INSTAAR

CU Boulder scientist shows expeditioners untamed Antarctica

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 19:17:45 +0000

CU Boulder scientist shows expeditioners untamed Antarctica Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/13/2024 - 12:17

Clint Talbott

Cassandra Brooks, whom The Explorers Club has honored as an ‘extraordinary person’ doing ‘remarkable work to promote science and exploration,’ gives onsite lessons on the ‘vital’ ecosystem

When she is in Antarctica, Cassandra Brooks normally works to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. This month, she returned from a trip not focused on scientific research but on expanding the horizons of eco-tourists.

In January, Brooks, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, joined a half-circumpolar expedition led by small ship cruise line Ponant in collaboration with The Explorers Club, a multidisciplinary scientific professional society, and open to the public. On the expedition, Brooks was the featured speaker.

The expeditioners were on the Commandant Charcot, a cruise ship operated by Ponant. The trip’s promotional material noted that Ptolemy, the Alexandrian mathematician, astronomer and geographer, argued that there must be a southern land mass to balance out the continents of the north.

CU Boulder researcher Cassandra Brooks recently was a featured speaker on a half-circumpolar expedition led by small ship cruise line Ponant in collaboration with The Explorers Club.

Brooks likes the metaphor: “There’s a lot of truth to the idea that the world will topple over were it not for the weight of Antarctica,” she told Ponant. “Its ecosystem in general—and the ecosystem of the Southern Ocean in particular—are vital to the world’s survival.”

In 2022, The Explorers Club recognized Brooks as one of “50 extraordinary people who do remarkable work to promote science and exploration but remain under the radar and out of the limelight.”

She was as a core member of The Last Ocean, a grand-scale media project focused on protecting the Ross Sea. Her work helped drive the adoption of the world’s largest marine protected area in the Ross Sea, Antarctica, one of the healthiest marine ecosystems left on Earth.

Brooks, who is also a faculty fellow at the CU Boulder Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, recently answered questions from Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about her trip. The Q&A follows:

Question: You’ve delivered presentations previously, of course, but your half-circumpolar expedition with the Explorers Club stands out. What were your hopes and expectations as a presenter and scientist for this trip?

Brooks: The Explorers Club was founded in 1904 and traditionally celebrated exploration in the form of pushing physical frontiers, like being the first to reach the South Pole or climb Mount Everest. The Explorers Club has evolved to also celebrate exploration in the form of scientific discovery, and nowadays, exploration in the form of storytelling, conservation, protection and more.

In 2022, for my work in Antarctic conservation, I received their Explorers Club 50 honor, being recognized as one of the 50 people changing the world that the world needs to know about. It’s been an amazing experience and honor to be welcomed into this community in this new era of exploration!

While on board the Commandant Charcot with The Explorers Club for their new partnership with Ponant, I worked to educate and inspire. While the participants were intimately experiencing Antarctica, and no doubt falling in love with its austere beauty, I was sharing with them the importance of Antarctica to the world, how it is threatened by climate change and other human uses, and how we can work together to protect it.

I shared the story of how the global community came together in 2016 to protect the Ross Sea, Antarctica. We visited the Ross Sea at the end of our journey, a region that is now the world’s largest marine protected area. I shared the fascinating details of how life has evolved in Antarctica, developing remarkable adaptations, such as animals having anti-freeze in their bodies.

There is even a special family of fish called ‘Icefish’ that have no hemoglobin, only white-blood cells. In the oxygen rich Southern Ocean, these fish adsorb oxygen directly through their skin. Brooks lab PhD candidate Zephyr Sylvester also joined the expedition, and she shared stories of Antarctic krill, the small crustacean which feeds the extensive populations of birds and mammals that inhabit the Southern Ocean.

A humback whale swims in Hanusee Bay in Antarctica. (Photo: Cassandra Brooks)

In the spirit of The Explorers Club, we celebrated Antarctica for its history of exploration, for the scientific discoveries of the past, present and future, and for its remarkable conservation value. Throughout the expedition, participants engaged in exploration: Exploration through navigating waters few have navigated before. Exploration through knowledge generation and scientific discovery as Ponant had a scientific team on board.

We also engaged in exploration through storytelling. Given the incredible and urgent threats to Antarctic life, now is also the time for exploration for conservation. After experiencing this remote, austere, beautiful seascape, which teems with life superbly adapted to the cold, our hope is that we were able to help inspire participants to leave the expedition motivated to help protect Antarctica.

Question: You’ve visited Antarctica as a researcher, but this time you went as an expert presenter for a select audience. How did this trip differ from a “normal” expedition for you?

Brooks: This trip was anything but normal for me! I admit that I longed to be engaging in research while on board, and while that was not possible, I so appreciated being able to teach the participants about Antarctica, to deepen their understanding of this amazing place and to share my passion for protecting it.

I learned a lot, too, about the ways in which tourist vessels can be platforms for scientific research and how careful tourist operators are about ensuring they do not harm Antarctica and its wildlife. We also traveled to places many research vessels don’t frequent, including stretches of the icy Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas.

For me, this was my first time visiting these parts of Antarctica, and I was absolutely struck by their unique beauty and life. We saw the rare and mysterious Ross Seal, another first for me. All of us on board and surely bonded for life after sharing this profound experience together.

Question: You hold a graduate certificate in science communication. In this time of polarized discussion about climate science and a range of other scientific topics, are there strategies that you employ to maximize the effectiveness or persuasiveness of your communications?

