all-you-can-eat buffet, it’s important that the Dolly Varden digestive track shrinks because big guts demand a lot of energy from an animal. A normal-size gut, for example, uses about 30 percent of the animal’s energy when it is at rest, Bond said. By weight, the fish’s digestive track takes more energy to maintain than its muscles or brain. By shrinking their gut Dolly Varden can cut their energy costs and survive until the next round of spawning salmon arrives.

“They live close to the edge though, getting skinnier and skinnier each month until salmon return in the late summer,” Bond said.

Conserving energy is crucial when the fish is essentially fasting most of the year. Many fish – including young Dolly Varden – head to the sea seeking food all summer long before returning to their home rivers. But once Dolly Varden reach 16 or 17 inches (40 to 43 centimeters) in length they begin staying put, waiting for the feast to come to them.

It’s an evolutionary adaptation that could be protecting them from the predators and other hazards encountered by fish going to sea, the co-authors say.

“These are pretty large-bodied fish living in a place that is relatively nutrient poor but the egg subsidy allows the fish to remain in fresh water year after year. They don’t have to go to sea,” Bond said.

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Alaska salmon processors and the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.

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For more information:
Armstrong, 541-840-6017, jonny5armstrong@gmail.com
Bond, 831-706-1274, mobond@uw.edu

University of Washington students have been testing low-cost materials capable of harvesting water from fog in a temporary “hoop house” next to the Botany Greenhouse. They create the fog with a specially adapted power washer and record how much water condenses and drips off various panels of low-cost materials, such as shade cloth.

P Cromwell/U of Washington

In tests on campus this month, faculty member Ben Spencer checks the water condensing and dripping down matting material used in landscapes to control soil erosion. The group is evaluating inexpensive, readily available materials for fog harvesting.

They specifically want to find a way to help residents on the northern edge of Lima, Peru, where less than half an inch of rain falls, but heavy fogs occur consistently for six to nine months a year. The faculty and students are seeking a way to condense enough water to irrigate new plantings that would, in turn, harvest fog on their own, naturally bringing water into the landscape, said Susan Bolton, a professor of environmental and forest sciences and one of the group’s instructors.

To that end, they are also testing various plants as fog collectors: Vines, for example, because winemaking is a growing industry in Peru and residents might plant vineyards. Or perhaps a city park with trees could be created.

The landscape once had trees that collected fog, but 500 years ago Spanish colonizers denuded Lima’s fog-fed dry forests.

The UW group and 43 other university teams last year competed and each received a $15,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency’s P3: People, Prosperity and the Planet program. Teams are developing ideas to make such things as water, energy and agriculture more sustainable in developed or developing countries. In April the groups will send representatives to Washington, D.C., trying to win one of the grants worth up to $90,000 to implement their ideas.

Doug Ewing, who runs the botany greenhouse, heard about the project and helped the group adapt some of equipment used in the greenhouse. He and his crew, for example, use a power washer set-up, but with a different nozzle, in the greenhouse to cool plants when it gets hot.

Humans have long fashioned structures meant to cause dew or fog to condense. Today, for example, the Canadian non-profit FogQuest tries to help communities, particularly in Chile, harvest drinking water. FogQuest says a 48-square-yard fog collector can produce an average of more than 50 gallons per day.

“We hope we improve upon standard fog collection models by finding ways to increase collection rates while decreasing the amount of material used and energy needed by communities to construct and maintain the collectors,” said Peter Cromwell, a graduate student in landscape architecture.

“The UW project wants to take that a step farther by thinking about it as part of larger social, environmental and economic systems,” said Ben Spencer, assistant professor of landscape architecture. “Our focus on fog collection as a source of water for households and irrigation of green space responds directly to priorities expressed by the community. Low-cost systems of fog collection would empower the community to take charge of their own water resources and improve their environment and living conditions.”

Speaking at a national meeting on a panel of academic leaders who focus on natural resource sustainability, College of the Environment Dean Lisa Graumlich said the college’s successful sustainability initiatives are grounded in long-standing relationships among scientists, local communities and decision-makers as well as widely accessible research data and results.

She was among the directors, deans and department heads exploring the challenges academic institutions face in undertaking sustainability science as part of a panel at the annual conference of the American Association for Advancement of Science.

Ben Lucas

Lisa Graumlich, dean of the UW College of the Environment

Sustainability science is about taking what’s being learned about ocean acidification, climate change and other phenomena and helping policy makers and citizens develop strategies to deal with challenges that may arise. It’s scientific knowledge linked with societal action.

