Fall/Winter 2023
Full steam ahead
Connecting polar researchers, educators and artists
The planet’s polar regions are reserves of unique biodiversity, epicenters of climate change and gorgeously inspirational landscapes. But these frozen locales and the research conducted there aren’t easily accessible to the general public.
Enter Polar STEAM (for science, technology, engineering, arts and math). This OSU-based initiative links educators, artists and writers with NSF-funded scientists working at either pole in order to co-create research, artworks and educational resources which they will then share with the broader public. The program is wrapping up its inaugural season, in which it paired eight educators with polar scientists. All educators participated remotely this year, but that did not dampen their enthusiasm.
The educators hailed from Maryland to Hawaii, and were partnered with researchers from Arkansas to Washington. The program’s outreach and engagement lead, Melissa Barker, provides one example of a great Polar STEAM project: “Dave Eisenberg, who teaches at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Maryland, is working with a team from the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration that is testing Ice Diver, a thermal ice penetrator which will help study lakes beneath the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Dave’s students are making a small replica of Ice Diver and will practice ice drilling in 5-gallon buckets of ice.”
Program Manager Michelle Pratt says that one unique aspect of Polar STEAM is that participants each bring their professional expertise to the collaborative work, and the program offers everyone the opportunity to look at their own work in different ways. “This approach supports Polar STEAM’s vision to create the conditions for curiosity to thrive by facilitating integrated programs that embody inclusivity and authentic collaboration,” she says.
Polar STEAM will move ahead with a new cohort in the coming months, consisting of researchers, educators and, new for this season, artists and writers. In the longer term, the program will collaborate with Oregon State’s new Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts, or PRAx, which will curate a major polar exhibition and performances in the 2026/27 season.
Photo: NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries program
Decades of data
Researchers take the pulse of Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary
Sometimes scientists don’t need shiny, new data to gain important insights about an ecosystem — sometimes they can take a closer look at data that has already been collected.
A team from the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences is joining with others to take a fresh look at two decades of data collected in Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary off the coast of Washington. They are particularly interested in climate-related shifts in ocean health, which can have significant impacts on economically and culturally important fisheries.
The researchers will collaborate with Tribal scientists and resource managers, as well as researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“This collaboration is designed to fill an important gap in understanding the oceanographic conditions in a region that is seeing climate-related changes,” says Melanie Fewings, a CEOAS associate professor and the project’s leader.
Moorings placed in the marine sanctuary have been collecting data for decades about oceanographic conditions, including water temperature, salinity and dissolved oxygen concentrations. Funds have not been previously available to study the entirety of the collected data.
“One of the goals of this project is to try to define what ‘normal’ looks like in the marine sanctuary,” Fewings says. “We know there are strong anomalies, such as marine heatwaves, but we’d like to have a more robust understanding of what has been happening over the past two decades.”
Satellite imagery
reveals evidence of Ethiopian massacres
The Washington Post recently conducted an investigation revealing potential mass grave sites in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, consulting with experts including CEOAS Associate Professor Jamon Van Den Hoek.
Van Den Hoek provided analysis and interpretation of very-high resolution satellite images that offer evidence that new burial sites appeared where massacres of residents by Eritrean forces allied with the Ethiopian government had been reported. According to the Post, the analysis by Van Den Hoek “… show[s] a significant amount of vegetation disappeared [in the region of the reported massacre] starting roughly two weeks after Eritrean soldiers left the village. This gap in time is consistent with reports of the time it took for villagers to find, and feel comfortable moving, those who had been killed.”
The changes in vegetation suggested to Van Den Hoek that the ground had been disturbed in a way consistent with interment. Other experts consulted by the Post agreed that the images support the existence of mass graves, and later onsite inspections conducted by Post personnel added to that evidence.
“Our first analysis of the imagery in the days following reports of an attack turned up nothing. It was only when we examined images collected a few weeks later that we could detect evidence of ground disturbance that aligned with our understanding of a burial site,” he says. “We didn’t understand why there was an apparent delay, but learned later from the Washington Post’s field reporting that the community needed to wait to dig these graves until they felt it was safe to do so.”
Photo: Hannah O’Leary for Oregon State University
Marine and Geology Repository
gets electronic upgrades
CEOAS maintains an unusual library, filled not with books and periodicals, but with sediment cores and rocks collected from across the globe.
Like any library, users need to be able to search its holdings in order to use them. The National Science Foundation understands this challenge, and has awarded the college’s Marine and Geology Repository $4.6 million to expand access to the collection for researchers and students around the world.
The MGR contains more than 22 miles of oceanic sediment cores and tens of thousands of marine rock specimens that reveal Earth’s history and document changes in climate, biology, volcanic and seismic activity, meteorite interactions and more.
The funds will allow the repository to modernize, including in the area of digitizing its holdings, says Joseph Stoner, a CEOAS geology and geophysics professor and co-director of the MGR.
“We are continually digitizing our data holdings so that we can make it easier for researchers to find what they want to work on,” Stoner says. “Our goal is to have baseline data for everything in the collection available online.”
Some of the amazing things the repository holds include a sediment core estimated at 25 million years old; a sediment core collected from the Peru-Chile Trench, at a water depth of 26,500 feet; an Antarctic sediment core collected from a depth of 1,285 meters below the ice; and the oldest core in the collection, an Antarctic core collected on the icebreaker Burton Island in February 1962.