Brooks: Effective science communication demands good storytelling and connecting with people. I find that bombarding people with facts, including about climate change, is not necessarily persuasive or even informative if it’s not delivered in a way that will stick in their hearts and minds.

A Weddell seal in Antarctica's Cape Evans. (Photo: Cassandra Brooks)

During my talks, I try to tell stories, for example, reminding people that even before the continent of Antarctica was discovered, the ancient Greeks insisted that a great southern land must exist, in symmetry with the land mass in the north. Without it, they said that the world would topple over.

We now know that the Greeks were right, because since the discovery of Antarctica, scientists have revealed that it stores the majority of the world’s freshwater, regulates our climate and drives global circulation. As the Greeks said, the great southern land keeps the world in balance and even stores disproportionate amounts of heat and carbon, especially buffering us from the impacts of climate change.

We have beautiful figures using the Spilhaus projection showing Antarctica rightly placed at the center of the map, demonstrating its role in the Earth system. I also share why protecting Antarctica has become so personal for me. I used to make a call to protect Antarctica so that my children, including my daughter Adelie (named for the Adelie penguin) and my son Orion Ross (named for the Ross Sea), could grow up with a Southern Ocean thriving with life.

And while protecting Antarctica for the sake of its wildlife is still incredibly important to me, the reasons have become more visceral. I’ll never forget the day in the middle of 2020 when I took my kids hiking on one of our favorite trails. The late day summer sun, and the Rocky Mountains of Colorado were behind me, when suddenly the sky went dark.

I turned to see a massive black cloud of smoke expanding out and blotting out the sun, and immediately a cloud of thick ash was raining down on us. The smoke continued for almost four months straight, with conditions so toxic, we had to stay locked indoors as the expansive forests of Colorado burned.

The next year, almost 1,000 houses burned within kilometers of ours, another record fire, this time in heart of winter. Now the fires continue with no end in sight. Even my childhood home in the northeastern United States was plagued by smoke last summer; there is nowhere to go. Nowadays, almost everyone has similar stories, and if not of fire, then of other extreme events.

And, of course, the world is burning. It’s warming, dramatically. The early days of June saw us breach the 1.5C warming threshold with predictions from the World Meteorological Organization that we are likely to exceed the 1.5C threshold for at least one year within the next four years.

Cassandra Brooks (left) films Ulyana Horodyskyj Peña on a recent expedition to Antarctica. (Photo: Cassandra Brooks)

But it is not hopeless. While the (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports call for urgent climate action, they also still suggest (that with immediate reductions in greenhouse gases) that we can secure a livable future. Antarctica is core to that future. Through doing more to safeguard Antarctica, we actually stand to create a more livable world for us all.

Question: Also on board the ship with you was Ulyana Horodyskyj Peña. Can you describe her role and how it buttresses or complements yours?

Brooks: On the Commandant Charcot, Ponant provides a platform for scientific exploration. Explorers Club member Ulyana Horodyskyj Peña joined the expedition to sample snow looking for black carbon, evidence of our human impact even in this most unexplored region. She also collected water samples to look for microplastics.

She’ll be analyzing her samples when she returns to CU Boulder. While her role was a scientist on board, she also gave talks to the participants, teaching them about how black carbon exacerbates warming and the melting of ice.

During the trip, Ulyana and I worked together to capture captivating imagery and video, including of the exploration and science being conducted aboard the Commandant Charcot. In the spirit of The Explorers Club, we sought to provide exploration through media and storytelling, capturing the beauty of this place, sharing imagery from this last intact wilderness with the world.

Question: For those of us who are unlikely to travel to Antarctica, could you share something memorable or unique about being there?

Brooks: Antarctica is so profoundly beautiful and awe-inspiring. Being there is a visceral experience that is all encompassing. Every moment takes your breath away. It is not only visually beautiful, but there is also something about the grand scale of the place:

The towering icebergs. Ice that spans in all directions seemingly into infinity. Life in the form of penguins, seals and whales popping out in the most unimaginable places all along the ice edges and cracks. The biting cold and wind, the mighty swells and salt sprays of the dark Southern Ocean make you feel alive and absolutely connected to the Earth, out of which all our lives arise.

Top image: (left to right) Cassandra Brooks, Ulyana Horodyskyj Peña and Zephyr Sylvester in Antarctica's Bay of Whales (Photo: Cassandra Brooks)

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Cassandra Brooks, whom The Explorers Club has honored as an ‘extraordinary person’ doing ‘remarkable work to promote science and exploration,’ gives onsite lessons on the ‘vital’ ecosystem.

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Scientist, Olympic hopeful runs with real purpose

Anonymous — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:38:00 +0000

Scientist, Olympic hopeful runs with real purpose Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/30/2024 - 17:38

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU Boulder postdoctoral researcher, who fuses running with a commitment to environmental causes, to compete in U.S. Olympic women’s marathon trials in February

Peyton Thomas has been interested in biology and environmental science for most of her life. And she’s been running competitively since her high school years in Roswell, Georgia, the Atlanta suburb where she grew up.

As an undergraduate, she studied environmental science and biochemistry and ran track and cross-country at Baylor University.

When she started a PhD program in biology and marine biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) in 2017, she also began working with private coach Tom Clifford, who introduced her to trail running.

Top image: In addition to marathons, Peyton Thomas is an avid trail runner (photo: Hames Ellerbe); above image: INSTAAR postdoctoral research associate Peyton Thomas is a fish physiologist focused on changing climate regimes and the impacts on fish growth trajectories.

“Tom helped me get into longer-distance running,” says Thomas, a postdoctoral research associate in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

On her 23rd birthday, she ran the legendary Bigfoot 40-mile trail race circumnavigating Washington’s Mount St. Helens, and Clifford helped her train for the 2019 California International Marathon, her first at that distance.

Fast forward to four years later, when Thomas will compete for the first time in the U.S. Olympic marathon trials in Orlando, Florida on Feb. 3, alongside three of her former Baylor teammates. (She was invited to the trials in 2020 but was derailed by an ankle injury.)

“It’s cool to have this amazing field of women helping pull me along, including a lot of old friends,” says Thomas, who hopes to set a PR—personal record.

Her move into trail running and racing at marathon-and-beyond distances coincided with a shift in her academic focus to the impacts of climate change. After seeing the destruction from Hurricane Florence, which hit Wilmington in 2018, she began thinking about how to meld her interest in environmental science with running.

“That changed the way I was thinking about science,” she says. “I wanted to be involved in community and it got me thinking about how running could be a part of that outside of competitive racing.”

She got involved with a project focusing on climate-change policy and local government in and around Wilmington and other social and political issues.

She continued to run trail races, winning the Eastern Divide 50K in 2021.

“After the trials in 2020, I started getting interest from trail-running brands in being sponsored,” she says. In 2021, Patagonia tapped Thomas to be a trail-running ambassador.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xr1rJ7-H-Q]

Building community

After earning a PhD in biology from UNCW, she took a postdoctoral position at CU Boulder’s INSTAAR. From her new home base, she took the opportunity to enter several Western races, including the Desert Rats 50K on Colorado’s Western Slope, the Bellingham 50K in Washington state and the Broken Arrow in California.

She also ran a race outside Salt Lake City in which runners grind up and barrel down a mountain repeatedly over six hours. The Running Up for Air race series, designed to “amplify informed dialogue and empower organizations actively working on air quality solutions,” vividly showed Thomas how running could make a difference.

“You can see the inversion (pollution trapped by air) so clearly up that high. It’s unfortunate, but it’s a cool way to see the impacts,” she says.

Scientist and marather Peyton Thomas melds her passion for environmental science with running.

Increasingly, Thomas has participated in races and events with social aims, such as the Latino Ultra Nature Adventure at Gross Reservoir in the mountains west of Boulder, which drew participants from across South and Central America. In the autumn of 2023, she partnered with the community of Gloster, Mississippi, to put on the Equitable Action Run Toward Health, which highlighted the air-quality impact and injustice of the wood-pellet industry on a low-income Black community.

“I wanted to create an event that would build community and encourage civic engagement against harmful biomass production,” Thomas wrote in a piece for Patagonia in November 2023.

Meanwhile, at INSTAAR, she is hard at work developing “fish bioenergetic” models as part of an interdisciplinary team modeling projections for the effects of climate change on watersheds in the Yukon region of Alaska and Canada.

“I’m working beyond biologists, so a lot of things are over my head when I’m talking to other people on the team. It’s cool to have the opportunity to learn so much from people and expand my mind,” she says.

Thomas is realistic about her chances to make the U.S. Olympic team but has set a goal of beating her PR of 2:34, set in December at the California International Marathon.

“Given the field of amazing women who run in the mid- to low-2:20s, I’m probably not capable of going” to the Olympics, she says. “But I’m excited to be there, especially since three of my Baylor teammates also qualified.”

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CU Boulder postdoctoral researcher, who fuses running with a commitment to environmental causes, to compete in U.S. Olympic women’s marathon trials in February.

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From molecule movement to coastal flooding, CU scientists push boundaries

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 17:49:32 +0000

From molecule movement to coastal flooding, CU scientists push boundaries Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/27/2023 - 11:49

Rachel Sauer

Researchers Andrés Montoya-Castillo and Julia Moriarty are named U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Researchers, receiving multiyear funding

Two University of Colorado Boulder researchers have been selected as U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Program scientists, a designation intended to support the next generation of U.S. STEM leaders.

Andrés Montoya-Castillo, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, and Julia Moriarty, an assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and a fellow in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, are among 93 early-career scientists from across the United States whose research spans astrophysics and artificial intelligence to fusion-energy and quantum materials. The 93 scientists will share in $135 million in research funding for projects of up to five years.

“Supporting America’s scientists and researchers early in their careers will ensure the United States remains at the forefront of scientific discovery,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm states in the awards announcement. “The funding … gives the recipients the resources to find the answers to some of the most complex questions as they establish themselves as experts in their fields.”

Understanding how molecules dance

Montoya-Castillo’s research is guided, in part, by the need to know which molecules are “going to be good candidates for some technological adventure,” he says. “We need to know how that molecule interacts with light.”

Researcher Andrés Montoya-Castillo studies molecular movement to better understand how they absorb energy.

One of the biggest challenges to understanding molecules is the fact that they don’t stop moving. Far from the static picture on a textbook page, molecules “are always dancing, always jiggling about,” Montoya-Castillo says. “When they jiggle about, sometimes photons or little particles of light that they wouldn’t have been able to absorb, now they can. Or the opposite could be true: They can’t absorb particles we thought they could, because they’re jiggling about, or can’t do it as well.”

Knowing how molecules in liquids and solids absorb light has the potential to support the development of everything from more efficient solar cells to organic semiconductors and biological dyes. But knowing molecules means knowing how they dance, a longtime roadblock in designing materials that maximize energy conversion, say, or enhance quantum computing.

