After graduation Nicole Gordon (’02) got a one-year position as a writer/editor at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Her position has since turned into a longer-term gig so she’s still there, writing about atmospheric science for the public, other UCAR/NCAR employees and the media.
Chelsey Baker-Hauck (’00) is director of periodicals at the University of Denver and managing editor of the award-winning University of Denver Magazine. In 2002, Baker-Hauck received a silver Mercury Award for science writing from the International Academy of Communication Arts & Sciences, as well as bronze awards for profile and science writing from CASE Region VI. In January of this year, she received a gold award from CASE Region VI for science/technology/research writing. A highlight of the past year was interviewing U.S. Interior Secretary Gale Norton (despite the fact that the interview was whittled from 45 minutes to 20 minutes because Norton was caught in traffic). The resulting profile ran in the winter 2003-04 issue of the University of Denver Magazine. Read it at www.du.edu/dumagazine. Baker-Hauck is renovating a Victorian home in northwest Denver, where she lives with her husband, dog, six ferrets and a very grumpy iguana.
Janine (Wingard) Frank (’00) is working as a writer for Gaiam (www.gaiam.com), writing copy for their Web site and email campaigns. She writes: “I love the company I work for and feel as though I have the ideal job. I also had a baby last spring and now I work from home—it just doesn’t get much better than that!!”
Tuesday, November 2, 2004
Monday, November 1, 2004
Updates on Former Scripps Fellows
Grossman Earns Top Science Writing Honors
Dan Grossman’s radio documentary, The Penguin Barometer, won the American Institute of Biological Sciences’ Broadcast Media Award in February. The documentary, which was broadcast by Radio Netherlands in November 2003, describes how scientists around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about the effects of climate change on ecosystems. In announcing the award the judges called Grossman’s piece “outstanding for a wide range of data, non-cliched use of scene setting, use of humor, and a broad diverse voice.”
Grossman’s Web site on Antarctica, WBUR Journeys to Antarctica, won the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last November. Click here to read about Grossman’s recent exploits reporting on climate change from Antarctica and Greenland.
Bowles Honored for Work on Pollution Story
Jennifer Bowles and two of her colleagues at The Press-Enterprise of Riverside (Calif.) won second place this spring in the Associate Press News Executives Council’s annual contest for newswriting and photography. Winners were chosen from more than 1,000 entries from AP member newspapers in California and Nevada.
Bowles’ story, “As Regulators Watched, Pollution Seeped In,” detailed how chemicals from a rocket testing facility contaminated land that was set to become a housing development. It was published in 2003.
Dan Grossman’s radio documentary, The Penguin Barometer, won the American Institute of Biological Sciences’ Broadcast Media Award in February. The documentary, which was broadcast by Radio Netherlands in November 2003, describes how scientists around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about the effects of climate change on ecosystems. In announcing the award the judges called Grossman’s piece “outstanding for a wide range of data, non-cliched use of scene setting, use of humor, and a broad diverse voice.”
Grossman’s Web site on Antarctica, WBUR Journeys to Antarctica, won the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last November. Click here to read about Grossman’s recent exploits reporting on climate change from Antarctica and Greenland.
Bowles Honored for Work on Pollution Story
Jennifer Bowles and two of her colleagues at The Press-Enterprise of Riverside (Calif.) won second place this spring in the Associate Press News Executives Council’s annual contest for newswriting and photography. Winners were chosen from more than 1,000 entries from AP member newspapers in California and Nevada.
Bowles’ story, “As Regulators Watched, Pollution Seeped In,” detailed how chemicals from a rocket testing facility contaminated land that was set to become a housing development. It was published in 2003.
CEJ Welcomes the 2004-05 Ted Scripps Fellows
Five journalists arrived in Boulder in August to become the eighth class of Ted Scripps Fellows in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The fellowships are sponsored by the Center for Environmental Journalism and funded through a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. The nine-month program offers mid-career journalists an opportunity to deepen their understanding of environmental issues and policy through coursework, seminars and field trips in the region.
The new fellows will be ideally located for such studies, as Boulder Valley is home to more than 300 Ph.D.s working in the environmental sciences at CU and major federal laboratories nearby.
The new fellows are:
Sam Eaton, an independent radio producer and reporter from Seattle, Wash. He lived most recently in El Salvador where he produced a bilingual radio documentary for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project examines the condition of Central America and its people two decades after the civil strife that tore much of the region apart. Eaton also has reported on global trade issues from Central America for Minnesota Public Radio's “Marketplace.” Previously, he was a staff reporter for Marketplace in New York City and a staff reporter at KUOW, Seattle’s National Public Radio affiliate.
Rachel Odell, environmental reporter at The Bulletin in Bend, Ore., covers public lands management, air and water quality, fish and river restoration and recreation. Before joining The Bulletin in 2001, she covered the environment for the Jackson Hole News in Jackson, Wyo., and freelanced for High Country News.
Liz Ruskin is a Washington, D.C., correspondent for the Anchorage Daily News. She covers Alaska issues in the nation’s capital, including the debate over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and logging in the Tongass National Forest, among other energy, environment, appropriations and transportation topics. She previously worked for the Anchorage Daily News in Anchorage for nine years, after beginning her career at the Homer (Alaska) News.
Andrew Silva, environment and transportation reporter at The Sun in San Bernardino, Calif., has reported in-depth on water and air pollution, the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, desert ecology and the bark beetle crisis in the San Bernardino National Forest. Prior to joining the Sun’s staff, he covered government beats at newspapers in Palm Springs, Riverside and Anaheim, Calif.
