Category Archives: College of Earth Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences

A surprise trip to the coldest continent on Earth!

Due to some unforeseen circumstances, we had a very impromptu guest join us for our show on February 18th. Rachel Kaplan is a 4th year PhD student in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, who researchers whales and krill around the world to better understand predator-prey dynamics. Part of her PhD research involves going to Antarctica so we sat down with Rachel to chat about what it’s like conducting field work on the coldest continent on Earth!

You can listen to the episode anywhere you listen to your podcasts, including on KBVR, Spotify, Apple, or anywhere else!

Krypton-ice : what the noble gases tell us about the ancient climate

Tree rings famously reflect the age of the tree, but they can also encode information about the environmental conditions throughout the organism’s life. A similar principle motivates the study of ice cores – traces of the ancient atmosphere are preserved in the massive ice caps covering Earth’s polar regions.

This Sunday’s guest is Olivia Williams, a graduate student here at Oregon State who is helping to uncover the wealth of climate information harbored by polar ice cores. Olivia is a member of the College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS), where she is advised by Christo Buizert. Their lab uses ice cores to study paleoclimatology and heads the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX), a multi-institution NSF collaboration.

Drilling an ice core in the Arctic or Antarctic is an expensive and labor-intensive process. As a result, once they have been studied by project leads, most American ice core samples are centrally managed by the National Ice Core Lab in Denver, CO and carefully allocated to labs throughout the country. Researchers analyze cross-sections of the larger ice core sample for many geochemical features, including dust records, stable isotopes, and evidence of volcanic eruptions. Determining the historical levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases is one application of ice core analysis that yields important insights into climate change.

Olivia’s project focuses on “melt layers”, which are formed by a large-scale melting and refreezing event. The frequency and intensity of melt layers help characterize polar summer temperatures, and specifically the number of days above freezing. Typically, researchers use visual examination or optical instruments to locate layers with relatively smooth and bubble-free ice. However, such methods can fail further down in ice cores, where clathrate ice formed by increased pressure excludes all bubbles. In response, the lab of Jeffrey Severinghaus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography developed a chemical method to serve as a supplement. This technique extracts noble gases from the core and compares the ratio of the heavier (xenon and krypton) to argon, the lightest noble gas. Since the heavier noble gases are more water-soluble, spikes in the relative concentration of krypton and xenon suggest that a melting event occurred.

During a typical day in the lab, Williams takes samples from the ice core stored at -20 C in a large walk-in freezer and handles the samples in chilled ethanol baths. She particularly focuses on ice cores from Greenland and time periods such as the last interglacial period ~120 thousand years ago and the early Holocene ~12 thousand years ago. Since the OSU lab’s noble gas methodology is novel, Olivia’s work involves a lot of design and troubleshooting the extraction line, which extracts the trapped gases. One time, she even had to commission a scientific glassblower for custom cold traps in the extraction line.

Williams’ interest in geology was impressed upon her at an early age, in part by the influence of her grandfather, a longtime science writer for the Seattle Times. Her grandfather’s love for the geology of the Pacific Northwest inspired her to follow in his footsteps as a scientific journalist. At Boston University, Olivia initially planned to major in communications, until she took a seminar on interdisciplinary science communication offered by BU Antarctic Research Lab, together with education and earth sciences majors. This experience helped solidify her interest in geology, and she switcher her major to earth sciences. Her senior research project related to nutrient cycling in salt marshes, but she knew that she eventually wanted to work in polar science and paleoclimatology. Besides her research at OSU, Olivia has stayed active in science communication, serving as the outreach chair for the CEOS graduate student association. She has helped organize education tables at the Corvallis Farmer’s Market. In the future, Olivia hopes to pursue an academic career and continue research and teaching in the field she loves but is open to the full range of earth science career paths.

For more on Olivia’s exciting research and to hear what it is like to drill ice from a lava formation, tune in this Sunday, January 22nd at 7PM on KBVR 88.7 FM or look out for the podcast upload on Spotify!

Schmitty Thompson wears glasses and a sweater, and smiles at the camera while standing in front of a vast field.

What ice sheets can teach us about ancient ocean shorelines

Around 80,000 years ago, the Earth was in the middle of the late Pleistocene era, and much of Canada and the northern part of the United States was blanketed in ice. The massive Laurentide Ice Sheet covered millions of square miles, and in some places, up to 2 miles thick. Over vast timescales this ice sheet advanced its way across the continent slowly, gouging out what we now know as the Great Lakes, carving the valleys, depositing glacial tills, and transforming the surface geology of much of the southern part of Canada and northern US. Further west, the Cordilleran ice sheet stretched across what is now Alaska, British Columbia, and the northern parts of the Western US, compressing the ground under its massive weight. As these ice sheets depressed the land beneath them, the Earth’s crust bulged outwards, and as the planet warmed and the ice sheets began to melt, the pressure was released, returning the crust underneath to its previous shape. As this happened, ocean water flowed away, resulting in lower sea levels locally, but higher levels across the other side of the planet.

The effects of massive bodies of ice forming, moving, and melting are far from negligible in their impact on the overall geology of the region, the sea level throughout history, and the patterns of a changing climate. Though there are only two ice sheets on the planet today, deducing the ancient patterns and dynamics of ice sheets can help researchers fill the geological record and even make predictions about what the planet might look like in the future. Our guest on Inspiration Dissemination this week is PhD candidate and researcher Schmitty Thompson, of the Department of Geology in CEOAS. Thompson is ultimately trying to answer questions about ice distribution, sea levels, and other unknown parameters that the geologic record is missing during two different ice age warming periods. Their research is very interdisciplinary – Thompson has degrees in both math and geology, and also uses a lot of data science, computer science, and physics in their work. They are using computer modeling to figure out just what the shorelines looked like during this time period around 80,000 years ago. 

Schmitty Thompson, fourth year PhD candidate with Jessica Creveling in the Geology Department.

“I use models because the geologic record is pretty incomplete – the further back you go, the less complete it is. So by matching my models to the existing data, we can then infer more information about what the shoreline was like,” they explain. To do this accurately, Thompson feeds the model what the ice sheets looked like over the course of around 250,000 years. They also need to incorporate other inputs to the model to get an accurate picture – variables such as the composition of the interior of the Earth, the physics of Earth’s interior, and even the ice sheets’ own gravitational pull (ice sheets are so massive they exert a gravitational pull on the water around them!)

Using math to learn about ice

The first equation to describe global changes in sea level was published in 1976, with refining throughout the 90s and early 2000s. Thompson’s model builds on these equations in two versions: one which can run in about 10 minutes on their laptop, and another which can take multiple weeks and must run on a supercomputer. The quicker version uses spherical harmonics as the basis function for the pseudospectral formulation, which is basically a complex function that does math and incorporates coefficient representations of the earth’s radius, meridional wave numbers, variation across north/south and east/west, and a few other variables. The short of it is that it can perform these calculations across a 250k time span relatively quickly, but it makes assumptions about the homogeneity of the earth’s crust and mantle viscosity. Think of it like a gumball: a giant, magma-filled gumball with a smooth outer surface and even layers. So while this method is fast, the assumptions that it makes means the output data is limited in its usefulness. When Thompson needs a more accurate picture, they turn to collaborators who are able to run the models on a supercomputer, and then they work with the model’s outputs.

While the model is useful for filling in gaps in the historical record, Thompson also points out that it has uses in predicting what the future will look like in the context of a changing climate. After testing out these models and seeing how sensitive they are, they could be used by researchers looking at much smaller time scales and more sensitive constraints for current and future predictions. “There are still lots of open questions – if we warm the planet by a few degrees, are we going to collapse a big part of Antarctica or a small part? How much ice will melt?”


To learn more about ice sheets, sea levels, and using computer models to figure out how the shoreline looked thousands of years ago, tune in to Schmitty Thompson’s episode on Inspiration Dissemination this upcoming Sunday evening at 7 PM PST. Catch the show live by streaming on https://kbvrfm.orangemedianetwork.com/, or check out the show later wherever you get your podcasts!

Thompson was also recently featured on Alie Ward’s popular podcast Ologies. You can catch up with all things geology by checking out their episode here.

Warming waters, waning nutrition

Here at Inspiration Dissemination, we are fascinated by the moments of inspiration that lead people to pursue graduate studies. For our next guest, an experience like this came during a boat trip accompanying the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on a research expedition. Becky Smoak, an M.S. student in OSU’s Marine Resource Management program, remembers feeling in awe of the vibrant array of marine life that she saw, including whales, sunfish, and sharks. Growing up on a farm in eastern Washington, Becky had always wanted to be a veterinarian. During her undergraduate studies at Washington State University, she came to feel that the culture of pre-veterinary students was too cutthroat. In search of something more collaborative, she came to Oregon State in summer 2019 for a Research Experience for Undergrads (REU) and was impressed by the support and inclusivity of her research mentors. A couple years later, Becky is now on the cusp of graduation after her time spent studying marine life.

Becky’s graduate work is the continuation of a long-running collaboration between Oregon State and NOAA out of the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. Beginning in 1996 under the direction of Bill Peterson, a team of researchers has monitored oceanic conditions along a route called the Newport Hydrographic, which extends in a straight line eastward from the Oregon Coast and intersects the northern part of the vast Californian Current. The team takes samples of ocean water at fixed points along the route and analyzes the concentrations of plankton and other organisms or compounds of interest. 

Becky Smoak, teaching on the OSU research vessel The Elakha.