So, Montoya-Castillo and his research group will attack this problem with statistics. “One of deepest aspects of theoretical chemistry is saying, ‘OK, we have a random-looking process. What kind of statistics does this random process follow?” he says. “We’re looking to bridge the randomness to establish a fully predictive simulation.”

The researchers will initially apply their techniques to porphyrins, which are molecules prevalent everywhere on Earth and involved in everything from oxygen transport to energy transfer; they cause the red in blood and the green in plants. Montoya-Castillo notes that porphyrins are ideal for testing the techniques because they are highly tunable and are critical ingredients in natural and artificial energy conversion.

“One of the questions we’re asking is, ‘How do we arrive at design principles to make the next generation of photo catalysts or energy conversion devices, the next generation of quantum computing or quantum sensing?’” he says.

“To do this, we need to achieve two things. The first is realize when our wonderful theories and models are not sufficient to predict and explain the physics that one gets from experiment and generalize our approach. We are doing that by developing the theoretical framework required to predict the spectra of molecules whose constant jiggling makes it difficult to know when they will absorb photons.

“The second is to exploit the current models when they work to give us insight. And fast. To tackle this second challenge, we’re working on being able to exploit experimental data to parameterize the model automatically and use this as a starting point to predict how molecules interact with light. Then we’ll be able to match our predictions to experiment, refine the model and our understanding, and speed up feedback loop of theory-experiment-design, which has traditionally been a very computationally complex and expensive procedure.

He adds that, “One of the final things we’re doing is developing a machine-learning framework to reduce this huge computational cost so we can really accelerate the pathway to tweaking these molecules to get some technological advances going for us.”

Climate change and coastal flooding

For Moriarty, a coast oceanographer by training, the path to her DOE-supported research began with a practical observation: As storms become slower and wetter because of climate change, they are dumping a lot more rain on coastal areas. Couple that with sea level rise caused by climate change, and coastal urban centers are increasingly at risk for floods.

Julia Moriarity, a CU Boulder researcher, uses process-based and statistical machine-learning modeling to understand how flooding affects coastal areas.

“When urban areas flood, you can have sewage systems flood, water-treatment plants flood, nuclear power plants flood, because all these facilities have to be located near water,” Moriarty says. “So, the question is: when a flood causes polluted water to enter the local waterways, what’s that polluted water’s fate?”

Not only can floods contaminate local waterways by spreading bacterial or even radioactive contaminants into them, but they can unleash a cascade of events in which excess nutrient levels can stimulate harmful algae blooms, reduce oxygen levels in the water and reduce water clarity and quality, sometimes leading to “dead zones.”

Moriarty’s research combines process-based and statistical machine-learning modeling to analyze how floods of coastal infrastructure affect pollutant and nutrient fluxes in local waterways, and their impact on biogeochemical processes. A significant aim is to better understand how extreme floods degrade water quality and which aspects of flooding are predictable and which are not.

“If something’s predictable, it’s a lot easier to plan for it,” Moriarty says.

The research will use Baltimore, Maryland, as a case study, in collaboration with the Baltimore Social-Environmental Collaborative (BSEC) Urban Integrated Field Laboratory. Using data from the Energy Exascale Earth System Model climate model, as well as a new Baltimore hydrodynamic-biogeochemistry model, Moriarty and her research team aim to better understand how coastal urban flooding impacts local waterway biogeochemistry in different climate scenarios.

Further, the researchers want to use a combination of machine learning and sensitivity tests of the process-based model they develop to scale up what they learn from local observations in Baltimore to coastal-urban systems worldwide.

“The better we can understand and predict these events, the better we can plan for them,” Moriarty says. “It costs a lot less to mitigate risks in advance of events than to clean them up afterward.”

Top image: Glenn Asakawa/CU Boulder

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Researchers Andrés Montoya-Castillo and Julia Moriarty are named U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Researchers, receiving multiyear funding.

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Experts see hope despite grim climate projections

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 17:13:55 +0000

Experts see hope despite grim climate projections Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/18/2019 - 11:13

Clint Talbott

CU Boulder and NOAA scientists join panel discussion following Boulder screening of Ice on Fire, an HBO documentary

Human activity has changed the climate, and humans have not yet done enough to slow—much less reverse—the damage, yet four scientists who study climate change all agreed this week that they have reason for optimism.

The scientists, all of whom appear in the HBO documentary Ice on Fire, joined a panel discussion after the Boulder screening of the film on the University of Colorado Boulder campus.

Gabrielle Petron, at right, makes a point during a panel discussion on campus following the CU Boulder screening of the HBO documentary Ice on Fire. To her left are other Boulder experts who also appear in the film: College of Arts and Sciences Interim Dean James W.C. White, NOAA Scientist Pieter Tans, and INSTAAR Climate Technician Jennifer Morse. Photo by Glenn Asakawa. At the top of the page is an image from the filming of the documentary.

“On the pessimism scale, I’m an 8 or 9” on a scale of one to 10, said James W.C. White, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a highly cited climatologist. On the optimism scale, however, he said he was a 9 or 10.

“The generation of students that comes to this campus wants to change the world. I want to give them every opportunity to do that,” White said.

Produced by Oscar-winner Leonardo DiCaprio, George DiCaprio and Mathew Schmid, Ice on Fire focuses on solutions designed to slow the accelerating environmental crisis. It argues that renewable energy is necessary but insufficient to meet the climate challenge.

