Summer Restoration in a Bolivian Winter

                                 El Hospital Pietro Gamba in Anzaldo, Bolivia Credit: Duke

My biggest accomplishment this summer was being able to call the mountains of Bolivia home. Far away from the lecture halls of Duke, I encountered a profound, alternative education that included everything from learning traditional dances to working in a rural hospital laboratory to raising pigs.

Of course, living in Bolivia for two months had its challenges, like a diet in which potatoes were considered vegetables, repeated food poisoning from chicha, the local alcoholic drink consisting of fermented corn, lack of a consistent water source, many near-car accidents, and most of all a deep-seated machismo, but I feel that these were all almost inextricable aspects of a culture that left such a positive impression upon me.

Of course, the inextricability of such factors posed a problem for me as an intern at El Hospital Pietro Gamba encouraging sustainable development to promote public health. Although 80% of children had head lice, a vast majority contracted repeated gastrointestinal bacterial infections, and countless had scabies, the community seemed to get along contentedly. Regardless, with support from the Foundation for Sustainable Development and DukeEngage, my sponsor organizations, I leveraged the relatively new running water system, implemented only 25 years ago, to set in motion a comprehensive lice campaign, to obtain government funding of soap in public restrooms for at least two years, and to create preventative medicine informational materials.

The majority of my education, though, occurred outside the scope of my project. Most importantly, I’ve learned to openly embrace different forms of learning, like relaxation or soccer, that energize me to wholeheartedly pursue my rigorous biophysics career, which I am so fortunate to have at one of the best universities in the world.

The idea of the Aymara New Year illustrates my mentality poignantly: on the first day of the Aymara New Year, traditional Bolivians wish for health, prosperity, and happiness, just as we do in the United States. However, they have a deeper connection with Pachamama, or Mother Nature: on New Year’s Day, they wake up early in the morning to stand on the ground barefoot, awaiting the first rays of the sun. They believe that watching these rays rise above the horizon and light the earth will bring them energy for the entire year. In this, the Aymara New Year represents both personal aspiration and attenuation with the environment.

Similarly, I now aim to maintain a balance between self and surroundings: I hope to be more attuned to the world around me rather than single-mindedly submersing myself in quantum physics, as I believe that varied experiences will infuse me with energy in whatever I pursue. Now, back at Duke for the start of my junior year, I’m excited to begin blogging again and to continue my adventures and education here on campus.

Source: Duke University

Icelandic volcano sits on massive magma hot spot

Holuhraun fissure eruption on the flanks of the Bárðarbunga volcano in central Iceland on Oct. 4, 2014, showing the development of a lava lake in the foreground. Vapor clouds over the lava lake are caused by degassing of volatile-rich basaltic magma. Credit: Morten S. Riishuus, Nordic Volcanological Institute

Spectacular eruptions at Bárðarbunga volcano in central Iceland have been spewing lava continuously since Aug. 31. Massive amounts of erupting lava are connected to the destruction of supercontinents and dramatic changes in climate and ecosystems.

New research from UC Davis and Aarhus University in Denmark shows that high mantle temperatures miles beneath Earth's surface are essential for generating such large amounts of magma. In fact, the scientists found that the Bárðarbunga volcano lies directly above the hottest portion of the North Atlantic mantle plume.

The study, published online Oct. 5 and appearing in the November issue of Nature Geoscience, comes from Charles Lesher, professor of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Davis and a visiting professor at Aarhus University, and his former PhD student, Eric Brown, now a post-doctoral scholar at Aarhus University.

"From time to time the Earth's mantle belches out huge quantities of magma on a scale unlike anything witnessed in historic times," Lesher said. "These events provide unique windows into the internal working of our planet."

Such fiery events have produced large igneous provinces throughout Earth's history. They are often attributed to upwelling of hot, deeply sourced mantle material, or "mantle plumes."

Recent models have dismissed the role of mantle plumes in the formation of large igneous provinces, ascribing their origin instead to chemical anomalies in the shallow mantle.

Based on the volcanic record in and around Iceland over the last 56 million years and numerical modeling, Brown and Lesher show that high mantle temperatures are essential for generating the large magma volumes that gave rise to the North Atlantic large igneous provinces bordering Greenland and northern Europe.

Their findings further substantiate the critical role of mantle plumes in forming large igneous provinces.

"Our work offers new tools to constrain the physical and chemical conditions in the mantle responsible for large igneous provinces," Brown said. "There's little doubt that the mantle is composed of different types of chemical compounds, but this is not the dominant factor. Rather, locally high mantle temperatures are the key ingredient."