The specific biochemicals that Becky studies are Omega-3 fatty acids. In a set of experiments from the 1930s, rats fed with a diet poor in Omega-3 fatty acids eventually died, demonstrating that these compounds are essential to life and are not produced by mammals. Two types of Omega-3 fatty acids, called EPA and DHA, can only be synthesized by phytoplankton, microscopic photosynthetic organisms that live in the ocean. The ability of phytoplankton to produce fatty acids is intimately linked with oceanic temperature. Studies have shown that increases in sea surface temperature and decreases in nutrient availability can decrease the quality of fatty acids in phytoplankton, thus decreasing food availability and quality in the marine environment. Fatty acid levels have downstream effects on the ecosystem, for example on copepods, a type of zooplankton that feeds on phytoplankton. Becky’s team affectionately refers to the copepod colony of the chilly northern Pacific as the “cheeseburger” copepods, in contrast to the “celery” copepods of the southern Pacific colony. The present-day effect of temperature also points to a key ecological challenge, as warming oceans due to climate change could disrupt the supply of this vital nutrient.

In her thesis work, Becky seeks to untangle the contributions of phytoplankton community structure to oceanic Omega-3 fatty acid levels. She uses a set of statistical methodologies called nonmetric multidimensional scaling to uncover correlations in the datasets. A particularly interesting instrument used to collect her data is a flow cytometry robot dubbed ‘Lucy’. Lucy uses advanced imaging to count individual plankton and characterize their sizes. This yields an improvement in accuracy over older monitoring techniques that assumed a fixed size for all plankton. Becky’s goal for finishing her thesis is to create a statistical procedure for predicting fatty acid availability given information on phytoplankton population structure.

To hear more about Becky’s journey to OSU, her experiences as a first-generation college student, and the fascinating role of Omega-3s in marine ecosystems, be sure to tune in this Sunday October 9th at 7pm on KBVR.

This article was written by Joseph Valencia.

Environmental Justice: what it is, and what to do about it

The overlap between environmental science and social justice are rare, but it has been around since at least the early 1990’s and is becoming more well-known today. The framework of Environmental Justice was popularized by Robert Bullard when his wife, a lawyer, asked him to help her with a case where he was mapping all the landfills in the state of Texas and cross reference the demographics of the people who lived there. Landfills are not the most pleasant places to live next to, especially if you never had the opportunity to choose otherwise. Bullard found that even though Houston has a 75% white population, every single city-owned landfill was built in predominantly black neighborhoods. The environmental hazards of landfills, their emissions and contaminated effluent, were systematically placed in communities that had been – and continue to be – disenfranchised citizens who lacked political power. Black people were forced to endure a disproportionate burden of the environmental hazards, and procedural justice was lacking in the decision making process that created these realities. Unfortunately, this is not a unique situation to Houston, or Texas, because this pattern continues today

Environmental justice is an umbrella term that we cannot fully unpack in a blogpost or a single podcast, but it is fundamentally about the injustices of environmental hazards being forced upon disadvantaged communities who had little to no role in creating those hazards. This is not a United States-specific issue although we do focus on state-side issues in this episode. In fact, some of the most egregious examples occur in smaller and lesser known countries (see our episode with Michael Johnson, where his motivation for pursuing marine sciences in graduate school is because the islands of micronesia where he grew up are literally being submerged by the rising seas of global warming). The issues we discuss are multifaceted and can seem impossible to fix. But before we can fix the issues we need to really understand the socio-political-economic ecosystem that has placed us exactly where we are today. 

To begin to discuss all of this, we have Chris Hughbanks who is a graduate student at Oregon State and one of the Vice Presidents of the local Linn-Benton NAACP branch and a member of their Environmental and Climate Justice committee (Disclaimer: Adrian is also a branch member and part of the committee). We begin the discussion with a flood in Chris’ hometown of Detroit. Chris describes how they never really had floods because when precipitation occurs it’s usually either not that much rain or cold enough for it to snow instead. Because it hardly rains that much, very few people have flood insurance. But that pesky climate change is making temperatures warmer and precipitation events more intense than ever before causing flooding to occur in 2014, 2016, 2019, and 2020. As you might guess, the effects of this natural disaster were not equally shared by all citizens of Detroit. We discuss the overlap between housing discrimination and flood areas, how the recovery effort left so many out to [not] dry. 

We end the episode with ways to get involved at the local level. First, consider learning more about the Linn-Benton NAACP branch, and the initiatives they focus on to empower local communities. Vote, vote, vote, and vote. Make sure you’re registered, and everyone else you know is registered to vote. And recognize these problems are generations in the making, and it will take just as long to fully rectify them. Finally, I am reminded of an episode interviewing millennial writers about what it means to be born when global warming was a niche research topic, but to come of age when climate change has become a global catastrophe. They rightfully point out that there are a myriad of possibilities for human salvation and sacrifice for every tenth of a degree between 1.5 and 3.0°C of warming that is predicted by the most recent 6th edition of the IPCC report. As grim as our future seems, what an awesome task for our generations to embark upon to try and “create a polity and economy that actually treats everybody with dignity, I cannot think of a more meaningful way to spend a human life.”