White’s acknowledgement of the grim scientific findings but expression of hope reflected the themes of Ice on Fire, which also features three other Boulder scientists who joined the panel discussion:

Jennifer Morse, climate technician at the Mountain Research Station of the CU Boulder Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR).
Gabrielle Petron, research scientist at the CU Boulder Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Pieter Tans, chief of the Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases Group at the NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory Global Monitoring Division.

Waleed Abdalati, who directs CIRES and moderated the panel discussion, asked the experts how they’d rank both their pessimism and optimism.

Tans said he was both pessimistic and optimistic, noting that the Paris Agreement on climate action hasn’t been effectively implemented. On the other hand, he said, people have the freedom to vote for government leaders who will take action.

Petron, too, expressed both pessimism and optimism, emphasizing the desire of younger people to address climate change. “Even our generation, we want a world we can thrive in,” she said.

Morse emphasized hope. “I’m super-optimistic about the next generation, but let’s not leave it all to them,” she said.

Meanwhile, the rapid decreases in land and sea ice are grave causes for concern, the panelists said. “What’s concerning about an ice-free Arctic is a planet that has a very different weather pattern from where we live,” White said. “There’s a huge amount of carbon locked up in the Arctic.”

Indigenous people see the change first hand, he added: “If you are indigenous to the Arctic, you are terrified.”

Ice on Fire argues for a two-pronged approach to reversing the crisis: reducing carbon emissions through traditional renewable energy sources and new ones, like tidal energy, and implementing “drawdown” measures, focusing on methods for drawing down and sequestering carbon, including direct air capture, sea farms, urban farms, biochar, marine snow and bionic leaves.

The panelists also discussed how individuals can help in their everyday lives, even if they can’t afford to buy solar panels and don’t own their own homes (and thus can’t invest in energy-efficiency measures). Consuming less stuff and eating lower on the food chain were two suggestions.

After a spirited Q&A session with the audience, Abdalati asked the panelists to give the audience a one-sentence message to take home. Two responded with one word.

Morse: “Together.”

Tans: “Solidarity.”

Petron: “We don’t have time; we need to act.”

White: “Show your children and grandchildren that you really do love them.”

CU Boulder and NOAA scientists join panel discussion following Boulder screening of Ice on Fire, an HBO documentary.

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DiCaprio film featuring four local scientists to be screened here

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 22:40:43 +0000

DiCaprio film featuring four local scientists to be screened here Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/03/2019 - 16:40

CU Boulder and NOAA scientists to join panel discussion following the film

Leila Conners and Leonardo DiCaprio arrive for the LA Premiere Of HBO's Ice On Fire. Photo by Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images. At the top of the page, cinemetographer Harun Mehmedinovic surveys an Arctic sky. Photo by Harun Mehmedinovic.

(Note: Due to a family emergency, Leila Connors, the film's director, will not attend the screening as originally reported. This story has been amended accordingly.)

Have humans past the tipping point with the climate, or can we act, even now, to reduce the damage the planet’s inhabitants will suffer? That’s a question posed in the HBO documentary Ice on Fire, which features three University of Colorado Boulder scientists.

The university will host a screening of the film on Thursday, Oct. 17, at 6:30 p.m. in the CASE Auditorium on campus. The event is free, but registration is required; follow this link.

Ice on Fire emphasizes the importance of an immediate, two-pronged approach to reversing the crisis: reducing carbon emissions through traditional renewable energy sources and new ones, like tidal energy, and implementing “drawdown” measures, focusing on methods for drawing down and sequestering carbon, including direct air capture, sea farms, urban farms, biochar, marine snow, bionic leaves and others.

“It’s an intelligently structured series of arguments which repeatedly takes the audience to the brink of despair, before pulling back with a glimmer of optimism,” a Screen Daily review said. The film premiered to a standing ovation at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The post-screening panel discussion will be moderated by Waleed Abdalati, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at CU Boulder. The panelists will include four local scientists who appear in the film. They are:

Jennifer Morse, Climate Technician, Mountain Research Station, CU Boulder Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR).
Gabrielle Petron, research scientist at CIRES/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Pieter Tans, chief, Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases Group, NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory Global Monitoring Division.
Jim White, interim dean, CU Boulder College of Arts and Sciences, professor of geological sciences and former INSTAAR director.

The event is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, with support from the CU Boulder Research & Innovation Office, INSTAAR and CIRES.

[video:https://youtu.be/Elf0RFBhr8I]

Film ‘repeatedly takes the audience to the brink of despair, before pulling back with a glimmer of optimism,’ Cannes reviewer says

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Mountain art residency attracts participants like moths to a flame

Anonymous — Sat, 31 Aug 2019 22:29:27 +0000

Mountain art residency attracts participants like moths to a flame Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 08/31/2019 - 16:29

Kenna Bruner

New program aims to promote cross-disciplinary research between art and science, and to support new creative works

Aaron Treher appears in an image titled "Street Light Project: Piney Creek Site." Photo by Barbara Bosworth.

In a small, brightly lit cabin nestled in a mountain forest west of Boulder, moths and other night creatures rushed toward the mercury vapor streetlights glowing inside. After dark, hundreds of moths and insects of many varieties flew into the open door and swarmed around the lights as part of an art installation conceived by Aaron Treher, who is a contemporary artist.

Treher, who earned a Master of Fine Arts in art practices at the University of Colorado Boulder, is the first recipient of a residency program launched this summer to promote cross-disciplinary research between art and science, and to support new creative work by a selected artist-in-residence.

Treher’s project documented the interaction of bugs and streetlights in a gallery space.