The research was supported by grants from the US National Science Foundation and by the Niels Bohr Professorship funded by Danish National Research Foundation.

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Source: University of California - Davis

'Tipping points' for sea level rise related flooding determined

Annapolis, Maryland, pictured here in 2012, is one of three major East Coast urban areas already being faced with nuisance flooding in excess of 30 days per year. Credit: With permission from Amy McGovern

By 2050, a majority of U.S. coastal areas are likely to be threatened by 30 or more days of flooding each year due to dramatically accelerating impacts from sea level rise, according to a new NOAA study, published today in the American Geophysical Union's online peer-reviewed journal Earth's Future.

The findings appear in the paper "From the Extreme to the Mean: Acceleration and Tipping Points for Coastal Inundation due to Sea Level Rise," and follows the earlier study, Sea Level Rise and Nuisance Flood Frequency Changes around the United States, by the report's co-author, William Sweet, Ph.D., oceanographer at NOAA's Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS). The new analysis was presented at a news conference today at the annual AGU fall meeting in San Francisco.

NOAA scientists Sweet and Joseph Park established a frequency-based benchmark for what they call "tipping points," when so-called nuisance flooding, defined by NOAA's National Weather Service as between one to two feet above local high tide, occurs more than 30 or more times a year.

Based on that standard, the NOAA team found that these tipping points will be met or exceeded by 2050 at most of the U.S. coastal areas studied, regardless of sea level rise likely to occur this century. In their study, Sweet and Park used a 1½ to 4 foot set of recent projections for global sea level rise by year 2100 similar to the rise projections of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, but also accounting for local factors such as the settlement of land, known as subsidence.

These regional tipping points will be surpassed in the coming decades in areas with more frequent storms, the report said. These tipping points will be also be exceeded in areas where local sea levels rise more than the global projection of one and half to four feet. This also includes coastal areas like Louisiana where subsidence, which is not a result of by climate change, is causing land to sink below sea level.

NOAA tide gauges show the annual rate of daily floods reaching these levels has drastically increased -- often accelerating -- and are now five to ten times more likely today than they were 50 years ago.

"Coastal communities are beginning to experience sunny-day nuisance or urban flooding, much more so than in decades past," said Sweet. "This is due to sea level rise. Unfortunately, once impacts are noticed, they will become commonplace rather quickly. We find that in 30 to 40 years, even modest projections of global sea level rise -- 1½ feet by the year 2100 -- will increase instances of daily high tide flooding to a point requiring an active, and potentially costly response, and by the end of this century, our projections show that there will be near-daily nuisance flooding in most of the locations that we reviewed."

"Communities across the country become increasingly vulnerable to water inundation and flooding, effective risk management is going to become more heavily reliant on environmental data and analysis," said Holly Bamford, Ph.D., NOAA acting assistant secretary for conservation and management. "Businesses, coastal managers, federal, state, and local governments, and non-governmental organizations can use research such as this as another tool as they develop plans to reduce vulnerabilities, adapt to change, and ensure they're resilient against future events."

"The importance of this research is that it draws attention to the largely neglected part of the frequency of these events. This frequency distribution includes a hazard level referred to as 'nuisance': occasionally costly to clean up, but never catastrophic or perhaps newsworthy," said Earth's Future editor Michael Ellis in accepting the paper for the online journal.

Ellis also observed that "the authors use observational data to drive home the important point that nuisance floods (from inundating seas) will cross a tipping point over the next several decades and significantly earlier than the 2100 date that is generally regarded as a target date for damaging levels of sea-level. The paper also raises the interesting question of what frequency of 'nuisance' corresponds to a perception of 'this is no longer a nuisance but a serious hazard due to its rapidly growing and cumulative impacts'."

The scientists base the projections on NOAA tidal stations where there is a 50-year or greater continuous record. The study does not include the Miami area, as the NOAA tide stations in the area were destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and a continuous 50-year data set for the area does not exist.

Based on that criteria, the NOAA team is projecting that Boston; New York City; Philadelphia; Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; Norfolk, Virginia; and Wilmington, North Carolina; all along the Mid-Atlantic coast, will soon make, or are already being forced to make, decisions on how to mitigate these nuisance floods earlier than planned. In the Gulf, NOAA forecasts earlier than anticipated floods for Galveston Bay and Port Isabel, Texas. Along the Pacific coast the earlier impacts will be most visible in the San Diego/La Jolla and San Francisco Bay areas.

Mitigation decisions could range from retreating further inland to coastal fortification or to a combination of "green" infrastructure using both natural resources such as dunes and wetland, along with "gray" human-made infrastructure such as sea walls and redesigned storm water systems.

Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration