Image: NASA
Fall/Winter 2022
A fresh face for the Transboundary Freshwater Diplomacy Database
If there is one resource that connects all people and places, communities and countries, it’s water. Managing this precious resource across basins, and in the face of pressures such as climate change, can be a complicated endeavor. For over 25 years, Oregon State University has been helping managers, academics and others to make informed decisions about water using a massive database of freshwater resources. Comprising information on river basins, treaties and instances of water-related cooperation and conflict, the Transboundary Freshwater Diplomacy Database is the most comprehensive repository of its kind, providing nations with a roadmap to management best practices.
“The database essentially catalogs how countries cooperate and manage their shared water resources,” says Alexandra Caplan, the TFDD manager and a Ph.D. student in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State.
The TFDD was an outgrowth of research conducted by water diplomacy expert Aaron Wolf, a professor at Oregon State University. He wanted to find out if water was the basis for violent conflict, a common trope referenced in media and water policy circles. Wolf found that contrary to popular belief, water is a powerful motivator for diplomacy, rather than violence.
In the spirit of building capacity for global water diplomacy, the database has served governments, policymakers and organizations throughout the world since its inception. Users can access scholarly papers and books about water conflict and cooperation, peruse freshwater treaties or explore thousands of historical international water events through searchable databases hosted by the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering.
“It’s a unique resource,” Caplan says. “The database is one of the reasons I wanted to come to OSU.”
The longstanding freshwater tool is now undergoing a major overhaul. Among the updates is the addition of two new shared basins, bringing the total number of watersheds that span two or more countries to 312. Roughly 150 treaties will be translated into English to improve the database’s utility and discoverability. Users will also enjoy more information on water allocation, since previous efforts can help today’s managers make wiser water decisions. Finally, in collaboration with the OSU library, all the TFDD’s data sets will be overlaid on a map to make the information more visually accessible.
Caplan anticipates that this robust, user-friendly tool will assist even more decisionmakers throughout the globe. “The best part about working with this database is that it’s actually used,” she says. “It has very important, real-life purposes, and the work we are doing here is making a difference.”
More information: transboundarywaters.science.oregonstate.edu
Cascadia quakes: Water makes a difference
You may not be able to get blood from a stone, but there is certainly fluid contained in many rocks.
CEOAS’ Gary Egbert and Adam Schultz, along with colleagues, have developed a novel three-dimensional model of the fluid stored deep in Earth’s crust along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, providing new insight into how the accumulation and release of that fluid may influence seismic activity in the region.
“Water is a key player in both seismic activity and volcanism in Cascadia,” Egbert says. “This information could be used in conjunction with other data, and more detailed modeling, to better understand large earthquakes in Cascadia.”
Water naturally cycles down from the ocean into the Earth’s crust, where it accumulates and chemically combines with minerals. Where the oceanic crust is thrust beneath the continent along subduction zones, it heats up and releases water. The released fluids can weaken crustal rocks, leading to a crustal deformation, both from slow-acting seismic forces, and from very large, damaging earthquakes.
Improved knowledge of the subsurface fluid distribution is important for assessing the risk of seismic hazards in areas such as Cascadia, where there is significant potential for a catastrophic megathrust earthquake, Egbert says.
Field site at Allan Hills. Photo courtesy of Princeton University
To the core: Science teams to embark on inaugural field season to drill ice cores in Antarctica
Ice cores may be the closest thing we have to time travel. They contain sips of ancient air trapped in bubbles when the ice formed. These cylindrical samples provide an almost living-breathing picture of a bygone Earth — an extraordinary record of how our climate has changed over hundreds of thousands of years. Now, scientists with the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration, a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center based at Oregon State with collaborators across the country, are eager to travel even farther back in time. This November, they embark on an inaugural field season to the Allan Hills of Antarctica, with the aim of finding ice at least 3 million years old, and maybe even older. A more complete record of our climate will be an important step in understanding our future in a warming world.
Scientists have already uncovered old ice at the Allan Hills, but the COLDEX drilling team plans to drill a few new sites in search of even older samples.
Traditional cores are drilled at the summit dome of an ice sheet or glacier — the deeper you drill, the farther back in time you travel. But at Allan Hills, the ice has been scoured and brought to the surface by ice flow, causing the older ice to sit at the surface where scientists can more easily access it.
“Finding more of this old ice is key to understanding the climate during a time when we still don’t have much data,” says Julia Marks-Peterson, a CEOAS graduate student and part of the COLDEX science team heading to Antarctica in November.
Marks-Peterson explains that it’s especially important to get a climate record before 800,000 years, because ice age cycles looked different during this period. “It was also warmer as we go back farther, and we know this from other paleo records,” she says. “Ice core records from the last 800,000 years have shown a clear link between carbon dioxide levels and temperature. We want to know what the concentration of carbon dioxide was in this earlier, warmer period, and ice is the only way to get actual air from the past.”
Once the field team obtains the ice, the drilling team and COLDEX collaborators from Princeton University will date it. Oregon State’s role will be to measure the greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane. These and other measurements will be an important step to uncovering what controls the long-term cycles of Earth’s climate system.
The ice core drilling at Allan Hills is but one component of the Center. COLDEX Director and CEOAS Professor Ed Brook is leading the overall effort that involves 15 collaborating institutions, and says that “the new funding in the form of an NSF Science and Technology Center is a major step forward in the international hunt for old ice, and we are very excited to start this endeavor.”
Keep up with COLDEX at https://coldex.org.
Wright practices getting in and out of the sub. Photo courtesy of Dawn Wright
Deep-sea Dawn dives to the deepest depth
CEOAS Courtesy Professor and Esri Chief Scientist Dawn Wright has certainly earned her nickname, Deep-sea Dawn, with her intrepid adventures mapping the ocean bottom around the globe. Her latest accomplishment means she might be worthy of a new suffix. In the summer of 2022, Deepest-sea Dawn became the first Black person to dive in a submersible to the deepest known spot in the ocean, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. The expedition reached the incredible depth of nearly seven miles.
Diving in the submersible Limiting Factor with pilot Victor Vescovo of ocean research company Caladan Oceanic, Wright’s mission was to map a previously unexplored section of the Challenger Deep. Wright and Vescovo tested a new side-scan sonar technology for ocean mapping on the dive, which has never been used at such depths. Maps and data from the dive will be released on Esri’s ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.
After the ground-breaking dive, Wright received a phone call from White House Office of Science and Technology Policy head Alondra Nelson and OSTP Deputy Director for Climate and Environment Jane Lubchenco (also of Oregon State University) extending congratulations from the Biden-Harris Administration.
“[This expedition] is a great opportunity to perform more detailed mapping of the entirety of Challenger Deep, as well as to just fulfill my dream of visiting there,” Wright says. “There is still so much we don’t know about the vast majority of our own planet. This is why it is such an important scientific endeavor to understand the oceans better.”
An artistic rendering of the bathymetry of the Mariana Trench as seen from above. The darkest colors indicate deeper depths.