The Mountain Research Station Sculpture Residency Program is a collaboration among sculpture and post-studio practice in the Department of Art and Art History at CU Boulder, the Mountain Research Station (MRS) and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). The residency includes the use of two remote MRS cabins, one for the artist to stay in for two weeks and the other to use as a studio or gallery space.

“I’ve been wanting to do this project for a long time,” Treher said.

An insect alights on a street lamp in Aaron Treher's work at the Mountain Research Station.

“The point of the work was to get people to look at these older style streetlights and consider them as cultural objects while also seeing how they interact with the ecology of a place. People reacted in an excited way and MRS is a great space for that kind of work. I had some great conversations with researchers and students about the intersection between art and science.”

The point of the work was to get people to look at these older style streetlights and consider them as cultural objects while also seeing how they interact with the ecology of a place."

Treher’s art practice focuses on building, documenting and studying forms of architecture and infrastructure that serve as niche habitats for specific animal species, such as barn swallows and bats. His artworks utilize sculpture, photography, architectural design, fieldwork and ecological survey.

“We think of street lights in terms of public safety,” Treher said. “The type of streetlights I’m working with have also become a form of habitat for a specific set of animals. I’ve been trying for a long time to find a place that would allow me to document the interaction of bugs, bats and streetlights. Most gallery spaces wouldn’t be too happy about hundreds of bugs showing up in their space. This residency was a perfect opportunity for me to make that happen.”

The residency program is directed by Richard Saxton, professor in art practices at CU Boulder.

“The main point of the residency is to create relationships between science and art,” Saxton said. “We really believe an artist needs to be working deeper in other fields, not just art, so we’re pushing hard to produce what we think of as the next generation of artists and cultural leaders. That includes being able to understand science topics like climate change and have first-hand experience with it. We’ve dedicated ourselves to that engagement with the world.”

The concept of a sculpture is much wider than people give it credit for, Saxton said. In Treher’s piece, the sculpture involved using the entire cabin.

“When we talk about sculpture, we’re also talking about installation art, outdoor participatory art,” Saxton said.

An important aspect of this residency is interacting with the classes and researchers at the MRS and creating work that can engage audiences that include K-12 students, undergraduates and graduates, and researchers who come from around the world.

Street lamps are visible inside of a cabin at the Mountain Research Station, where Alex Treher's creation underscores the interplay between the human-built environment and indigenous creatures, in this case insects. `

The residency program is one way that the sculpture and post-studio practice area promotes cross-pollination with scientists, researchers and policy makers whose work centers on rural environments, conservation and ecology. The residency allows space for creative voices to join many important science-based conversations.

The artists-in-residence will share their work through open studio events and presentations. Immersed in the workings of a science research station, artists can create site-specific installations, ecological projects, walking and hiking projects and collaborative experiments.

The residency will be awarded annually to an alumnus or graduating Masters of Fine Arts students in the CU Boulder sculpture and post-studio practice area. Artists will spend two weeks during the summer on the MRS campus.

At 9,500 feet in the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies, MRS is an interdisciplinary INSTAAR research centerdevoted to the study of mountain ecosystems. Alpine ecosystems support an abundance of diverse and rare species that are being affected by climate change. For nearly 100 years, MRS has provided research and educational opportunities for scientists and students.

“We want to continue offering more than just the studio on campus,” Saxton said. “We’re really focused on site-based work. There may be some preliminary research they’ve done, but the project is going to come out of their time there.”

Grad student is first recipient of a residency program launched this summer to promote cross-disciplinary research between art and science.

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Amsterdam to CU Boulder, by rail, boat, bus and bike

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 15:27:33 +0000

Amsterdam to CU Boulder, by rail, boat, bus and bike Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/10/2019 - 09:27

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Climate researcher eschews air travel on 8,000-mile ‘commute’ to take up INSTAAR position

Climate scientist Joep van Dijk was excited when he received a postdoctoral appointment to the Institute of Alpine and Arctic Research at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Climate scientist Joep van Dijk near the coast of St. Lucia in the Caribbean. At the top of the page, Dijk is pictured riding near Colorado Springs along Fountain Creek. Images courtesy of Joep van Dijk.

But the good news also presented a conundrum: Concerned about his personal carbon footprint, he didn’t want to fly from his home in Amsterdam to take up the new job. According to some studies, a round-trip flight from New York to Europe can create a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person, or nearly 16 percent of the average American’s annual carbon output.

“I thought, ‘I have three months, let’s see if I can get to Colorado without flying,’” says van Dijk, who specializes in paleo-oceanography and paleoclimatology.

He’d soon come up with an ambitious plan: He’d sail across the Atlantic, then bike from his U.S. port of call to Boulder. And that’s just what he did, in 87 days.

“I arrived by bike in Boulder Sunday, March 31,” he says. “Monday was my first day of work.”

The time and effort to make his more-than-8,000-mile journey was considerable, but worth it, van Dijk says.

“When I arrived at my new house in Boulder, I met a woman and the first thing she asked was, ‘How much did you grow throughout your trip?’ It’s such a good question” — and unlike the usual questions he got along the way, he says. “The answer is that I have grown as much as I would have in five years’ time. I would not underestimate the personal development you may experience if you take a slower way to travel.”

More than anything, van Dijk wanted his slow-boat-and-bike trip to serve as an example.

“It’s not that difficult. It takes a bit of energy, but it will make you pretty happy in the long term to know that you didn’t contribute to the (climate change) problem,” he says. “And I’m pretty sure that within a couple of decades, all these things I’m doing will become normal.”

