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A new study indicates that some binary asteroids, like the pair depicted in orbit around each other in this visualization, have the ability to escape from each other shortly after they are formed. Image courtesy JPL/NASA

While the common perception of asteroids is that they are giant rocks lumbering about in orbit, a new study shows they actually are constantly changing “little worlds” that can give birth to smaller asteroids that split off to start their own lives as they circle around the sun.

Astronomers have known that small asteroids get “spun up” to fast rotation rates by sunlight falling on them, much like propellers in the wind.  The new results show when asteroids spin fast enough, they can undergo “rotational fission,” splitting into two pieces which then begin orbiting each other.  Such “binary asteroids” are fairly common in the solar system.

The new study, led by Petr Pravec of the Astronomical Institute in the Czech Republic and involving the University of Colorado at Boulder and 15 other institutions around the world, shows that many of these binary asteroids do not remain bound to each other but escape, forming two asteroids in orbit around the sun when there previously was just one.  The study appears in the Aug. 26 issue of Nature.

The researchers studied 35 so-called “asteroid pairs,” separate asteroids in orbit around the sun that have come close to each other at some point in the past million years — usually within a few miles, or kilometers — at very low relative speeds. They measured the relative brightness of each asteroid pair, which correlates to its size, and determined the spin rates of the asteroid pairs using a technique known as photometry.

“It was clear to us then that just computing orbits of the paired asteroids was not sufficient to understand their origin,” said Pravec.  “We had to study the properties of the bodies.  We used photometric techniques that allowed us to determine their rotation rates and study their relative sizes.”

The research team showed that all of the asteroid pairs in the study had a specific relationship between the larger and smaller members, with the smallest one always less than 60 percent of the size of its companion asteroid. The measurement fits precisely with a theory developed in 2007 by study co-author and CU-Boulder aerospace engineering sciences Professor Daniel Scheeres.

Scheeres’ theory predicts that if a binary asteroid forms by rotational fission, the two can only escape from each other if the smaller one is less than 60 percent of the size of the larger asteroid. When one of the asteroids in the pair is small enough, it can “make a break for it” and escape the orbital dance, essentially moving away to start its own “asteroid family,” he said. During rotational fission, the asteroids separate gently from each other at relatively low velocities.

“This is perhaps the clearest observational evidence that asteroids aren’t just large rocks in orbit about the sun that keep the same shape over time,” said Scheeres. “Instead, they are little worlds that may be constantly changing as they grow older, sometimes giving birth to smaller asteroids that then start their own life in orbit around the sun.”

While asteroid pairs were first discovered in 2008 by paper co-author David Vokrouhlicky of Charles University in Prague, their formation process remained a mystery prior to the new Nature study.

When the binary asteroid forms, the orbit of the two asteroids around each other is initially chaotic, Scheeres said. “The smaller guy steals rotational energy from the bigger guy, causing the bigger guy to rotate more slowly and the size of the orbit of the two bodies to expand.  If the second asteroid is small enough, there is enough excess energy for the pair to escape from each other and go into their own orbits around the sun.”

Several telescopes around the world were used for the study, with the most thorough observations made with the 1-meter telescope at Wise Observatory in the Negev Desert in Israel and the Danish 1.54-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile. “This study makes the clear connection between asteroids spinning up and breaking into pieces, showing that asteroids are not static, monolithic bodies,” said Vokrouhlicky.

The asteroids that populate the solar system are primarily concentrated in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter some 200 million miles from the sun, but extend all the way down into the inner solar system, which are known as the near-Earth asteroids. There are likely about a million asteroids larger than 0.6 miles, or 1 kilometer, in diameter orbiting the sun.  Last month, NASA’s WISE spacecraft spotted 25,000 never-before-seen asteroids in just six months.

Astronomers believe most asteroids are not solid chunks of rock, but rather piles of debris that come in shapes ranging from snowmen and dog bones to potatoes and bananas, with each asteroid essentially glued together by gravitational forces.

“Sunlight striking an asteroid less than 10 kilometers across can change its rotation over millions of years, a slow motion version of how a windmill reacts to the wind,” said Scheeres, who has studied asteroids for the past decade. “This causes the smaller asteroid to rotate more rapidly until it can undergo rotational fission. It’s not hard for these asteroid pairs to be pushed over the edge.”