Graumlich said the UW’s Climate Impacts Group and the Northwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing Systems, for example, have critical ties with user communities, providing them with tailored information, teaching resources and apps to help people make decisions about issues from daily fishing conditions to climate change adaptation.

She also pointed to the importance of long-running relationships that college researchers, like forest ecologist Jerry Franklin, have with the various communities that bring multiple perspectives to the table when dealing with natural resource issues. “Franklin is known as the father of modern forestry precisely because he continually brings people together, so that they can identify logging practices that will work for them in the long-term,” Graumlich said.

These relationships require both social and financial investment, a critical issue that Graumlich said is often overlooked.

“New institutional arrangements are necessary if we are going to reconcile our development goals with the planet’s environmental limits,” said panelist James Buizer, one of the developers of Arizona State University’s institution-wide effort to increase sustainability science and practice. Because research to address environmental problems is inherently complex, researchers require skills, like mediation and facilitation, for which they are often undertrained.

That message was echoed in the “Careers” section of Nature the week following the AAAS meeting that said, “Sustainability training is on the rise, and institutions are working out how to best translate it into marketable skills.”

The article quotes Julia Parrish, associate dean in the UW College of the Environment, who said, “When we talked to employers, whether they’re top-tier universities, federal labs or large environmental non-government organizations, they said ‘we want disciplinary experts with cross-cutting skills in communication, problem-solving and leadership.”

An example is James Thorson, now with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Services. While earning his doctorate in aquatic and fishery sciences at the UW, he also worked on a team advising the Washington Restaurant Association on sustainability guidelines. But his contributions didn’t concern fisheries, they concerned such things as energy-efficient lighting.

That “pushed him out of his area of expertise and into one with varied stakeholders,” the Nature article said. “He learned about everything from environmental auditing to certification programmes to project management.”

“It’s an example of how universities are seeking new institutional models to effectively engage with the grand challenges of sustainability,” Graumlich said.

University of Washington atmospheric scientists hope their results help explain why global climate models mistakenly duplicate the inter-tropical convergence zone, a band of heavy rainfall in the northern tropics, on the other side of the equator. The study appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Liam Quinn, Canada / Wikimedia Commons

Low, gray clouds in Antarctica’s Gerlache Strait.

“There have been tons of efforts to get the tropical precipitation right, but they have looked in the tropics only,” said lead author Yen-Ting Hwang, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences. She found the culprit in one of the most remote areas of the planet.

“What we found, and that was surprising to us, is the models tend to be not cloudy enough in the Southern Ocean so too much sunlight reaches the ocean surface and it gets too hot there,” Hwang said. “People think of clouds locally, but we found that these changes spread into the lower latitudes.”

Previous studies looking at the problem investigated tropical sea-surface temperatures, or ways to better represent tropical winds and clouds. But none managed to correctly simulate rainfall in the tropics – an important region for global climate predictions, since small shifts in rainfall patterns can have huge effects on climate and agriculture.

“The rain bands are very sharp in this area,” commented co-author Dargan Frierson, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences. “You go from some of the rainiest places on Earth to some of the driest in just a few hundred kilometers.”

Recent theories suggest tropical rainfall might be linked to global processes. Hwang’s research, funded by the National Science Foundation, looked for possible connections to ocean temperatures, air temperatures, winds and cloud cover.

“For the longest time we were expecting that it would be a combination of different factors,” Frierson said, “but this one just stood out.”

The paper shows that cloud biases over the Southern Ocean are the primary contributor to the double-rain band problem that exists in most modern climate models.

“It almost correlates perfectly,” Hwang said. “The models that are doing better in tropical rainfall are the ones that have more cloud cover in the Southern Ocean.”

Hwang will speak on her results in April to scientists at the World Climate Research Programme. The results have also been submitted for inclusion in the fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is expected to appear next year.

Y.-T. Hwang, UW

Upper left shows historical rainfall, and upper right is an average of climate models’ estimates — notice the longer blue and red rain bands south of the equator. Lower left is the observed effect of low-level clouds, and lower right is the difference between the measurements and the average model output.

Most models don’t generate enough low-level clouds over the perpetually stormy Southern Ocean, the authors found, so heat accumulates in the Southern Hemisphere.

“Basically hot air rises, and it rains where air rises. So it’s kind of obvious that the rain is going to be over warmer ocean temperatures,” Frierson said. “Our new thinking is that the heat spreads – it’s the warmth of the entire hemisphere that affects tropical rainfall.”

In the short term, climate scientists can look for ways to improve the models to increase cloud cover over the Southern Ocean. Eventually, more powerful computers may permit models that are able to accurately simulate clouds over the entire planet.