Nadia White, state editor at the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming, oversees development of statewide news through bureaus across the state. Her daily stories include a slate of environmental topics from oil, gas and coal production on public lands to a multitude of wildlife and habitat issues. White’s own work has focused on brucellosis, a livestock disease with enormous impacts on bison and elk in Yellowstone National Park. She traveled to Kazakhstan in 2003 to report on the disease in a comparative context with Wyoming.
Since 1997, the Scripps Howard Foundation has provided annual grants for its fellowships at CU-Boulder, named for Ted Scripps, grandson of the founder of the E.W. Scripps Co. Ted Scripps distinguished himself as a journalist who cared about First Amendment rights and the environment.
The fellowships are sponsored by the Center for Environmental Journalism and funded through a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation. The nine-month program offers mid-career journalists an opportunity to deepen their understanding of environmental issues and policy through coursework, seminars and field trips in the region.
The new fellows will be ideally located for such studies, as Boulder Valley is home to more than 300 Ph.D.s working in the environmental sciences at CU and major federal laboratories nearby.
 |
| The 2004-05 Scripps Fellows pause on campus for a photo with Robert Frost. |
The new fellows are:
Sam Eaton, an independent radio producer and reporter from Seattle, Wash. He lived most recently in El Salvador where he produced a bilingual radio documentary for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project examines the condition of Central America and its people two decades after the civil strife that tore much of the region apart. Eaton also has reported on global trade issues from Central America for Minnesota Public Radio's “Marketplace.” Previously, he was a staff reporter for Marketplace in New York City and a staff reporter at KUOW, Seattle’s National Public Radio affiliate.
Rachel Odell, environmental reporter at The Bulletin in Bend, Ore., covers public lands management, air and water quality, fish and river restoration and recreation. Before joining The Bulletin in 2001, she covered the environment for the Jackson Hole News in Jackson, Wyo., and freelanced for High Country News.
Liz Ruskin is a Washington, D.C., correspondent for the Anchorage Daily News. She covers Alaska issues in the nation’s capital, including the debate over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and logging in the Tongass National Forest, among other energy, environment, appropriations and transportation topics. She previously worked for the Anchorage Daily News in Anchorage for nine years, after beginning her career at the Homer (Alaska) News.
Andrew Silva, environment and transportation reporter at The Sun in San Bernardino, Calif., has reported in-depth on water and air pollution, the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, desert ecology and the bark beetle crisis in the San Bernardino National Forest. Prior to joining the Sun’s staff, he covered government beats at newspapers in Palm Springs, Riverside and Anaheim, Calif.
Nadia White, state editor at the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming, oversees development of statewide news through bureaus across the state. Her daily stories include a slate of environmental topics from oil, gas and coal production on public lands to a multitude of wildlife and habitat issues. White’s own work has focused on brucellosis, a livestock disease with enormous impacts on bison and elk in Yellowstone National Park. She traveled to Kazakhstan in 2003 to report on the disease in a comparative context with Wyoming.
Since 1997, the Scripps Howard Foundation has provided annual grants for its fellowships at CU-Boulder, named for Ted Scripps, grandson of the founder of the E.W. Scripps Co. Ted Scripps distinguished himself as a journalist who cared about First Amendment rights and the environment.
Journalists Help Tackle Climate Change Conundrum
By Emily Cooper
In a sunny conference room, seated along two long tables scattered with papers, soda cans and reading glasses, the Senate Committee on Climate Change and a panel of global warming experts face off. Legislators chat, rustle papers and mill around as each panelist in turn raises his or her voice to be heard above the fray.
At one end of the room, a television cameraman records the proceedings. At the other end, three more journalists listen intently to the people at both tables.
The scene looks real enough at first, but then the subtle details sink in. Nalgene water bottles outnumber soda cans on the cluttered tables. The television camera is a handheld video camera. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., wears a heart-shaped badge with the words “Big Oil” written on it. And Inhofe is…a woman?
The mock congressional testimony on Feb. 26 was staged by members of the Carbon, Climate and Society Initiative, a National Science Foundation-funded fellowship program that throws together 13 University of Colorado students pursuing graduate degrees in the natural sciences, social sciences and journalism. The goal of the initiative is to help the fellows learn—and teach each other—about climate change science, policy and communication.
Alan Townsend, a biologist and CU professor who is one of the two directors of the initiative, said that although there are a number of climate change-related programs that combine the natural and social sciences, CU’s fellowship is the only one he has heard of that includes journalists as well.
He recalled how he and CCSI Co-Director Jim White, a geochemist and CU professor, first worked out the details of the grant application over beers at a Mexican restaurant. He said they decided they needed to expand their thinking beyond the natural sciences, incorporating social sciences and policy as well. Then the truly novel idea came.
“We remembered that there’s this really good Center for Environmental Journalism here, and that that’s really the conduit to the people,” Townsend said. “We weren’t sure at the time how we would incorporate it, but we just thought it would make a lot of sense to at least explore the possibility.”
Townsend and White approached CEJ Co-Director Tom Yulsman for help. When they submitted their grant application to the National Science Foundation in 1999, incorporating journalists had become part of the plan. NSF awarded them a five-year grant, enough to cover an initial planning year followed by two two-year fellowship cycles. The grant began in the fall of 2000; the fellows in the program now are the second group to participate.
For Hillary Rosner and Amanda Haag, the two journalists in the group, the climate initiative was an excellent fit. Rosner had been a journalist for almost 10 years, first on staff at the New York Post and The Village Voice, then later as a freelancer. Much of her writing had focused on the technology boom and the Internet, but she found herself wanting to write more about things that mattered to her—in particular, the environment.
“I wanted to go back to school really badly, to get a kind of base in environmental studies,” Rosner said, “but I just didn’t want to walk too far away from the rest of it [freelancing and journalism].”
Haag came to the fellowship from the opposite direction. She had been working for several years as a biologist in California, and had even spent two field seasons doing research in Antarctica. But eventually she decided she wanted to get out of the lab and move towards writing, as a way to communicate about science to the general public.
She applied mostly to graduate programs that focused on science writing. CU’s program was a “long-shot” because it was a journalism program with an environment (not science) emphasis.
“At that time I was really struggling with the issue of totally walking away from science,” Haag said.
For both Haag and Rosner, the climate initiative helped tie their interests together.
But the fellowship is no small commitment. Fellows meet weekly for a three-hour class, which sometimes includes guest lectures by climate change experts. Townsend and White led the classes last year during the first semester, arranging speakers and giving lectures to help bring the fellows up to speed on the science and policy issues surrounding climate change.
Since then, the group has become more involved in the direction of the meetings. In addition to hosting three mock congressional hearings last spring, they also broke into groups to research the political, cultural and business backgrounds of the U.S., China, Brazil, Indonesia and the European Union, with the goal of figuring out how an international climate change policy might take all countries’ situations into account.
And unlike many university classes, the fellows’ work is more than just theoretical. This year they’ll be pulling together everything they’ve learned to complete their final project: a new curriculum for an undergraduate-level course on climate change. The course will take an interdisciplinary and global look at climate change, with the goal of encouraging students to draw their own conclusions about the problems and their solutions. Some fellows may even get to try their hand at teaching parts of the course, which is slated to be offered beginning next fall.
Haag acknowledged the issues around climate change are complex, and there are no easy answers.
“There’s not going to be some eureka moment when you’re like, ‘That’s it!’” she said.
But if the fellows’ experience is any indication, people from many different academic backgrounds can learn to work together.
“We thought this would be hard, and I think we’ve learned it’s harder than we thought,” Townsend, the co-director, said.
But it’s also encouraging.
“The basic idea can work,” he said. “People can start to learn across those boundaries and talk to each other effectively, and I think that’s starting to happen.”
Thanks to the hard work of the fellows and their faculty advisors, undergraduates at CU will soon have the chance do the same.
In a sunny conference room, seated along two long tables scattered with papers, soda cans and reading glasses, the Senate Committee on Climate Change and a panel of global warming experts face off. Legislators chat, rustle papers and mill around as each panelist in turn raises his or her voice to be heard above the fray.
At one end of the room, a television cameraman records the proceedings. At the other end, three more journalists listen intently to the people at both tables.
The scene looks real enough at first, but then the subtle details sink in. Nalgene water bottles outnumber soda cans on the cluttered tables. The television camera is a handheld video camera. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., wears a heart-shaped badge with the words “Big Oil” written on it. And Inhofe is…a woman?
 |
| Sen. Inhofe (aka Rosner) listens to a colleague and waits patiently for lunch. |
The mock congressional testimony on Feb. 26 was staged by members of the Carbon, Climate and Society Initiative, a National Science Foundation-funded fellowship program that throws together 13 University of Colorado students pursuing graduate degrees in the natural sciences, social sciences and journalism. The goal of the initiative is to help the fellows learn—and teach each other—about climate change science, policy and communication.
Alan Townsend, a biologist and CU professor who is one of the two directors of the initiative, said that although there are a number of climate change-related programs that combine the natural and social sciences, CU’s fellowship is the only one he has heard of that includes journalists as well.
He recalled how he and CCSI Co-Director Jim White, a geochemist and CU professor, first worked out the details of the grant application over beers at a Mexican restaurant. He said they decided they needed to expand their thinking beyond the natural sciences, incorporating social sciences and policy as well. Then the truly novel idea came.
“We remembered that there’s this really good Center for Environmental Journalism here, and that that’s really the conduit to the people,” Townsend said. “We weren’t sure at the time how we would incorporate it, but we just thought it would make a lot of sense to at least explore the possibility.”
 |
| Sen. Buck White of Montana (aka Townsend) questions a member of the panel about carbon sequestration. |
Townsend and White approached CEJ Co-Director Tom Yulsman for help. When they submitted their grant application to the National Science Foundation in 1999, incorporating journalists had become part of the plan. NSF awarded them a five-year grant, enough to cover an initial planning year followed by two two-year fellowship cycles. The grant began in the fall of 2000; the fellows in the program now are the second group to participate.
For Hillary Rosner and Amanda Haag, the two journalists in the group, the climate initiative was an excellent fit. Rosner had been a journalist for almost 10 years, first on staff at the New York Post and The Village Voice, then later as a freelancer. Much of her writing had focused on the technology boom and the Internet, but she found herself wanting to write more about things that mattered to her—in particular, the environment.
“I wanted to go back to school really badly, to get a kind of base in environmental studies,” Rosner said, “but I just didn’t want to walk too far away from the rest of it [freelancing and journalism].”
 |
| The press corps (with Haag in the center) listens dispassionately to the procedings. |
Haag came to the fellowship from the opposite direction. She had been working for several years as a biologist in California, and had even spent two field seasons doing research in Antarctica. But eventually she decided she wanted to get out of the lab and move towards writing, as a way to communicate about science to the general public.
She applied mostly to graduate programs that focused on science writing. CU’s program was a “long-shot” because it was a journalism program with an environment (not science) emphasis.
“At that time I was really struggling with the issue of totally walking away from science,” Haag said.
For both Haag and Rosner, the climate initiative helped tie their interests together.
But the fellowship is no small commitment. Fellows meet weekly for a three-hour class, which sometimes includes guest lectures by climate change experts. Townsend and White led the classes last year during the first semester, arranging speakers and giving lectures to help bring the fellows up to speed on the science and policy issues surrounding climate change.
Since then, the group has become more involved in the direction of the meetings. In addition to hosting three mock congressional hearings last spring, they also broke into groups to research the political, cultural and business backgrounds of the U.S., China, Brazil, Indonesia and the European Union, with the goal of figuring out how an international climate change policy might take all countries’ situations into account.