He took video and photos along the way, and is now crowdfunding to raise funds to produce a documentary titled, “Carbon Dioxide? That’s Not Right!”

“Initially, I didn’t want to make a movie of it,” van Dijk says. Then his sister, Puck van Dijk, gave him a present for his PhD graduation on one condition: “I’ll give you this drone, but only if you document the entire trip.”

Van Dijk started his odyssey by searching online for someone to sail with. That’s where he met Captain Robert Bachmann, a German man planning to sail his roughly 40-by-15-foot catamaran, Namaka—named after a Hawaiian sea goddess—from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean.

Van Dijk had participated in a “couple of sailing camps” growing up in the Netherlands, but was no seasoned sailor. In order to gauge how he might fare on a three or four week transatlantic journey, Bachmann agreed to meet him in Spain for a six-day shakedown cruise to the Canary Islands.

“I’d never done something like this before,” Van Dijk says. “We wanted to see if it would be a match, a sort of trial, for seasickness and things like that.”

Van Dijk left Amsterdam by train Jan. 2 for Almeria, Spain, where he met Bachmann. Sailing through the straits of Gibraltar to Las Palmas, on the island of Gran Canaria, he passed his shakedown practicum with flying colors.

“He took me on for two reasons. He liked the idea of a documentary, and was a documentary maker himself. And if need be, he was capable of doing the crossing himself, without help,” van Dijk says.

The Namaka embarked from Las Palmas with Bachmann, van Dijk and two German passengers aboard on Jan. 18. They encountered mostly smooth sailing over the next several weeks, except for some doldrums—areas of low or no wind—that forced the captain to alter his route, and arrived in Barbados on Feb. 10.

When the other two passengers decided to leave the expedition earlier than anticipated, Bachmann asked van Dijk to crew for another couple of weeks’ sailing around the Caribbean, from St. Lucia to George Town, capitol of the Bahamas.

“That was also a very nice and interesting part of the trip,” van Dijk says. “It’s a lot of work to manage a big boat with just two people.”

From George Town, he took three ferries to Florida, where he boarded a red-eye Greyhound bus for New Orleans. There, he bought a bike and began the final, 1,400-mile leg of his journey on March 11. Three weeks later, he showed up at INSTAAR to start his new position researching—as he put it in lay terms—“How did the earth’s marine ecosystem respond to the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs?”

Van Dijk has been interested in climate science since high school, where he designed a solar panel with an eye toward fueling his school through solar energy. Undergraduate research in Spain showed him the importance of the geological record in understanding climate issues. As a graduate student, he worked in Switzerland helping to reconstruct the terrestrial climate of the early Eocene period.

His increasing knowledge about climate change inspired van Dijk to begin making changes to his lifestyle. He became a vegetarian—a 2016 study by scientists at the University of Oxford found that widespread adoption of a vegetarian diet would reduce carbon emissions by as much as 63 percent, and a vegan diet by as much as 70 percent—and began to balk at having to fly to conferences and do field work.

Van Dijk recognizes how deeply ingrained luxuries such as air travel and meat-based diets have become in the lives of many Americans. But, he says, it’s possible to make changes incrementally, such as by starting with a “meatless Monday” then increasing the number of meatless days. And he believes that “slow travel” is ultimately more rewarding than winging it to a beach for a week and returning, exhausted and harried.

“My own trip took 87 days. There is a lot of stuff to be seen between Boulder and the Mediterranean,” he says. “If you take a plane to the other side of the world, apart from the fact that it’s completely unnatural and you have no time to adapt, you also miss everything in between.”

A transition to slower travel would require fundamental shifts in how Americans work, he acknowledges, including shorter hours and more vacation time. But that’s all to the good, van Dijk says.

“In Scandinavia, there are 30-hour work weeks, and productivity actually goes up,” he says. “And especially in the U.S., we must leave behind the two-week (vacation time); it must become at least six weeks.”

In the end, he says, taking personal action to mitigate climate change will make us happier.

“As a geologist, I’m trained to think in terms of 50 or 60 million years. Of course, I care about my own life, and I take pleasure in life once in a while,” he says.

“But when you look at your own life and try to make sustainable choices, that will make you happy. Because what is the point of personal growth and happiness if you cannot pass it on? Your grandchildren won’t be able to experience the same things as you, and I think that’s very selfish.”

Climate researcher eschews air travel on 8,000-mile ‘commute’ to take up INSTAAR position.

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CU Boulder pika researcher wins conservation award

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 17:39:57 +0000

CU Boulder pika researcher wins conservation award Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 11/02/2018 - 11:39

Cay Leytham-Powell

A CU Boulder researcher is being recognized by the Denver Zoo for her extensive work studying the pika across the Colorado alpine

Chris Ray, a researcher from the University of Colorado Boulder known for her work with pikas in the Colorado alpine, is this year’s recipient of the Denver Zoological Conservation Award.

This annual award, which comes with a cash prize of $5,000, recognizes an individual who has made a significant contribution to the field of wildlife conservation. For Ray, this impact included working with the Front Range Pika Project, a citizen science project that gathers data on pikas—a small mammal related to the rabbit—in the Rocky Mountains, and studying the vulnerability of pikas around the world.

“I was really surprised,” said Ray, a researcher in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research that is also affiliated with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at CU Boulder. “It felt so rewarding to feel like these amazing organizations were supporting our research so much that they were willing to give to the cause. It’s really validating to understand that people are behind you that much.”

Chris Ray, seen here handling an unconscious pika, is being recognized for her conservation work. Photograph courtesy of Wolf Perry/H2O Radio.

Ray has been a fundamental part of the Front Range Pika Project since its inception roughly ten years ago. While it is managed jointly by the Denver Zoo and Rocky Mountain Wild, it is built off of Ray’s existing pika research and her ongoing scientific supervision.

An important part of what makes the Front Range Pika Project unique—and one that is critical to its ongoing success—is the inclusion of citizen scientists, or residents in the community who assist in data collection. These volunteers come from across the Denver metropolitan area, Front Range and high country communities, and help to collect data on pikas and their habitats. In 2018 alone, 125 volunteers hiked to more than 100 sites, and managers of the project want to expand it even more next year.

Ray then uses data collected by volunteers to draw conclusions about the state of pika populations across the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Over the course of her research thus far, she has found that while pikas are faring better in Colorado than in many other places around the globe where they are disappearing, that may not last, as she and her colleagues have predicted local extinctions—or when the species disappears in some areas but not others—connected to a changing climate.

“We admire, appreciate, and thank Dr. Ray for her efforts. Her ability to inspire and train the next generation of wildlife conservationists is motivating—she is a true conservation leader within the community,” the Denver Zoo wrote in a press release.

Ray plans to use the award in two ways: First, she wants to fund a student study of the grasses and flowers that pikas collect, and what impacts a changing climate might have on their quality; and second, she also wants to continue another interest: Pika ecology in Mongolia, where they appear to be in drastic decline in some locations and researchers don’t know why.

“I’m urgently wanting to go back right now while there are still some pikas there,” Ray said. “I want to try to understand what’s going on before I lose that opportunity.”

More information on the Pika Project, including how to get involved, is available on the Pika Partners website.

Top photograph courtesy of Shanthanu Bhardwaj/Flickr.

A CU Boulder researcher is being recognized by the Denver Zoo for her extensive work studying the pika across the Colorado alpine

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Digging in the Arctic mud for answers to climate change

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 22:28:24 +0000

Digging in the Arctic mud for answers to climate change Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/18/2017 - 16:28

Paleoclimatologist Sarah Crump, a PhD student and INSTARR researcher, studies the effects of climate variability in the Canadian Arctic by analyzing ancient DNA from lake sediment.

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CU Boulder launches cool certificate in Arctic studies

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 18:15:01 +0000

CU Boulder launches cool certificate in Arctic studies Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/05/2016 - 11:15

Jeff Thomas

There probably is not a more suitable location for one of the world’s only interdisciplinary certificates in Arctic studies than the University of Colorado Boulder.

Benjamin Teitelbaum

“In some ways we couldn’t afford not to do it,” said Assistant Professor Benjamin Teitelbaum, who will serve as the director of the certificate that will be administered by the College of Arts and Sciences’ International Affairs Program.

“We have a world-class research institutes like INSTAAR (the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research) and CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences), a program in International Affairs, a program in Nordic Studies, and the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies.”

“With all that already in place, there is relatively little new that is needed,” Teitelbaum said. Indeed, talks between International Affairs, INSTAAR and CIRES, which oversees the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), were initiated little more than a year ago.

“Part of the impetus to creating the certificate was our recognition of the growing geopolitical significance of the Arctic area in general,” said Teitelbaum, noting the growing potential for international conflict over natural resources as shipping lanes open.

In addition to International Affairs, INSTAAR and CIRES, the undergraduate certificate is also supported by the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Department of Geography, the Environmental Studies Program, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Ethnic Studies. Teitelbaum credited NSIDC Director Mark Serreze, a geography professor, and Tom Zeiler, director of international affairs, with really getting the ball rolling in early discussions.

“Of course, one of the most pressing issues is ice melt; where we see the effects of global warming taking place at a greater degree than elsewhere,” Teitelbaum said. “But we’ve designed this certificate to crisscross the boundaries between the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences.”

The program’s first offerings will begin in spring 2017 semester and are open to all CU undergraduates. The certificate requires the completion of six courses for a total of 18 credit hours.

“I think this is going to attract a wide range of students. �鶹��Ժ interested in geopolitics, or students interested in environmental studies or students interested in policy can all concentrate in areas they are familiar with, though we want to make inroads in showing people that the environment, politics and arts are all affected together.”

Credit hours are distributed in three categories: certificate core courses, environment and policy, and culture and society. The core courses include Geography 2271 - Introduction to Arctic Climate and Environment; Political Science 3206 - The Environment and Public Policy; and International Affairs 3631 - Arctic Society and Culture.

From the core courses, the program offers flexibility for undergraduate students to follow their own strengths—for instance, in choosing among science-, policy- or societal-driven studies. That’s important to Teitelbaum, who hopes that the program attracts a good cross-section of students who will also bring differentiated interests on board.

“I think this is going to attract a wide range of students,” he said. “�鶹��Ժ interested in geopolitics, or students interested in environmental studies or students interested in policy can all concentrate in areas they are familiar with, though we want to make inroads in showing people that the environment, politics and arts are all affected together.”

While perhaps the Inuit people in Alaska and Canada get at least some coverage by the American press, there is growing nationalism and conflict involving indigenous people in northern Europe, Russia and Siberia, as well. Teitelbaum's doctorate is in ethnomusicology, but his studies have extended into such areas as radical nationalism and neofascism in the Nordic countries, and he said that cultural offerings in the certificate will also explore modern culture and politics.

For more on the certificate in Arctic studies, click here.

There probably is not a more suitable location for one of the world’s first interdisciplinary certificates in Arctic studies than the University of Colorado Boulder.

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