“We have confidence in climate predictions outside the tropics, but tropical rainfall forecasts are much less certain,” Frierson said. “We hope this work will lead to better rainfall forecasts in regions like equatorial Africa, where it’s so important to have accurate predictions of future patterns.”

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For more information, contact Hwang at 206-543-0333 or yting@atmos.washington.edu and Frierson at 206-685-7364 or dargan@atmos.washington.edu. Ting is traveling until March 17 and is best reached via e-mail.

The 108-foot Elwha Dam was built in 1910, and after decades of debate it was finally dismantled last year. Roughly a third of the 210-foot Glines Canyon Dam still stands, holding back a mountain of silt, sand and gravel.

Tom Roorda

A century of accumulated sediment fans out at the Elwha river mouth.

Removal of the upper dam was halted in January while crews repair a water-treatment plant near Port Angeles that got clogged with leaves and other debris. For engineers, this phase may be the trickiest part of the dam-removal project. For oceanographers, “the best is yet to come,” said Charles Nittrouer, a UW professor of oceanography and of Earth and space sciences.

It turns out there is even more sediment than originally thought – about 34 million cubic yards. That’s more than 3 million truck loads, enough to bury all of Seattle in a layer almost 3 inches thick.

Aerial photos show sediment starting to fan out around the river’s mouth.

“One of the risks of just looking at these beautiful plume pictures is that you really don’t know the extent of where that sediment actually ends up,” said Andrea Ogston, a UW associate professor of oceanography. “Our focus is looking at what’s happening very close to the seabed – how it’s going to move, where it’s going to get to, what’s its ultimate fate.”

For the past five years, Ogston and Nittrouer and their students have been studying the sediment around the river mouth, initially with the support of Washington Sea Grant, to understand the condition before the dams’ removal. Their current project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is looking for events that could act like a hundred-year storm and bury the sediment deep in the ocean.

Emily Eidam, UW

Andrea Ogston (upper right) and students empty sediment into a bucket to study the contents.

The UW researchers have instruments to track particles in the water and record them accumulating on the ocean floor. They are on high alert for a rapid response when the river floods and dislodges the sediment. When that happens, they want to be onsite to record as much data as possible – and perhaps be the first to witness a rare geologic event.

In nature, deep-sea sediment flows triggered by earthquakes or extreme storms can be important for creating oil reserves and other geologic deposits, as a component of the global carbon cycle, and for burying communication cables.

Computer models and the geologic record suggest that when the sediment is in high-enough concentrations, it goes directly to the ocean floor. Instead of the fresh river water floating on top of the seawater, the river water becomes denser than the sea, and the sediment-laden river water plunges below the ocean water.

For the Elwha, that path would take much of the sediment away from the coastline and deep into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

“A surface plume is very much at the whim of the winds and tides, whereas these underflows are just going down the steepest gradient,” Ogston said. “These are two very different mechanisms that would create very different impacts to the seabed.”

The dams initially powered a pulp mill and were built unusually close to the ocean – the upper dam is just 13 miles from the river mouth. Their removal provides a unique opportunity to study large river discharges.

“There is an understanding of the general type of flow, and people have predicted that it occurs in rivers, but no one has seen the smoking gun yet,” Nittrouer said. “This is a chance to document a 100-year storm. It’s really somewhat new territory.”

So far there have been dramatic changes to the seabed in the shallows, but few changes below about 20 feet, Ogston said.

Where the sediment ends up is of practical interest. Sediment can make the water murky, creating conditions that make it difficult for salmon to lay eggs, or block light from reaching algae and other life on the ocean floor. On the other hand, the sediment also has positive impacts. Many people hope that removing the dam will help with erosion along the Olympic Coast. The new sediment could accumulate and restore natural beaches on the bluffs near Port Angeles.

A better understanding of sediment transport could also help determine the timing of future dam removals.

“One of the arguments is that rather than having a river that’s unacceptable to salmon for many years, you can accelerate the erosion to flush the system. That way you have two or three really bad years instead of two or three pretty bad decades,” Nittrouer said. Future projects might be trickier, he added, if the sediments contain pesticides or other chemicals.

Nobody knows when the Elwha’s sediment mother lode will begin to shift. A heavy rainfall combined with spring melt could dislodge the heap; if not, next fall and early winter rains will do the job. Either way, the UW marine geologists will be ready to hop in their van, hitch up a boat, and race out to see what happens.

“This is a very exciting time,” Ogston said.

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For more information, contact Ogston at 206-543-0768 or ogston@ocean.washington.edu and Nittrouer at 206-543-5099 or nittroue@ocean.washington.edu. Nittrouer is on travel until the end of March and is best reached via e-mail.