And unlike many university classes, the fellows’ work is more than just theoretical. This year they’ll be pulling together everything they’ve learned to complete their final project: a new curriculum for an undergraduate-level course on climate change. The course will take an interdisciplinary and global look at climate change, with the goal of encouraging students to draw their own conclusions about the problems and their solutions. Some fellows may even get to try their hand at teaching parts of the course, which is slated to be offered beginning next fall.
Haag acknowledged the issues around climate change are complex, and there are no easy answers.
“There’s not going to be some eureka moment when you’re like, ‘That’s it!’” she said.
But if the fellows’ experience is any indication, people from many different academic backgrounds can learn to work together.
“We thought this would be hard, and I think we’ve learned it’s harder than we thought,” Townsend, the co-director, said.
But it’s also encouraging.
“The basic idea can work,” he said. “People can start to learn across those boundaries and talk to each other effectively, and I think that’s starting to happen.”
Thanks to the hard work of the fellows and their faculty advisors, undergraduates at CU will soon have the chance do the same.
Ancient Ice May Be Key to Understanding Modern Climate Change
By Wendy Worrall Redal
When Ted Scripps Fellows come to Colorado to study, they don’t typically expect to be surrounded by polar ice in 40-below temperatures, even in January.
But such was the case when fellows visited the National Ice Core Laboratory in Lakewood, Colo., on a program field trip. Here, though, the ice was locked inside thousands of thin silver cylinders in a freezer unit within the vast suburban complex that is the Denver Federal Center. Inside each cylinder are data that provide scientists with records of ancient climate patterns.
The freezer is at the center of the National Ice Core Laboratory, a facility for storing, curating and studying ice cores recovered from the polar ice sheets and high mountain glaciers of the world. The lab is jointly operated funded by the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Science Foundation.
Its purpose is to get information about the climate history of the Earth, obtained by studying the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere over time. Through analyzing gases in air bubbles trapped in the layers of compressed ice, scientists can reconstruct past climate states of the Earth, including temperature changes over millennia.
The lab’s technical director, Todd Hinkley, explained that studying past climate fluctuations can help scientists better understand the factors that prompt such shifts and potentially help them predict future climate change.
Ice core samples are more thorough than other means of assessing climate history, including tree rings, coral and sediments from the ocean floor. The lab’s web site explains that “an ice core from the right site can contain an uninterrupted, detailed climate record extending back hundreds of thousands of years. This record can include temperature, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity and a variety of other climate indicators. It is the simultaneity of these properties recorded in the ice that makes ice cores such a powerful tool in paleoclimate research.”
Geoff Hargreaves, the lab’s curator, served as the fellows’ tour guide through the lab. Sporting a ponytail that reaches to the middle of his back and a long, wavy gray beard, Hargreaves looks like a modern-day biblical patriarch. The facial hair comes in handy, he acknowledged, when every bit of extra warmth is welcome for someone who spends as much time as he does in sub-zero temperatures.
Hargreaves helped fellows don heavy parkas for their foray into the freezer, stacked to the ceiling with shelves of cylinders containing the unique collection that Hargreaves oversees. Once inside, his beard hairs were quickly coated in white frost as he explained how the ice core samples made their way from the Earth’s most remote regions to the Lakewood warehouse.
Polar core samples are obtained from Antarctica and Greenland, drilled from deep sheets of ancient ice that has never melted. Greenland samples offer 1/4 million years of data, while Antarctic cores reveal at least 1/2 million years of information and the ability to extrapolate much farther back.
The oldest site is Vostok in Antarctica, where cores have been drilled to a depth of 3,623 meters, or 2 1/4 miles. Beneath the Vostok ice sheet lies a 1,000-meter-deep ancient lake the size of Lake Ontario, created when the weight of the ice above exerted pressure so strong that the friction melted the lowest layers.
The lab, which is the most comprehensive storage facility of its kind in the world, has more than 14,000 meters of ice available for scientists to examine. The cores, which are 3 to 5.2 inches in diameter, are obtained via a lengthy and expensive drilling process. Gas bubbles do not begin to form until the ice is 60 to 100 meters deep, and it can take three to four years to drill a very deep core at a cost of $20,000 per meter, according to Hargreaves. The deepest cores have been drilled to bedrock.
Antarctica’s severe climate allows drilling only during the southern summer from October through January. The last flight out is at the end of February, when the ice cores are loaded onto a ship bound northward.
Preserving them until they reach Colorado is an involved process. The cores are cut into 1-meter pieces, sealed in plastic bags labeled liberally with arrows to note the “up end,” put into silver tubes to reflect heat-inducing light, then placed into insulated shipping containers and stored under the snowpack until it’s time to transport them. The ice must remain at -15º C or colder once it is out of the ground or the gases within will begin to migrate.
The containers are flown aboard a ski-equipped LC130 airplane to McMurdo Station by a frigid pilot who must fly without heat in order to keep the ice cold enough. There, it is loaded into a freezer on board ship and brought to Port Hueneme, Calif., where it is moved onto freezer trucks and taken to the National Ice Core Lab in Lakewood. Each truck is accompanied by an empty truck that is kept cold, in order to transfer the ice in case of an accident or breakdown. Hargreaves explained that it’s cheaper to pay $2,000 for an extra truck than to lose a single meter of ice, which costs $3,000-$20,000 per meter to obtain.
Once the ice cores are safely ensconced in the lab’s freezer, they are available for scientists to study, either at the lab or another research site. Pieces of ice are sent out in vacuum-insulated boxes that keep the ice at -20º C for a week, in any ambient temperature.
Researchers may examine the ice in solid condition or melt it in order to do core gas analysis. In any case, they receive only a piece of the core sample, not the whole diameter, in order to leave a good portion of it as archive. An archive of the entire Vostok core is kept at the lab, Hargreaves said, since it is the coldest and safest repository in the world.
Paleoclimatologists such as Jim White, a University of Colorado geology professor and scientist with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, rely upon core samples from the National Ice Core Lab to further their knowledge of what causes climatic shifts. White spoke to the Ted Scripps Fellows about his research during a seminar leading up to the fellows’ visit to the lab.
White is particularly interested in rapid climate change. The evidence he has uncovered suggests that temperature fluctuations sometimes occur as abrupt spikes, rather than gradual trends.
White’s research team has studied ice samples from the Siple Dome core in Antarctica to deduce that air temperatures there rose up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few decades as the last ice age began to wane some 19,000 years ago, the largest and most abrupt warming spike ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.
The timing of the warming correlates with an abrupt sea-level rise documented by researchers at Australian National University and with less dramatic warming increases seen in the Byrd and Vostok ice cores from Antarctica.
“The signal we see in the Siple Dome core is so strong, we can speculate it may have been the trigger area for the end of the glacial period,” White said. Because of its coastal location, Siple Dome would have been climatically sensitive to events like partial collapses of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would have caused seas to rise globally.
Understanding events like these can help climatologists get a better grasp on the matrix of forces that influence climate change, especially as they seek to discern the more recent role of human beings in global warming. The ancient ice samples stored at the national Ice Core Laboratory are providing some of the keys to unlock those complex mysteries.
When Ted Scripps Fellows come to Colorado to study, they don’t typically expect to be surrounded by polar ice in 40-below temperatures, even in January.
But such was the case when fellows visited the National Ice Core Laboratory in Lakewood, Colo., on a program field trip. Here, though, the ice was locked inside thousands of thin silver cylinders in a freezer unit within the vast suburban complex that is the Denver Federal Center. Inside each cylinder are data that provide scientists with records of ancient climate patterns.
 |
| Scripps Fellows & CEJ staff shiver inside the ice freezer. (Photo/John Kotlowski) |
The freezer is at the center of the National Ice Core Laboratory, a facility for storing, curating and studying ice cores recovered from the polar ice sheets and high mountain glaciers of the world. The lab is jointly operated funded by the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Science Foundation.
Its purpose is to get information about the climate history of the Earth, obtained by studying the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere over time. Through analyzing gases in air bubbles trapped in the layers of compressed ice, scientists can reconstruct past climate states of the Earth, including temperature changes over millennia.
The lab’s technical director, Todd Hinkley, explained that studying past climate fluctuations can help scientists better understand the factors that prompt such shifts and potentially help them predict future climate change.
Ice core samples are more thorough than other means of assessing climate history, including tree rings, coral and sediments from the ocean floor. The lab’s web site explains that “an ice core from the right site can contain an uninterrupted, detailed climate record extending back hundreds of thousands of years. This record can include temperature, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity and a variety of other climate indicators. It is the simultaneity of these properties recorded in the ice that makes ice cores such a powerful tool in paleoclimate research.”
Geoff Hargreaves, the lab’s curator, served as the fellows’ tour guide through the lab. Sporting a ponytail that reaches to the middle of his back and a long, wavy gray beard, Hargreaves looks like a modern-day biblical patriarch. The facial hair comes in handy, he acknowledged, when every bit of extra warmth is welcome for someone who spends as much time as he does in sub-zero temperatures.
 |
| National Ice Core Lab curator Geoff Hargreaves sports a rime-coated beard. (Photo/John Kotlowski) |
Hargreaves helped fellows don heavy parkas for their foray into the freezer, stacked to the ceiling with shelves of cylinders containing the unique collection that Hargreaves oversees. Once inside, his beard hairs were quickly coated in white frost as he explained how the ice core samples made their way from the Earth’s most remote regions to the Lakewood warehouse.
Polar core samples are obtained from Antarctica and Greenland, drilled from deep sheets of ancient ice that has never melted. Greenland samples offer 1/4 million years of data, while Antarctic cores reveal at least 1/2 million years of information and the ability to extrapolate much farther back.
The oldest site is Vostok in Antarctica, where cores have been drilled to a depth of 3,623 meters, or 2 1/4 miles. Beneath the Vostok ice sheet lies a 1,000-meter-deep ancient lake the size of Lake Ontario, created when the weight of the ice above exerted pressure so strong that the friction melted the lowest layers.
The lab, which is the most comprehensive storage facility of its kind in the world, has more than 14,000 meters of ice available for scientists to examine. The cores, which are 3 to 5.2 inches in diameter, are obtained via a lengthy and expensive drilling process. Gas bubbles do not begin to form until the ice is 60 to 100 meters deep, and it can take three to four years to drill a very deep core at a cost of $20,000 per meter, according to Hargreaves. The deepest cores have been drilled to bedrock.
Antarctica’s severe climate allows drilling only during the southern summer from October through January. The last flight out is at the end of February, when the ice cores are loaded onto a ship bound northward.
Preserving them until they reach Colorado is an involved process. The cores are cut into 1-meter pieces, sealed in plastic bags labeled liberally with arrows to note the “up end,” put into silver tubes to reflect heat-inducing light, then placed into insulated shipping containers and stored under the snowpack until it’s time to transport them. The ice must remain at -15º C or colder once it is out of the ground or the gases within will begin to migrate.
The containers are flown aboard a ski-equipped LC130 airplane to McMurdo Station by a frigid pilot who must fly without heat in order to keep the ice cold enough. There, it is loaded into a freezer on board ship and brought to Port Hueneme, Calif., where it is moved onto freezer trucks and taken to the National Ice Core Lab in Lakewood. Each truck is accompanied by an empty truck that is kept cold, in order to transfer the ice in case of an accident or breakdown. Hargreaves explained that it’s cheaper to pay $2,000 for an extra truck than to lose a single meter of ice, which costs $3,000-$20,000 per meter to obtain.
Once the ice cores are safely ensconced in the lab’s freezer, they are available for scientists to study, either at the lab or another research site. Pieces of ice are sent out in vacuum-insulated boxes that keep the ice at -20º C for a week, in any ambient temperature.
Researchers may examine the ice in solid condition or melt it in order to do core gas analysis. In any case, they receive only a piece of the core sample, not the whole diameter, in order to leave a good portion of it as archive. An archive of the entire Vostok core is kept at the lab, Hargreaves said, since it is the coldest and safest repository in the world.
Paleoclimatologists such as Jim White, a University of Colorado geology professor and scientist with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, rely upon core samples from the National Ice Core Lab to further their knowledge of what causes climatic shifts. White spoke to the Ted Scripps Fellows about his research during a seminar leading up to the fellows’ visit to the lab.
White is particularly interested in rapid climate change. The evidence he has uncovered suggests that temperature fluctuations sometimes occur as abrupt spikes, rather than gradual trends.
White’s research team has studied ice samples from the Siple Dome core in Antarctica to deduce that air temperatures there rose up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few decades as the last ice age began to wane some 19,000 years ago, the largest and most abrupt warming spike ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.
The timing of the warming correlates with an abrupt sea-level rise documented by researchers at Australian National University and with less dramatic warming increases seen in the Byrd and Vostok ice cores from Antarctica.
“The signal we see in the Siple Dome core is so strong, we can speculate it may have been the trigger area for the end of the glacial period,” White said. Because of its coastal location, Siple Dome would have been climatically sensitive to events like partial collapses of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would have caused seas to rise globally.
Understanding events like these can help climatologists get a better grasp on the matrix of forces that influence climate change, especially as they seek to discern the more recent role of human beings in global warming. The ancient ice samples stored at the national Ice Core Laboratory are providing some of the keys to unlock those complex mysteries.
Interior Secretaries Reflect on Legacies During CU Series
By Wendy Worrall Redal
James Watt.
The name alone is enough to evoke a visceral response among seasoned environmentalists. They remember Watt as the abrasive Reagan-era Interior Secretary in the early 1980s, bent on opening vast tracts of Western public lands for extractive use and returning their control to the states.
Yet one Watt successor, a Democrat deeply at odds with Watt’s arch-conservative agenda, says he is “positively nostalgic” for the Watt years when compared to the environmental record of the current Bush Administration.
Bruce Babbitt, the centrist Arizona governor who headed Interior under President Clinton from 1993-2001, told a University of Colorado audience on April 20th that Watt “awakened the American people to the need to talk back.”
Despite Watt’s tough rhetoric, though, “not a lot changed,” said Babbitt. “This administration is exactly the opposite. It’s not being done in a frontal fashion but in an incremental way, chipping, chipping, chipping…through technicalities, jargon, minutiae.”
Babbitt cited marginal changes in the Clean Water Act, for example, that are gradually eroding it while at the same time the administration issues press releases touting “improved administration of the Clean Water Act.” Along with Bush’s “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” initiatives, the environment is being damaged through “incredibly subtle means” that are presented in terms that mask the real intent of regulatory changes, according to Babbitt.
Both Babbitt and Watt visited the Boulder campus as part of the “Inside Interior” series hosted by CU’s Center of the American West and The Nature Conservancy. The series features interviews with former Secretaries of the Interior, whose philosophies and policies have been integral in shaping the face of public lands in the West.
Watt met with the Ted Scripps Fellows, Center for Environmental Journalism staff and graduate students on Jan. 10. He took issue with the way his administration has been characterized, contending that a hostile Washington press corps had not told the truth about his accomplishments.
“If I believed what the press said about Jim Watt, I’d hate him,” he said. Yet he claimed that “in every environmental arena the lands are being better managed” since he was in office. “We’re seeing the restoration of air, land and water values” that are in harmony with human needs.
Watt said he and President Reagan were “conservationists” in the “classic school of [former Forest Service head] Gifford Pinchot.” He defined conservation as “the proper use of the resources for the benefit of the people” both now and in the future. Watt contrasted that approach with the “new philosophy of preservation,” one he thinks tilts the balance too far away from people and their needs. When he took office after a decade of major environmental legislation moves, Watt said that balance was far askew.
“The essence of Western Civilization is that man has dignity above all,” according to Watt. It is that basic tenet, he said, which underlies his approach to environmental issues.
“I would be willing to flood a canyon in the Rocky Mountains so that you would have water in Boulder to drink, even if it killed some animals and destroyed some land,” he said.
He agreed that conservation efforts might ward off the necessity of such tradeoffs, but said they need to be “prompted through market-driven initiatives,” not coercive measures.
“The way to get people to conserve water is to get rid of the subsidies. Kentucky bluegrass in the desert is there because water is cheap,” Watt said.
Secretary Babbitt, on the other hand, argued for the importance of legal and administrative means to ensure environmental protection.
“You have to have a legislative stick to get anywhere,” Babbitt said. “Once you have the power, the legal authority, it’s then imperative…to work to reconcile competing interests in the best way that’s compatible with the legal objective we’re here to enforce.”
Bringing disparate voices together to talk about how to achieve objectives is essential for political success, according to Babbitt. He took such an approach to the Northwest Forest Plan, Clinton’s mandate to create a scientifically driven ecosystem plan to protect 200 species on public lands. To do that, Babbitt said, he insisted that jurisdictional boundaries and agency badges were “left at the door” when it came time to engage in joint planning.
On occasion, however, Babbitt encouraged the protection of special tracts of land through administrative fiat. A vivid example was the creation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, achieved through Clinton’s use of the 1906 Antiquities Act. A provision in the act grants the President the right to declare as national monuments “objects of historic or scientific interest” on federal lands.
Grand Staircase was really “a product of Dick Morris,” Babbitt revealed, the dramatic environmental initiative that the Clinton pollster said would make a big political impact. While Babbitt said “congressional legislation is vastly preferential to a presidential decree,” he acknowledged the practical value of the “creative forcing” possible through his close relationship with the president.
By Clinton’s second term, Babbitt saw that the way forward on environmental issues was to appeal to the president’s desire for a legacy. At one point he showed Clinton a tally between himself and Theodore Roosevelt comparing their records on acreage set aside for preservation.
“I put their names side by side on a card,” Babbitt recalled, suggesting to Clinton that he could outdo his storied predecessor when it came to protecting land for parks and monuments.
“That was the moment,” Babbitt said. “It was not environment, it was legacy…From that point on I had a mandate.”
It was a mandate in sync with Babbitt’s own sense of a legacy for the American people, one dedicated to “preserving ecosystems [and] protecting creation in all its glory.”
“Multiple use is not the right image for public lands,” he told a receptive audience. Currently, Babbitt said, “the primary purpose of public lands is to drill for oil and gas everywhere. It’s an outrage.
“We can’t drill our way out of this cul-de-sac,” he said, arguing that it was not worth ruining the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the Colorado Plateau “for a few more weeks” of energy use. Longer-term approaches to energy are essential for a sustainable future, according to Babbitt.
“Climate change is the most ominous environmental threat we face in this century…We have to take dramatic steps to get off of fossil fuels,” he said. He contended that the U.S. must look to nuclear power to “bridge across to a future of renewable energy.”
The only alternative would be to cut our energy use by 75 percent, Babbitt said, “and that isn’t going to happen.” In terms of hard choices, “coal emissions vastly outweigh nuclear risks” in terms of environmental hazards, in his view.
But Babbitt worries the American people aren’t concerned enough about the problem of global warming to make the tough decisions required. He commended the public on mobilizing well in crises, but “short of a galvanizing crisis we’re a society of happy complacency,” a condition that isn’t well suited for responding to “slowly emerging problems like global warming.”
If we continue to do nothing, however, Babbitt suggested a vision of the near future: “There will be no glaciers left in Glacier Park in my lifetime. The Arctic will be a bluewater ocean.” When the snow pack in the Rockies disappears and there is no more “timed sequential release” into reservoirs, “it will be chaos in the watershed of the Colorado River,” and “the Colorado ski industry will have to move to Montana.
“And we can’t even muster our elected leaders to do anything about automobile efficiency,” Babbitt said with a note of despair. “Overnight we could double our fuel economy to 40 miles per gallon and cut our fossil fuel use in half…but our political system is unresponsive.”
Yet he is not without optimism. He spoke of the success of the wolf reinroduction program in Yellowstone, launched in 1995 while he was Secretary. It showed that restoring ecosystems was possible, he said.
In a region where the elk population was “out of control, the wolves just electrified the place,” said Babbitt, who also noted that riparian systems have come back, and beaver and aspen are flourishing.
The wolf, to Babbitt, is “the elegant bearer of a message I want to be heard in the West — of dominant public servitude of public lands.”
For Babbitt, protecting threatened ecosystems is paramount. “The wolf is saying, ‘I have the first right to be here.’ Ranchers will have to learn to make sacrifices.”
Two secretaries, two eras: much historical perspective.
The current Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, is expected to conclude the interview series sometime this fall. The date and time are yet to be announced but will be noted on the Center of the American West’s web site, www.centerwest.org, when they are set.
For transcripts of the previous secretaries’ CU-Boulder talks, go to www.headwatersnews.org/interior.html
James Watt.
The name alone is enough to evoke a visceral response among seasoned environmentalists. They remember Watt as the abrasive Reagan-era Interior Secretary in the early 1980s, bent on opening vast tracts of Western public lands for extractive use and returning their control to the states.
 |
| James Watt, Interior Secretary from 1980 to 1983 under President Reagan. (Photo courtesy of Center of the American West) |
Yet one Watt successor, a Democrat deeply at odds with Watt’s arch-conservative agenda, says he is “positively nostalgic” for the Watt years when compared to the environmental record of the current Bush Administration.
Bruce Babbitt, the centrist Arizona governor who headed Interior under President Clinton from 1993-2001, told a University of Colorado audience on April 20th that Watt “awakened the American people to the need to talk back.”
Despite Watt’s tough rhetoric, though, “not a lot changed,” said Babbitt. “This administration is exactly the opposite. It’s not being done in a frontal fashion but in an incremental way, chipping, chipping, chipping…through technicalities, jargon, minutiae.”
 |
| Bruce Babbitt, President Clinton's Interior Secretary from 1993 to 2001. (Photo/Center of the American West) |
Babbitt cited marginal changes in the Clean Water Act, for example, that are gradually eroding it while at the same time the administration issues press releases touting “improved administration of the Clean Water Act.” Along with Bush’s “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” initiatives, the environment is being damaged through “incredibly subtle means” that are presented in terms that mask the real intent of regulatory changes, according to Babbitt.
Both Babbitt and Watt visited the Boulder campus as part of the “Inside Interior” series hosted by CU’s Center of the American West and The Nature Conservancy. The series features interviews with former Secretaries of the Interior, whose philosophies and policies have been integral in shaping the face of public lands in the West.
Watt met with the Ted Scripps Fellows, Center for Environmental Journalism staff and graduate students on Jan. 10. He took issue with the way his administration has been characterized, contending that a hostile Washington press corps had not told the truth about his accomplishments.
“If I believed what the press said about Jim Watt, I’d hate him,” he said. Yet he claimed that “in every environmental arena the lands are being better managed” since he was in office. “We’re seeing the restoration of air, land and water values” that are in harmony with human needs.
Watt said he and President Reagan were “conservationists” in the “classic school of [former Forest Service head] Gifford Pinchot.” He defined conservation as “the proper use of the resources for the benefit of the people” both now and in the future. Watt contrasted that approach with the “new philosophy of preservation,” one he thinks tilts the balance too far away from people and their needs. When he took office after a decade of major environmental legislation moves, Watt said that balance was far askew.
“The essence of Western Civilization is that man has dignity above all,” according to Watt. It is that basic tenet, he said, which underlies his approach to environmental issues.
“I would be willing to flood a canyon in the Rocky Mountains so that you would have water in Boulder to drink, even if it killed some animals and destroyed some land,” he said.
He agreed that conservation efforts might ward off the necessity of such tradeoffs, but said they need to be “prompted through market-driven initiatives,” not coercive measures.
“The way to get people to conserve water is to get rid of the subsidies. Kentucky bluegrass in the desert is there because water is cheap,” Watt said.
Secretary Babbitt, on the other hand, argued for the importance of legal and administrative means to ensure environmental protection.
“You have to have a legislative stick to get anywhere,” Babbitt said. “Once you have the power, the legal authority, it’s then imperative…to work to reconcile competing interests in the best way that’s compatible with the legal objective we’re here to enforce.”
Bringing disparate voices together to talk about how to achieve objectives is essential for political success, according to Babbitt. He took such an approach to the Northwest Forest Plan, Clinton’s mandate to create a scientifically driven ecosystem plan to protect 200 species on public lands. To do that, Babbitt said, he insisted that jurisdictional boundaries and agency badges were “left at the door” when it came time to engage in joint planning.
On occasion, however, Babbitt encouraged the protection of special tracts of land through administrative fiat. A vivid example was the creation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, achieved through Clinton’s use of the 1906 Antiquities Act. A provision in the act grants the President the right to declare as national monuments “objects of historic or scientific interest” on federal lands.
Grand Staircase was really “a product of Dick Morris,” Babbitt revealed, the dramatic environmental initiative that the Clinton pollster said would make a big political impact. While Babbitt said “congressional legislation is vastly preferential to a presidential decree,” he acknowledged the practical value of the “creative forcing” possible through his close relationship with the president.
By Clinton’s second term, Babbitt saw that the way forward on environmental issues was to appeal to the president’s desire for a legacy. At one point he showed Clinton a tally between himself and Theodore Roosevelt comparing their records on acreage set aside for preservation.
“I put their names side by side on a card,” Babbitt recalled, suggesting to Clinton that he could outdo his storied predecessor when it came to protecting land for parks and monuments.
“That was the moment,” Babbitt said. “It was not environment, it was legacy…From that point on I had a mandate.”
It was a mandate in sync with Babbitt’s own sense of a legacy for the American people, one dedicated to “preserving ecosystems [and] protecting creation in all its glory.”
“Multiple use is not the right image for public lands,” he told a receptive audience. Currently, Babbitt said, “the primary purpose of public lands is to drill for oil and gas everywhere. It’s an outrage.
“We can’t drill our way out of this cul-de-sac,” he said, arguing that it was not worth ruining the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the Colorado Plateau “for a few more weeks” of energy use. Longer-term approaches to energy are essential for a sustainable future, according to Babbitt.
“Climate change is the most ominous environmental threat we face in this century…We have to take dramatic steps to get off of fossil fuels,” he said. He contended that the U.S. must look to nuclear power to “bridge across to a future of renewable energy.”
The only alternative would be to cut our energy use by 75 percent, Babbitt said, “and that isn’t going to happen.” In terms of hard choices, “coal emissions vastly outweigh nuclear risks” in terms of environmental hazards, in his view.
But Babbitt worries the American people aren’t concerned enough about the problem of global warming to make the tough decisions required. He commended the public on mobilizing well in crises, but “short of a galvanizing crisis we’re a society of happy complacency,” a condition that isn’t well suited for responding to “slowly emerging problems like global warming.”
If we continue to do nothing, however, Babbitt suggested a vision of the near future: “There will be no glaciers left in Glacier Park in my lifetime. The Arctic will be a bluewater ocean.” When the snow pack in the Rockies disappears and there is no more “timed sequential release” into reservoirs, “it will be chaos in the watershed of the Colorado River,” and “the Colorado ski industry will have to move to Montana.
“And we can’t even muster our elected leaders to do anything about automobile efficiency,” Babbitt said with a note of despair. “Overnight we could double our fuel economy to 40 miles per gallon and cut our fossil fuel use in half…but our political system is unresponsive.”
Yet he is not without optimism. He spoke of the success of the wolf reinroduction program in Yellowstone, launched in 1995 while he was Secretary. It showed that restoring ecosystems was possible, he said.
In a region where the elk population was “out of control, the wolves just electrified the place,” said Babbitt, who also noted that riparian systems have come back, and beaver and aspen are flourishing.
The wolf, to Babbitt, is “the elegant bearer of a message I want to be heard in the West — of dominant public servitude of public lands.”
For Babbitt, protecting threatened ecosystems is paramount. “The wolf is saying, ‘I have the first right to be here.’ Ranchers will have to learn to make sacrifices.”
Two secretaries, two eras: much historical perspective.
The current Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, is expected to conclude the interview series sometime this fall. The date and time are yet to be announced but will be noted on the Center of the American West’s web site, www.centerwest.org, when they are set.
For transcripts of the previous secretaries’ CU-Boulder talks, go to www.headwatersnews.org/interior.html
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