CU-Boulder doctoral student Seth Jacobson of CU-Boulder’s astrophysical and planetary sciences department, a co-author on the Nature paper, said the most surprising part of the study was showing that sunlight played the key role in “birthing” asteroids. “There was a time when most astronomers referred to asteroids as vermin,” said Jacobson. “But the more we learn about them, the more exciting they are.  They are not just big chunks of rock, but have the dynamic ability to evolve.”

The asteroids in the study ranged from about 1 kilometer to about 10 kilometers or about 0.6 miles to 6 miles in diameter, said Jacobson.  He said one of the biggest questions is what lies beneath the surfaces of asteroids.  “This is something we just don’t know yet,” he said.

Asteroids have become a hot topic, said Scheeres. The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa made two landings on the asteroid Itokawa in 2005 before its recent return to Earth — the first spacecraft ever to visit an asteroid and return to the planet.  Scientists are hopeful the spacecraft recovered at least some particles from the asteroid, which may give them more information about the origin and evolution of the solar system roughly 4.6 billion years ago.

President Barack Obama this year announced his vision for planetary exploration that involves skipping future manned moon landings in favor of sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid in the next two decades.  Obama and others see a successful manned asteroid landing as a stepping stone to eventually landing humans on Mars.

“Asteroids are important to understanding life on Earth,” said Pravec.  He pointed to the Chicxulub asteroid believed to have plowed into the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago and caused dinosaurs to go extinct, essentially resetting the evolutionary clock on Earth. Some asteroids have even been found to contain amino acids — the building blocks of life — causing some scientists to speculate that life on Earth could have come from asteroids pelting the planet.

Other co-authors of the study are from institutions in North Carolina, California, Massachusetts, Chile, Israel, Slovakia, the Ukraine, Spain and France.

By Jim Scott
Office of News Services
This originally appeared on the news services site

August 2010

Patti Adler

CU-Boulder sociology Professor Patti Adler, along with her husband Peter, a professor in the department of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver, was presented with the George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Atlanta, Ga., on Aug. 16.

This is the first time this honor has been presented jointly to a collaborating couple. The Society represents one of the three major branches of theoretical sociology, and traces its roots to the Chicago School in the 1920s. It is most often associated with the qualitative research traditions of field research and ethnography. The previous winners of the Mead Award are some of the pioneering scholars who brought the philosophy of pragmatism to the social sciences.

The Adlers have been co-authoring since 1972 and their career accomplishments include the co-writing and/or editing of over 20 books, more than 100 scholarly articles and chapters, and the reprinting of their work more than 100 times in readers and anthologies.

They received their A.B. degrees from Washington University in St. Louis, their M.A.s from the University of Chicago, and their Ph.D.s from the University of California, San Diego. Paradise Laborers, published in 2004, was the recipient of the North Central Sociological Association’s Scholarly Achievement Award. Their most recent book, The Tender Cut: The Social Transformation of Self-Injury, is forthcoming with NYU Press. From 1986-94, they served as Editors of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and they were the Founding Editors of Sociological Studies of Child Development.

Their work has been translated into Dutch, French, Italian, German, and Japanese. From 2006-2007, they served as Co-Presidents of the Midwest Sociological Society.

Patti Adler has previously received the Excellence in Teaching Award, the Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Work, and the College Scholar Award at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Office of News Services
This originally appeared on the news services site

August 2010

A new study of the High Arctic climate roughly 50 million years ago led by the University of Colorado at Boulder helps to explain how ancient alligators and giant tortoises were able to thrive on Ellesmere Island well above the Arctic Circle, even as they endured six months of darkness each year.

The new study, which looked at temperatures during the early Eocene period 52 to 53 million years ago, also has implications for the impacts of future climate change as Arctic temperatures continue to rise, said University of Colorado at Boulder Associate Professor Jaelyn Eberle of the department of geological sciences, lead author of the study.

The team used a combination of oxygen isotope ratios from fossil bone and tooth enamel of mammals, fish and turtles that lived together on Ellesmere Island to estimate the average annual Eocene temperature for the site.  They also were able to tease out temperature estimates for the warmest and coldest months of the year, critical data that should help scientists better understand past and future biodiversity in the High Arctic as the climate warms, including the geographical ranges and species richness of animals and plants.

The team concluded the average temperatures of the warmest month on Ellesmere Island during the early Eocene were from 66 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit (19-20 degrees C), while the coldest month temperature was about 32 to 38 degrees F (0-3.5 degrees C).  “Our data gathered from multiple organisms indicate it probably did not get below freezing on Ellesmere Island during the early Eocene, which has some interesting implications,” she said.