If you missed the show, you can listen to this episode on the podcast feed!

Additional Reading & Podcast Notes

The Detroit Flood – We mentioned the NPR article reporting that 40% of people living in Detroit experienced flooding, how black neighborhoods were at higher risk to flooding, and that renters (who are disproportionately black) were nearly twice as likely to experience flooding compared to those who owned their homes. We also mentioned a map of Detroit, showing which areas are more at risk of flooding. Another local article described how abnormal that summer in Detroit and the surrounding areas were compared to other years.

We listed a number of Environmental Justice links that include:

  • Dumping in Dixie, the 1990 book written by Robert Bullard which is considered essential reading for many law school courses on environmental justice.  
  • We listed the organizing principles of the modern environmental justice movement, first codified in 1991 at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit
  • A story near Los Angeles where mixed-use city zoning laws allowed industrial businesses to operate near residential areas, causing soil lead pollution that was unknown until Yvette Cabrera wrote her own grant to study the issue. Read her story in Grist: Ghost of Polluter’s Past that describes the immense efforts she and researchers had to go through to map soil lead contamination, and how the community has used that information to generate positive change for the community. 
  • Environmental [in]justice afflicts the global south as well, where a majority of forest loss since the 1960’s has occurred in the tropical regions of the world. 

Adrian mentioned a number of podcasts for further listening:

  • Two Voltz podcasts about recent  increased traffic fatalities and how to get cars out of downtowns
  • Two past Inspiration Dissemination episodes with Holly Horan on maternal infant stress in Puerto Rico and her experience conducting research after Hurricane Maria, and Michael Johnson who one of his motivation to go to graduate school was because where he grew up – Micronesia – has been feeling the rising seas of climate change long before other countries. 
  • A deep investigative journalism podcast called Floodlines about the events leading up to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and what happened after (or, what should have happened). 
  • If all this hurricane and flooding talk has got you down, consider that heat kills more people in the US than floods, hurricanes, or tornadoes according to the National Weather Service.

We also discussed the 2021 heat dome in the Pacific Northwest. This led to Oregon passing some of the strongest protections for heat for farmworkers (and others working outside). Consider reading a summary of wildfire effects on outdoor workers, and a new proposal in Oregon to pay farmworkers overtime (this proposal was recently passed in March of 2022). Related to farmworkers, Adrian mentioned the 2013 Southern Poverty Law Center’s analysis of guest visa worker programs titled Close to Slavery: Guestworker programs in the United States

We returned to the fact that housing is central to so many injustices for generations. The Color of Law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America by Richard Rothstein is a historical analysis of the laws and policies that shaped today’s housing patterns. One example Rothstein often cites is the construction of freeways purposefully routed through black communities; recently one developer accidentally said the quiet part out loud in explaining where a gas pipeline was routed because they choose “the path of least resistance“. We also mentioned that in 2019 and in 2020, Corvallis has ~37% of its residents being rent burdened (meaning households spend more than 50% of their income on rent), which is the worst city in the state over both years. You can also read about a California Delta assessment that focuses on agricultural shifts in the region due to land erosion and flooding, but they mention how current flood risk is tied to historical redlining.  

Global ocean modeling, with a microscope on Micronesia

How could an equation developed by a German mathematician in 1909 help Micronesian conservation networks plan for the future in the face of climate change? 

In this week’s episode, we interview Dr. Steven Johnson, a graduate of Oregon State University’s Geography graduate program. Steven completed his doctorate earlier in 2021, under the guidance of Dr. James Watson, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. He’s now a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University. During his time at Oregon State, the focus of his work was oceans. “I study the ocean – in particular, people’s relationship with the ocean. The condition of the ocean has implications for people all over the world and millions depend on it for their livelihood,” he explains.

Steven Johnson, a recent graduate of OSU and now a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University

“There used to be this idea that the ocean was ‘too big to fail’, but Oregon State University Distinguished Professor and White House Deputy Director for Climate and the Environment Jane Lubchenco made the point that ‘the ocean is too big to fail, but too big to ignore,’” Steven recounts. “Not a single part of the ocean has not been impacted by people.” Plastic waste, rising temperatures, increasing acidification, and other byproducts of human activity have been changing the ocean as we know it, and it will continue to worsen if the problem can’t be solved. One challenge that arises as a result of these changes is the future of aquatic resource management and conservation programs, which are designed to work in current ocean and climate conditions.

So how does Steven’s research tackle these problems? In the first chapter of his thesis, he developed a novel model for predicting the way the ocean will change due to climate change. This approach is titled the Ocean Novelty Index, or the ONo Index. The Ocean Novelty Index quantifies the relative impact of climate change across all parts of the ocean, using a statistical metric applied to six different ocean surface variables (chlorophyll, O2, pH, sea surface temperature, silica, and zooplankton.) The metric is derived from the Hellinger distance, developed by a German mathematician in 1909, which is a nonparametric analysis that measures the similarity and dissimilarity between two distributions and their overlap. The baseline, or ‘normal’, conditions are derived from the period between 1970-2014, a 50 year period which recognizes 1970 as the birth of the modern Western climate movement. The model can then be used to assess and predict what climate change will do to one part of the ocean, and compare it to how that part of the ocean looked previously. The model better encapsulates the dynamic and unpredictable changes of the ocean resulting from climate change, as opposed to just rising temperatures. 

In addition to the development of this climate change index, Steven’s research also focused on conservation networks and initiatives across Micronesia, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. These networks and cooperatives are collaborative efforts between regional governments to meet certain conservation goals, taking into account the differing social, cultural, and economic needs of the different countries involved. Part of Steven’s work has focused on applying the ONo index on a local scale, to help determine what changes may occur in the regions as well as where. What will the regions of these networks look like at different points as the climate changes, and how can we create strong policies and political relationships in these cooperatives and their respective countries to ameliorate potential issues in the future? Steven discusses these topics and more with us on this week’s ID podcast.

If you are interested in learning more about the ONo index and Steven’s work, you can read his paper here.

This post was written by Grace Deitzler

Libraries of possibilities: Algorithmic identification of possible fossil chronologies

Cedric Hagen, a doctoral candidate in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, spends a lot of time thinking about fossils. He’s not a paleontologist, though: don’t expect to find him digging up a Tyrannosaurus Rex. For one thing, dinosaurs lived much too recently–a measly 66 million years ago, in the case of the T. rex. Cedric’s work takes him much, much further back in time to the beginning of the Cambrian era, which began over 500 million years ago.

PhD candidate Cedric Hagen (photo by Hannah O’Leary)

While the Cambrian era is not the beginning of life on earth (for that, you’d need to go back a staggering 3.5 billion years) the Cambrian era is important because that is the time when many of the major forms of life appeared. This includes, for example, spongelike animals, burrowing worms, creatures with carbonate shells, reef-forming animals, and arthropods like the remarkably successful trilobites. The apparent rapid increase in the diversity of life at this time is termed the Cambrian explosion.

Trilobite. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons, accessed 5/17/2020. Ellipsocephalus Hoffi detail (Cambrian Trilobite) (Fig. 31) (b), from “The ancient life-history of the earth” (Page 85)

As you may imagine, there are numerous challenges to studying life from so long ago. One of the major challenges is that there simply aren’t very many samples in existence. Part of the problem is that although the rocks at the ocean floor are old from a human standpoint, since oceanic crust is continually formed at mid-ocean ridges and destroyed at deep-sea trenches, there’s a hard limit on the age of fossils you can find at the sea floor. Oceanic crust is at most about 200 million years old throughout most of the world’s oceans. While there are a few places in the Mediterranean that date back around 340 million years, even that is a couple hundred million years too young. Only at isolated locations on the continents are there places where Cambrian carbonate rock formations exist. “You can think of these as reefs, really old reefs,” Hagen said.

Carbonate rocks outcropping in the southern Nopah Range, Death Valley, CA (photo by Cedric Hagen)

Before the advent of carbon isotope and radiometric dating, geologists had to base their ordering of the fossil record on relative positioning in layers of rock and fossil co-occurrence. Sedimentary rock forms as layers of material (strata) pile up over time. So, the more strata above a fossil, the further back in time the fossil formed. If you find multiple fossils in one area, this is a reliable way to place the fossils in chronological order—that is, of course, if those layers haven’t been jumbled up by earthquakes, landslides, or tectonic folding in the meantime. An additional help is that the events that lead to fossilization, such as a mudslide, frequently result in many organisms being fossilized together. If the same species is found at two sites, it is likely that the two sites represent the same era. This lets scientists pin approximate dates on the co-occurring fossils.

Photo of folded limestone layers in Provo Canyon, Utah. Photo by Kerk Philips (Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Accessed 5/17/2020)

Radiometric dating allows precise measurement of age based on the decay of radioactive material. As radioactive material decays, atoms of one element are transformed into another. For example, uranium decays (through a convoluted process) into lead. Measuring the relative abundance of each element allows one to calculate the age of the sample. Since these rocks are made in part from the remnants of carbon-shelled organisms, they also record the amount of particular isotopes of carbon that were present at the time that the organism died. Since the relative abundance of carbon isotopes varies slowly through time, the pattern of carbon isotope concentrations in a sample of carbonate rock is like a record of the rock’s position in time.

“We’ve pulled together these records that have different chunks of time, and we’re trying to correlate them to a single high resolution record that we know the time of so we can know the order of the fossils, ” Hagen says. “What we’ve started to find is that the uncertainty in these measurements is quite large, larger than previously anticipated—there’s a lot of different places and times where things could have evolved.”

Prior to this research, scientists lined up carbon isotope chronologies visually. Hagen has been working on numerical algorithm that allows a computer to identify possible matches between rock samples from different parts of the world. “We’re cataloging libraries of possibilities,” says Hagen. “Are there twenty [possible arrangements]? Are there two? What could we do as geologists to go into the field and pick one or two of those and narrow down this uncertainty?”

To hear more about Cedric’s research, tune in on Sunday,May 15th at 7 PM on KBVR 88.7 FM. You can live stream the show, or, if you miss it, you can download this episode and most of our earlier shows as podcasts on iTunes.

Rethinking oyster reef restoration and coastal community resilience: The use of biomimicry and outreach to offset the growing risk of invasive species

“I like to think of them as the corals of estuaries,” says Megan Considine as she describes the role that oysters play in coastal systems all over the world. Megan is a first-year Marine Resource Management Masters student who is working on a project to map the distribution of an invasive mud worm (Polydora websteri) that infects native shellfish such as the commercially grown Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas) and wild populations of Olympia oysters (Ostrea lurida).

Oyster transplant project in the Lynnhaven River, a tributary to the Chesapeake Bay where Megan worked prior to coming to OSU. Photo courtesy of Megan Considine.

Megan explains that these tiny worms don’t make the oyster meat inedible, as infected populations can still be harvested and sold for canning, but they do become unmarketable on the half shell. This is because the worms crawl between the inner shell surfaces, and the oyster then grows new shell material over it to wall off the invader. The worm then deposits muddy material or debris into the shell pocket and essentially creates a blister. Although these blisters are not known to negatively impact the oysters themselves, they are not exactly aesthetically pleasing to the consumer. This is what is really hurting the multi-million dollar industry and the main reason stakeholders from Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California are all working together to detect and prevent further spread of the worms. 

A Pacific oyster infected by the invasive mudworm, showing blisters that have been opened up to try and extract the worm. Photo courtesy of Megan Considine.

Dr. Steve Rumrill is the Shellfish Program Leader at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) and as courtesy faculty of Hatfield Marine Science Center is Megan’s primary advisor. Working with ODFW, Megan visits shellfish farms located in estuaries along the Oregon coast and picks up oysters which are inspected for worms. If found, samples are then sent to a lab in Washington for genetic analysis to confirm infestation. Megan says that farmers may not even know their oysters are infected and she hopes to expand her work beyond just ecological sampling to outreach and mitigating an emergent problem.

“I want to create an education piece in Spanish and English, so that farmers can be aware of when their oysters are infected.”

Megan’s passion for education goes far beyond aquaculture. Getting back to her coral analogy, oysters are not just important to aquaculture here in the Pacific Northwest. Ecologically, they are incredibly valuable wherever they occur both when living, for example, filtering the water column, but also after they die. Their calcium carbonate shells provide the foundational habitat that supports an incredible diversity of estuarine life. 

For a long time in oyster restoration efforts, it’s been understood that substrate is a primary limiting factor in supporting this reef-building capacity of oysters. According to Megan, in the PNW, they were just completely overharvested during the Gold Rush era. In addition to her work on invasive mud worms in oyster farms, Megan is also a part of efforts to restore natural oyster populations in Oregon, specifically at Yaquina Head. And this is an area of research Megan has been passionate about for some time. 

Megan getting ready to snorkel assist with coral restoration in the Florida Keys working with Mote Marine Laboratory. Photo courtesy of Megan Considine.

Originally from Virginia Beach, Megan recalls her time as an elementary school student being tasked along with her classmates to monitor the growth of a bag of oysters donated by a local non-profit. Along with studying their entrusted specimens, she says that they would also engage in other activities about estuarine ecology surrounding oysters in the Chesapeake Bay. This hands-on experience would come full circle when after completing her undergraduate studies at the University of South Carolina, Megan had the opportunity to intern with the same organization, Oyster Reef Keepers, that sponsored the oyster education program in several schools, leading kids through many of the same activities that sparked her early fascination with estuary ecosystems and marine science.  

Although a more well-known issue on the East coast, Megan explains that oyster habitat degradation is a world-wide problem and she came to Oregon State to expand her knowledge of its effects in other places. She says that oyster restoration hasn’t had as much momentum here in the West because aquaculture has been the focus, but it’s gaining traction. Concern over threats like climate change to coastal ecosystems have supported this trend. Although oysters are  less sensitive to climate change impacts like ocean acidification than corals are known to be, it still may compromise their ability to cope with other direct threats, such as invasive species. 

At Yaquina Head, Megan is working with an artist from the East coast named Evelyn Tickle who makes concrete tiles to be used in oyster reef restoration that are designed to mimic natural oyster beds. These one square foot tiles differ from the cinder block structures that have been used to provide substrate for the oysters to grow on in the past by providing a more complex structure made of compounds like calcium carbonate. Overall, the tiles give oysters a better chance to establish amidst other stressors. 

Megan has been so inspired by Evelyn’s work that she has begun working with two other OSU students, Chad Sullivan and Nicolás Gómez-Andújar, to develop other biomimicry concrete structures for future restoration efforts that support the erosion and storm mitigation services that both oysters and corals provide to coastal systems. They are calling themselves the Urban Reef Lab

Megan on one of many coastal trips taken since Megan moved to Oregon; exploring the West coast is one of her favorite pastime’s. Photo courtesy of Megan Considine.

“The idea is that instead of using simple and smooth breakwater structures or sea walls, we can incorporate textures and shapes that are designed for specific organisms. So, working with nature rather than against. For instance, if the goal is oyster settlement we would use the appropriate texture such as crevices and pits. The designs can also be used as hard substrate for coral outplants or for oyster restoration efforts, like the Yaquina Bay project.”

To learn more about Megan’s research and outreach goals beyond her graduate work, tune in to KBVR 88.7 FM or stream online April 19, 2020 at 7 P.M. 

Working with Dungeness crab fishermen to get a ‘sense’ of low-oxygen conditions off the Oregon coast

Linus tidepooling at Yaquina Head, Oregon Coast.

Linus Stoltz is a graduate student in the Marine Resource Management Master’s Program through the College of Earth Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, co-advised by Dr. Kipp Shearman and Dr. Francis Chan. Only in his second term, Linus is already diving in to a project that means a lot to Oregon coastal communities.

Dungeness crab is the most profitable state-managed fishery in Oregon, generating $66.7 million dollars in commercial sales over the 2018-2019 season alone. However, an increasing threat to this valuable industry that has caused significant harvest reductions in recent years: hypoxia. Hypoxia refers to low-oxygen conditions in the ocean that have been recorded as occurring more frequently off the Oregon Coast and elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, where Dungeness crab fishing is a major activity. In some parts of the ocean, such as the Gulf Coast, these conditions are triggered by pollution which causes overproduction of algae, followed by excess decomposition. However, here, it’s more complicated. These conditions are generated by offshore wind- driven movement of cold, nutrient-rich but oxygen-poor deep water across the continental shelf, toward the coast.

This process of ‘upwelling’ (see figure below) is a natural occurrence, but scientists speculate that climate change is making these events more frequent and their characteristics severe. As a Marine Biology major in his undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, Linus admits that oceanography isn’t exactly in his “wheelhouse” but it doesn’t take an oceanographer to understand that atmospheric conditions are strongly tied to ocean circulation patterns. Referring to graphic representations of Northwest wind stress and dissolved oxygen concentrations, he says “they’re pretty well correlated.” Normally, the offshore winds that drive upwelling are counteracted by a shifting of wind patterns that ultimately allow them to mix sufficiently and re-oxygenate. But the reality is that this is happening less and less frequently.

The process of ‘upwelling’ off the West Coast. Source. www.noaa.gov

What does hypoxia mean for Dungeness crabs? Linus describes the events like waves of low-oxygen water moving slowly across the seafloor. As bottom-dwelling organisms that depend on dissolved oxygen to breathe, if conditions are severe enough or persist long enough, they’ll die. More and more instances of crab fishermen pulling up their gear full of dead crabs prompted them to reach out to scientists for help. Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) biologists and researchers at Oregon State University (OSU) have been working together since 2002 to try and find answers. Check out this video by ODFW to see real-time footage of a hypoxic wave as it flows over a Dungeness crab pot in 2017.

While we are beginning to understand the bigger picture of the oceanographic conditions that result in hypoxia, Linus explains that we don’t have any models that predict this ‘wave’ on a finer scale. He describes the ocean as patchy, where conditions just a thousand yards away from where a fisherman may have set his or her pots may be completely different. The ultimate goal of his research is to be able to predict these conditions and inform management decisions such as seasonal and/or spatial closures.

The roughly two-foot long Sexton oxygen sensor seen above will be attached to an individual crab pot that will transmit data via Bluetooth to the Deck Data Hub which will then relay the information to a receiver on the OSU campus.

But even more important to fisherman now, the project will also provide ‘in situ’ information fisherman can use to make critical decisions while they’re out there. To achieve this, Linus will be equipping fishermen with sensors to be deployed by Dungeness crab fishermen through the season to collect data on dissolved oxygen. The data recorded by the sensors can be seen immediately by fishermen when they retrieve their pots and will also be automatically transferred via Bluetooth to a box on deck which will ultimately transmit to a receiver on the OSU campus. The hope is to capture the variability in oxygen conditions, while minimizing their impact on fishing operations.

Linus tagging red drum in Hancock Creek when he worked for North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries (NCDMF).

Before coming to OSU, Linus spent time as an observer for the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries testing by-catch reduction technology in the shrimp trawling industry, an experience he recounts as “character-building to say the least.” In other words, Linus knows how important it is to streamline the process if he wants to get any cooperation from fishermen and collecting data can’t be in the way or slow them down. A stark contrast, however, between the interactions between fisherman and researchers on the East Coast to Oregon is that this relationship is more than just cooperative, it’s a collaboration. Fishermen here trust scientists, but at the same time the researchers recognize that fishermen are out there more and are the ones who see changes first-hand.

For Linus, this project represents one of just about any marine science topic he’s excited to be involved in. To learn more about Linus’s journey from SCUBA diving in a cold lake in Ohio as a ten-year old to working as an underwater technician monitoring artificial reefs off the coast of North Carolina, tune in to KBVR 88.7 FM or online February 23, 2020 at 7 P.M.

Are Microplastics the New Fish Food?

Geologists have considered an entirely new geologic era as a result of the impact humans are having on the planet. Some plastic material in our oceans near Hawaii along are hot magma vents and is being cemented together with sand, shells, fishing nets and forming never before existing material — Plastiglomerates. This new rock is a geologic marker providing evidence of our impact that will last centuries. Although rocks seem inert, that same plastic material floating around our oceans is constantly being eaten, purposefully and accidentally, by ocean creatures from as small as plankton to as large as whales and we’re just beginning to understand the ubiquity of microplastics in our oceans and food webs that humans depend on.  

Our guest this evening is Katherine Lasdin, a Masters student in the Fisheries and Wildlife Department, and she has to go through extraordinary steps in her lab to measure the quantity and accumulation of plastics in fish. Her work focuses on the area off the coast of Oregon, where she is collecting black rockfish near Oregon Marine Reserves and far away from those protected areas. These Marine Reserves are “living laboratory” zones that do not allow any fishing or development so that long-term monitoring and research can occur to better understand natural ecosystems. Due to the protected nature of these zones, fish may be able to live longer lives compared to fish who are not accessing this reserve. The paradox is whether fish leading longer lives could also allow them to bioaccumulate more plastics in their system compared to fish outside these reserves. But why would fish be eating plastics in the first place? 

These are the locations of Oregon’s Marine Reserves. The sampling for juveniles and adult black rockfish is occurring at Cape Foulweather which is between the Cascade head and Otter Rock Reserves. PC:
Black rockfish are a common fish off the Oregon coast and due to their abundance it’s a great study species for this research.

Plastic bottles, straws, and fishing equipment all eventually degrade into smaller pieces. Either through photodegradation from the sun rays, by wave action physically ripping holes in bottles, or abrasion with rocks as they churn on our beaches. The bottle that was once your laundry detergent  is now a million tiny fragments, some you can see but many you cannot. And they’re not just in our oceans either. As the plastics degrade into even tinier pieces, they can become small enough that, just like dust off a farm field, these microplastics can become airborne where we breathe them in! Microplastics are as large as 5mm (about the height of a pencil eraser) and they are hoping to find them as small as 45 micrometers (about the width of a human hair). To a juvenile fish their first few meals is critical to their survival and growth, but with such a variety of sizes and colors of plastics floating in the water column it’s often mistaken for food and ingested. In addition to the plastic pieces we can see with our eyes there is a background level of plastics even in the air we breathe that we can’t see, but they could show up in our analytical observations so Katherine has a unique system to keep everything clean. 

In order to quantify the amount of plastics in fish, you have to digest some of the fish guts. PC: Katherine Lasdin

Katherine is co-advised by Dr. Susanne Brander who’s lab studies microplastics in marine ecosystems. In order to keep plastics out of their samples, they need to carefully monitor the air flow in the lab. A HEPA filtration laminar flow hood blows purified air towards samples they’re working with in the lab and pushes that clean air out into the rest of the lab. There is a multi-staged glassware washing procedure requiring multiple ethanol rinses, soap wash, deionized water rinses, a chemical solvents rinse, another ethanol, and a final combustion of the glass in a furnace at 350°C for 12-hours to get rid of any last bit of contamination. And everyday that someone in Dr. Brander’s lab works in the building they know exactly what they’re wearing; not to look cool, but to minimize any polyester clothing and maximize cotton clothing so there is even less daily contamination of plastic fibers. These steps are taken because plastics are everywhere, and Katherine is determined to find out just big the problem may be for Oregon’s fish.  

Katherine Lasdin working in the laminar flow hood that blows purified air towards the samples in Dr. Brander’s lab. PC: Cheyenne Pozar

Be sure to listen to the interview Sunday 7PM, either on the radio 88.7KBVR FM or live-stream, to learn how Katherine is conducting her research off the coast of Oregon to better understand our ocean ecosystems in the age of humans.

Listen to the podcast episode!

On this episode at the 16:00 mark we described how every time you wash clothing you will loose some microfibers; and how a different student was looking at this material under microscopes. That person is Sam Athey, a PhD student at the University of Toronto who also studies microplastics.