May 24, 2013, 12:19 pm
By Paul Voosen
David Ferguson and his colleague Sebastian Watt (above) learned a lot from Chilean road cuts, some striated with layers of basaltic scoria.
If there’s a lesson David Ferguson has learned in his early years as a volcanologist, it’s this: Always carry a big hammer.
“You just have to pound away, smash as much rock as you can,” said Ferguson, a postdoc at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “There’s nothing more frustrating than having gone all that way and then you discover your hammer isn’t big enough.”
He will need that persistence as he taps away at one of the most vexing problems in volcanology: Does the rock hold evidence that climate changes have, over time, caused a surge of volcanic eruptions?
The idea does sound implausible, Ferguson acknowledged during a visit I made to his…
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April 30, 2013, 5:19 pm
By Paul Voosen
Above all else, Charles D. Keeling was fastidious with his data.
A couple of years ago, I found myself on assignment at Mauna Loa Observatory, the U.S. weather station perched just below the summit of a Hawaiian volcano. Spurred by Keeling, a longtime climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, this lab—still not much more than a bunch of prefab white containers sited below lava breaks—has measured the accretion of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 55 years. When Keeling began, those concentrations sat at 315 parts per million. That’s an idyllic level by today’s standards.
Indeed, as you may have heard, the CO2 monitors at Mauna Loa will soon reach—if temporarily—400 parts per million. They’ve already touched 400 ppm for at least an hour, and it’s likely that a daily average will top that level as well this month. (Stations in the A…
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April 4, 2013, 4:57 am
By Tom Bartlett
Colin Purrington
Colin Purrington wrote a funny, helpful guide about designing scientific posters. It has loads of practical tips (don’t make it too long, use a nonserif font for titles, etc.) and jokes about the mating habits of cute red pandas. The guide has been remarkably popular—he estimates it’s been viewed about two million times over the years—and he gets e-mails thanking him all the time. It has become a claim to minor fame.
Sometimes people, um, borrow his guide without giving him credit. This happens fairly regularly, and when he finds out about it, he sends an e-mail asking them to take it down. Usually they do. But when he sent an e-mail to the Consortium for Plant Biotechnology Research, asking that a roughly 1,200-word, near-verbatim, uncredited chunk from his guide be removed from the…
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February 26, 2013, 11:14 am
By Paul Voosen
![411px-SoufriereHillsVolcano[1]](http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/files/2013/02/411px-SoufriereHillsVolcano1-205x300.jpg)
The Soufrière Hills eruption in Montserrat in 1995
Scientific outlines of global warming have remained relatively unchanged for decades. Climate scientists, however, armed with better satellites and long-term data, continue to refine their understanding of the jogs up and down that typify the planet’s surface temperature, which can remain flat for years at a time before rising again. There are many pieces to this puzzle, and for more than a decade, one mystery has been centered high in the sky, in the freezing stratosphere.
Given its height, many miles above sea level, the stratosphere is typically a barren place. Suspended above the weather, this dry atmospheric layer rarely houses anything more tangible than gases. Occasionally a vast volcanic eruption—like Mount Pinatubo, in 1991—might inject a load of…
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February 20, 2013, 1:33 pm
By Paul Voosen
Ancient rice paddies released significant amounts of methane into the atmosphere, but scientists disagree on whether they helped trigger a change in climate.
When did the Epoch of Man begin?
In recent years, it’s become common to hear that the earth has entered the Anthropocene, a new geological time dominated by humanity. The term, very much a meme, unifies a host of environmental concerns—climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution. It’s so influential that the body governing geological time is now studying, as I detailed last year, whether to consider the Anthropocene as a formal epoch—like the Pleistocene or Miocene—to the chagrin of some stratigraphers, the fastidious adherents to the discipline that judges such things.
If we are to enter a new epoch, though, geologists will have to decide when…
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February 14, 2013, 8:30 pm
By Paul Basken
Boston — Scientists have a hard enough time getting people to understand what they’re talking about.
Their thoughts can be complicated. Their sentences can be laden with jargon. And their conclusions can offend political or religious sensibilities.
And now, to make things worse, readers have an immediate forum to talk back. And when some readers post uncivil comments at the bottom of online articles, that alone can raise doubts about the underlying science, a new study has found. Or at least reinforce those doubts.
The study, outlined on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, involved a survey of 2,338 Americans asked to read an article that discussed the risks of nanotechnology, which involves engineering materials at the atomic scale.
Of participants who had already expressed wariness toward the technology, those who…
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November 8, 2012, 3:44 pm
By Paul Basken
In one of Dr. Seuss’s better-known tales of jealousy and prejudice, the Sneetches with stars on their bellies are considered superior to those without.
Now there’s more evidence that journals’ impact factors are similarly misleading.
A study published by three Canadian researchers has identified a two-decade-long trend in which the world’s top-ranked scientific journals are slowly losing their share of the most-cited articles.
The study, published in the November issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, found that in 1990, 45 percent of the top 5 percent of the most cited articles were published in journals whose impact factor was in the top 5 percent—publications like Cell, Nature, Science, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. By 2009, that rate had fallen to 36 percent, the authors found.
“We’re still…
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September 12, 2012, 2:04 pm
By Paul Basken
First there was the “impact factor.” Then came the “h-index.” Now, for those who believe that scientific prowess can be measured by statistical metrics, comes the Acuna-Allesina-Kording formula.
The formula, outlined on Wednesday in the journal Nature, is intended to improve upon the h-index—a tally of a researcher’s publications and citations—by adding a few more numerical measures of a scientist’s publishing history to allow for predictions of future success.
The idea, said the paper’s senior author, Konrad P. Kording, an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern University, is to help universities and grant-writing agencies “fund someone who will have high impact in the future.”
Kording readily admitted his method—tweaking the h-index by adding numbers such as years of publication and number of distinct journals—cannot…
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August 2, 2012, 5:51 pm
By Josh Fischman
ChemCam in action, in an artist’s view.
Early on Monday, after a tricky parachute descent, a hovering spacecraft will lower the new Mars rover, Curiosity, to the planet’s surface with long cables. If the nail-biting, never-before-tried maneuver works, the remote-controlled vehicle will begin searching for signs of water—and life. Bethany Ehlmann, an assistant professor at Caltech, will play a key role. From a control room in Pasadena, Calif., she will blow holes in rocks with a laser on the rover, creating clouds of atoms that could hold evidence of water. She spoke with The Chronicle about the quest.
Bethany Ehlmann
Q. This sounds like a point-and-shoot game, something in a video arcade.
A. I can see that. This is the first time …
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July 23, 2012, 1:50 pm
By Josh Fischman
Forty years ago today, NASA launched its first Earth-observation satellite, Landsat. Data from the program, now on its eighth orbiter, have been used in climate-change studies, in ecology, and to show the effects of population growth.
Scientists have also noticed that some images are just visually amazing. (Particularly when the researchers add color to the pixels.)
Here are two of the most popular, voted on by 14,000 members of the public. The first contrasts the graceful oxbow bends of the Mississippi with the blocklike parcels of land that surround it. The second highlights one of the largest—and least-seen—river deltas in the world: the Yukon Delta in southwest Alaska, featuring a multitude of ponds, sloughs, and other water-forms.
(Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/USGS)
![411px-SoufriereHillsVolcano[1]](http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/files/2013/02/411px-SoufriereHillsVolcano1.jpg)
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