A paper on the subject was published in this month’s issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters.  Co-authors included Henry Fricke from Colorado College, John Humphrey and Logan Hackett from the Colorado School of Mines, Michael Newbrey from University of Alberta, Edmonton, and Howard Hutchison from the University California, Berkeley.  The National Science Foundation funded the study.

“This is arguably the most comprehensive data set for the early Eocene High Arctic, and certainly explains how alligators and giant tortoises could live on Ellesmere Island some 52 to 53 million years ago,” said Eberle, who also is the curator of fossil vertebrates at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

During the Eocene, Ellesmere Island — which is adjacent to Greenland — probably was similar to swampy cypress forests in the southeastern United States today, said Eberle. Eocene fossil evidence collected there in recent decades by various teams indicate the lush landscape hosted giant tortoises, aquatic turtles, large snakes, alligators, flying lemurs, tapirs, and hippo-like and rhino-like mammals.

The bone and tooth enamel of vertebrate fossils contains biogenic apatite — a mineral that is fossilized after the death of living organisms and which can be used as a “flight recorder” to infer paleoclimate conditions.  Since all of the fossil materials were from the same stratigraphic layer and locality, the oxygen isotope ratios from the animals are linked to the temperatures of both ingested river water and precipitation at the time, allowing them to better estimate temperatures in the Eocene both annually and seasonally, she said.

“We use the water that the animals were drinking as a proxy for paleotemperature,” said Eberle.  “In mammal fossils, for example, we can analyze the oxygen isotope ratios in a sequence along the length of a large fossil tooth and estimate the warm-month and cold-month averages during the Eocene because teeth grow year round. When it comes to oxygen isotope values in tooth enamel, what we found for these creatures is that you are what you drink,” she said.

The team looked at teeth from a large, hippo-like mammal known as Coryphodon, as well as bones from bowfin fish and shells and bones from aquatic turtles from the Emydidae family, the largest and most diverse family of contemporary pond turtles. While Coryphodon and bowfins grew throughout the year, the turtles exhibited shell growth only during summer months, much like turtles that live today in non-equatorial areas.

“By looking at a host of animals with different physiologies, we were better able to pin down warm- and cold-month temperatures,” she said. “Many aspects of biodiversity and species richness are related more to seasonal temperatures and ranges such as cold-month means rather than to mean annual temperature.”

Bowfins — which have a long dorsal fin and powerful jaws — inhabit a variety of waters today from the Saint Lawrence River drainage in Quebec south to Florida and Texas. The team also compared the ranges of bowfins, aquatic turtles and giant tortoises of today with their ranges in the Eocene to help them estimate temperatures, according to co-author Newbrey, an expert in both contemporary and extinct fishes.

Eberle said the new study implies Eocene alligators could withstand slightly cooler winters than their present-day counterparts, although data from captive alligators show they are heartier than other members of the crocodilian family and can survive short intervals of subfreezing temperatures by submerging themselves in the water.

In contrast, the existence of large land tortoises in the Eocene High Arctic is still somewhat puzzling, said Eberle, since today’s large tortoises inhabit places like the Galapagos Islands where the cold-month average temperature is about 50 degrees F (10 degrees C.)

But during the late Pleistocene period some 10,000 to 50,000 years ago — when air temperatures were comparable to those today — large land tortoises were found as far north as present-day Pennsylvania and Illinois, Eberle said.  This suggests their present range in the Americas does not represent their fullest geographic range as allowed by climate. Factors like hunting by early Native Americans and the past extent of glaciers probably are playing a role in today’s distribution of giant tortoises, she said.

Eberle, who calls the new results “a deep time analogue” for today’s rapidly warming Arctic region, said quantitative estimates of early Eocene climate conditions at high latitudes like Ellesmere Island are rare and often contradictory.  Previous estimates of the early Eocene mean annual temperatures have ranged from 39 to 68 degrees F (4 to 20 degrees C), a temperature range equivalent to geographic ranges reaching from Canada to Florida.

There is high concern by scientists over a proposal to mine coal on Ellesmere Island at the ancient fossil site by WestStar Resources Inc. headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Eberle said. “Sites like this are unique and extremely valuable resources that are of international importance, and shouldn’t be allowed to disappear,” she said. “Our concern is that coal mining activities could damage such sites and they will be lost forever.”

Today Ellesmere Island is one of the coldest, driest environments on Earth and features tundra, permafrost, ice sheets, sparse vegetation and few mammals.  The temperatures range from roughly minus 37 degrees F in winter (minus 38 C) to 48 degrees F (8 degrees C) in summer.

The new study foreshadows the impacts of continuing global warming on Arctic plants and animals, Eberle said.  Temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as those at mid-latitudes as greenhouse gases build up in Earth’s atmosphere, due primarily to human activities like fossil fuel burning and deforestation, according to climate scientists.

A sound slide show on the research effort can be found by clicking on the story headline at http://www.colorado.edu/news/.

By Jim Scott
Office of News Services
This originally appeared on the news services site

August 2010

A planned $110 million telescope in Chile that the University of Colorado at Boulder is partnering on to probe distant galaxies and stellar nurseries has been named as the top construction priority for mid-sized, ground-based telescopes by the National Research Council in the coming decade.

The 25-meter, far-infrared and submillimeter telescope effort involves two major partners — Cornell University and the California Institute of Technology — and three other partners, including CU-Boulder and Canadian and German universities.  Known as CCAT, the facility would be built in the Atacama Desert in Chile at about 18,500 feet above sea level and would be the largest, most precise and highest astronomical facility of its kind in the world, said Associate Professor Jason Glenn, who is spearheading the CU-Boulder portion of the CCAT project.

The telescope was selected as part of the Astro2010 Decadal Survey produced by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences and which recommends priorities for the most important scientific and technical activities every 10 years in astronomy and astrophysics. The report, called the “Astro2010 Decadal Survey: New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics,” was issued Aug. 13.

“With a broad scientific agenda, CCAT will enable studies of the evolution of galaxies across cosmic time, the formation of clusters of galaxies, the formation of stars in the Milky Way, the formation and evolution of planets, and the nature of objects in the outer solar system,” according to the report.

“We are very excited about this selection because it means this telescope now has a very high probability of being built,” said Glenn of CU-Boulder’s astrophysical and planetary sciences department.  “This state-of-the-art facility will allow us to look back in time to when galaxies first appeared in the universe.”

The Astro2010 committee is recommending that the National Science Foundation provide one-third of the cost of the project.  The CCAT project partners also are raising funds for the telescope, some of which already have been gathered through private donations and university contributions.

CCAT fundraising by CU-Boulder is under way and will require roughly $5.5 million in capital toward the cost of the facility as well as a contribution toward annual operating costs in the future, said Glenn.

Technology for the CCAT telescope’s instruments already is being developed at CU-Boulder.  Glenn’s lab at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy is building a state-of-the-art camera using an array of 2,400 superconducting detectors. CU-Boulder is collaborating with the California Institute of Technology on the effort.

CCAT will gather radiation from submillimeter wavelengths, which are longer than visible and infrared light but shorter than radio waves, Glenn said. The telescope would be a workhorse for astronomers, because about half of the light emanating from distant stars and galaxies reaches Earth at far-infrared and submillimeter wavelengths.

“This facility will enable us to study the earliest stages of star and galaxy formation, as well as the initial conditions of solar systems like our own,” Glenn said.

A number of CASA faculty and students will be involved in the CCAT effort. Professor Jack Burns is serving as chairman of the CCAT board of directors.  Other faculty members from CASA include John Bally, Jeremy Darling, Nils Halverson, Dick McCray and Michael Shull.

For more information visit the Web at http://www.submm.org/.

By Jim Scott
Office of News Services
This originally appeared on the news services site

August 2010

While petrochemical air pollution in Houston is decreasing, industry there still is underestimating the amounts of reactive chemicals released into the air that lead to ground-level ozone problems, according to a new study by a team of scientists at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a joint institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Image of WD-P3 on the tarmac in Houston courtesy of CIRES. Photo by Bill Dube/NOAA

A thick blanket of yellow haze hovering over Houston as a result of chemical pollution produced by manufacturing petroleum products may be getting a little bit thinner, according to a new study.

But the new findings — which have implications for petrochemical-producing cities around the world — come with a catch, says a team of scientists from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, a joint institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The problem is that industry still significantly underestimates the amounts of reactive chemicals being released into the air, according to airplane measurements made by the research team as part of the study. Inaccuracies in the reporting of emissions pose big challenges for the reduction and regulation of emissions coming from petrochemical plants. The emissions are important to monitor, because some chemicals released from the plants react to form ground-level ozone that can be harmful to human health and agricultural crops.

“Emissions may have decreased some, but there’s still a long way to go,” said study author Joost de Gouw, a CIRES atmospheric scientist. “And the emission inventories by industry were not any better in 2006 than they were in 2000.”

States that regularly suffer from ozone problems like Texas are required by the federal government to scientifically model what happens during air pollution episodes and develop plans for mitigation. For that to happen effectively, modelers need good inventories, says the research team.

“Initial inventories are not based on measurements. They’re based on estimates,” said de Gouw. “When you go back to verify those estimates, we find they’re not very accurate.”

To check on those estimates, lead study author Rebecca Washenfelder of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory and CIRES, along with de Gouw, took to the plumes in an aircraft, the NOAA WP-3D, outfitted with an array of air quality measuring instruments. The plane flew through emissions over Houston as part of the second Texas Air Quality Study in 2006, sampling air for signs of ingredients of the chemical reaction that makes ozone, including nitrogen oxides and reactive hydrocarbons.

Washenfelder, de Gouw and their study colleagues compared these measurements with data taken during similar flyovers from the first Texas Air Quality Study in 2000 and another flight in 2002. They then compared those measurements against emissions inventories for each year. In all cases, the industry-reported inventories — which are supplied to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — didn’t agree with the measured amounts of pollutants.

The conflicting data is likely a problem of estimation and general industry practice. “There are tens of thousands of valves and fittings installed throughout the plants in most cases with an assumed — not measured — leak rate for each,” Washenfelder said.

But industry is taking steps to lessen ozone-causing emissions, and repairs to petrochemical plants may have contributed to recent emission declines. Washenfelder and de Gouw found that the concentrations of ethene and propene — which both contribute to ozone formation — dropped by 52 percent and 48 percent respectively between 2000 and 2006.

The two scientists see the study as a wake-up call for emissions monitoring.

“There are a lot of discussions with the petrochemical industry on how to measure these things instead of relying on estimates,” said de Gouw. “I think the No. 1 issue here is awareness. As soon as industry is aware that there could be emissions problems down the road, they can figure out how to fix them at lower cost.”

The study been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. Funding for the project came from NOAA Air Quality, NOAA Climate Research and Modeling Program, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship.

A podcast on the study can be heard at http://colorado.edu/news/podcasts/.

By Morgan Heim
CIRES

August 2010

An international drilling team involving CU-Boulder has hit bedrock 1.5 miles below the icy surface of Greenland, pulling up deep ice cores from the last interglacial period that should help climate scientists assess the risks of abrupt climate change on a warming Earth. Image courtesy NEEM ice core drilling project, http://neem.nbi.ku.dk/.

An international science team involving the University of Colorado at Boulder that is working on the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project hit bedrock July 27 after two summers of work, drilling down more than 1.5 miles in an effort to help assess the risks of abrupt future climate change on Earth.

Led by Denmark and the United States, the team recovered ice from the Eemian interglacial period from about 115,000 to 130,000 years ago, a time when temperatures were 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit above today’s temperatures. During the Eemian — the most recent interglacial period on Earth — there was substantially less ice on Greenland, and sea levels were more than 15 feet higher than today.

While three previous ice cores drilled in Greenland in the last 20 years recovered ice from the Eemian, the deepest layers were compressed and folded, making the data difficult to interpret.  The new effort, known as NEEM, has allowed researchers to obtain thicker, more intact annual ice layers near the bottom of the core that are expected to contain crucial information about how Earth’s climate functions, said CU-Boulder Professor Jim White, lead U.S. investigator on the project.

“Scientists from 14 countries have come together in a common effort to provide the science our leaders and policy makers need to plan for our collective future,” said White, who directs CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and is an internationally known ice core expert.  “I hope that NEEM is a foretaste of the kind of cooperation we need for the future, because we all share the world.”

Annual ice layers formed over millennia in Greenland by compressed snow reveal information on past temperatures and precipitation levels, as well as the contents of ancient atmospheres, said White. Ice cores from previous drilling efforts revealed temperature spikes of more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit in just 50 years in the Northern Hemisphere.

White said the new NEEM ice cores will more accurately portray past changes in temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations in the Eemian, making it the best analogue for future climate change on Earth. An international study released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week showed the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record for the planet.

The NEEM project involves 300 scientists and students and is led by Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, director of the University of Copenhagen’s Centre of Ice and Climate. The United States portion of the effort is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.

The two meters of ice just above bedrock from NEEM — which is located at one of the most inaccessible parts of the Greenland ice sheet — go beyond the Eemian interglacial period into the previous ice age and contains rocks and other material that have not seen sunlight for hundreds of thousands of years, said White. The researchers expect the cores to be rich in DNA and pollen that can tell scientists about the plants that existed in Greenland before it became covered with ice.

The cores samples are being studied in detail using a suite of measurements, including stable water isotopes that reveal information about temperature and moisture changes back in time. The team is using state-of-the art laser instruments to measure the isotopes, as well as atmospheric gas bubbles trapped in the ice and ice crystals to understand past variations in climate on a year-by-year basis, said White.

As part of the project, the researchers want to determine how much smaller the Greenland ice sheet was 120,000 years ago when the temperatures were higher than present, as well as how much and how fast the Greenland ice sheet contributed to sea level.  “We expect that our findings will increase our knowledge on the future climate system and increase our ability to predict the speed and final height of sea level rise during the Eemian,” said Dahl-Jensen.

The NEEM facility includes a large dome, a drilling rig to extract 3-inch in diameter ice cores, drilling trenches, labs and living quarters. The United States is leading the laboratory analysis of atmospheric gases trapped in bubbles within the cores, including greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane.

Other nations involved in NEEM include Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Other U.S. institutions involved in the effort include Oregon State University, Penn State, the University of California, San Diego and Dartmouth College.

Other CU-Boulder participants include postdoctoral researcher Vasilii Petrenko and doctoral student Tyler Jones. White also is a professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department.

The vast majority of climate scientists attribute rising temperatures on Earth to increased greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere as a result of human activity. In 2008 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that temperatures on Earth could rise by as much as 10 degrees F above today’s temperatures in the next century, primarily due to atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Additional information and photos on the NEEM effort can be found on the web at http:// www.neem.ku.dk.

By Jim Scott
Office of News Services
This originally appeared on the news services site

August 2010

Every academic year for more than 25 years, University of Colorado at Boulder graduate students and alumni have been awarded Fulbright scholarships and the 2010-11 term is no exception with five recipients heading to other countries for graduate study, advanced research and teaching projects through the U.S. government’s flagship international exchange program.

CU-Boulder’s Office of International Education, or OIE, also has received a grant from the Fulbright program to host the Fulbright Gateway Orientation Aug. 2-6, serving as the first point of contact for 38 international students arriving in the United States to carry out the Fulbright program at campuses across the country. This will be the second year CU has hosted the event.

Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. The program operates in over 155 countries and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries.

“The five CU-Boulder students who have earned Fulbright scholarships bring honor to themselves, the university and the nation,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “These wonderful students embody the scholarly excellence and commitment to civic engagement of their peers at CU-Boulder, and they will represent our country well in the nations where they will soon live and study.”

Christa Hasenkopf, a CU-Boulder doctoral candidate in atmospheric and oceanic sciences will study the mass loading and transport of pollution in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia by installing aethalometers, air pollution monitoring instruments. She will collaborate with Mongolian agencies and researchers to examine existing records of air pollution and organize outreach activities educating the public on atmospheric science.

“The Fulbright program offers an unparalleled opportunity for recipients to dive head first into a foreign community, explore research projects of their own design and, frankly, have an adventure of a lifetime,” said Hasenkopf. “For my own career, I also look at the Fulbright program as a chance to get experience in science policy and diplomacy, which can be difficult for early-career scientists to obtain through traditional means.”

John Dykes, a 2009 graduate of CU-Boulder with a bachelor’s degree in international affairs and Germanic studies, will be an English teaching assistant in Germany, working with both German and Turkish students to gain insight into the issues faced by minority groups and promote mutual understanding.

Kathryn Williamson, who graduated from CU-Boulder in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in women and gender studies and Spanish and Portuguese, will carry out an ethnographic study on family-centered maternity at a hospital in Argentina. Williamson’s broader focus is how dominant paradigms in biomedicine can change and benefit patients.

Mark Arnoldy, a 2010 graduate of CU-Boulder with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, will design a plan to integrate the Community-based Management of Acute Malnutrition, or CMAM program, into the national public health system of Nepal, focusing on severely malnourished children and the use of ready-to-use therapeutic food, or RUTF.

Sarah Lawrence, who earned a master’s degree in 2010 in speech and language pathology, will conduct her Fulbright studies and research as an English teaching assistant in Uruguay. She plans to write an ethnography about Uruguayan families’ attitudes toward education and literacy.

“The Fulbright program has a strong post-World War II record of attracting bright scholars to this program of educational and cultural sharing,” said Larry Bell, director of CU-Boulder’s OIE. “CU-Boulder has sent many faculty, staff and student participants out into the world and brought them in from around the world through this rigorous program of study and research. These participants are but the most current examples.”

The Fulbright Gateway Orientation through the CU-Boulder OIE is sponsored by the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and will provide international students talks on everything from the U.S. academic system and cross-cultural awareness to health, wellness and time and stress management.

The visiting Fulbright students also will be welcomed with remarks by Chancellor DiStefano. They will attend a musical play and take tours of local spots including the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Celestial Seasonings tea company.

For a list of current and former CU-Boulder Fulbright winners visit http://www.colorado.edu/oie/admin/CUFulbrightHighlights.html. The Fulbright Gateway Orientation information for 2010 is found at http://www.colorado.edu/oie/FulbGateway/home.html.

By Elizabeth Lock
Office of News Services
This originally appeared on the news services site

August 2010

The larva of a thistle-feeding shield beetle. (Photo by Jeff Mitton)

By Jeff Mitton

A meadow on Flagstaff Mountain is home to two species of tortoise or shield beetles.

The names for this group of beetles come from their covering, which extends beyond the margins of the body to cover the legs, head and antennae and forms a seal with the substrate, usually a flat portion of a leaf. Adults protect themselves passively with a translucent shield, but larvae protect themselves more vigorously with a fecal shield.

Our local tortoise beetles are relatively easy to find, for they are restricted to specific host plants. The horse mint tortoise beetle,Physonata unipunctata, feeds on wild bergamot,Monarda fistulosa, which is also known colloquially as horse mint or bee balm. Bergamot is an herbaceous perennial native to North America. It grows 2 to 3 feet tall and is topped by a globe of tubular lavender flowers. Young larvae are black, older larvae are predominantly yellow with white and black spots, lines and spikes.

Thistle-feeding shield beetles,Cassida rubiginosa, were accidentally introduced from Europe to Canada in 1901, and were later purposefully introduced to Virginia to control Canada thistle. They feed on a variety of introduced and native thistles, including our local musk thistle and bull thistle. Larvae are mottled in tan, olive, green and white and they have many branched spines projecting from their sides. Their colors, texture and spines camouflage them on thistle leaves.

Larvae of both species consume the leaves of their host plants, ingesting defensive compounds toxic to most insect species. But unlike many species of butterflies, these larvae do not sequester the compounds in specific tissues, but they release them in tarry feces. The feces are not discarded; larvae spool them on their forked tails, and arch their tails to suspend the fetid mass over their bodies as a fecal shield.

The term “fecal shield” does not tell the whole story, for a shield is a defensive weapon. When I approach the larvae, the thistle-feeding larvae hold the fecal mass closer to their bodies in a defensive posture. But the larvae on bergamot lift the fecal mass high and brandish it as a weapon. The term “fecal shield” is used in the academic literature, but to recognize its offensive function I prefer the terms “turd truncheon” or “club of crap.”

Experimental studies have demonstrated the efficacy of the shields and clubs. If the shield is removed, insect predators soon eat the unshielded larvae. If the shield is rinsed to remove the defensive chemicals but left otherwise intact, insect predators soon eat the deodorized larvae. Thus, the purloined plant defensive chemical compounds effectively ward off predators.

Other studies showed that bigger shields and clubs worked better, and thus older larvae, which are larger and carry disproportionately larger weapons, are more fully protected. The older larvae of our local tortoise and shield beetles carry shields or clubs that weigh 50 percent of their body weight. Divide your weight in half, and imagine carrying that weight around to discourage predators.

It seems that no defense system is perfect, and as aesthetically appealing as this system is, it has its shortcomings. Predators with long, piercing and sucking mouthparts, such as damsel bugs and some stink bugs, probe through the fecal club to pierce and drain the larvae.

It may not be a perfect defense, but trust me, when something brandishes a club of crap at you, they have your undivided attention.

Jeff Mitton (mitton@colorado.edu) is chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado. This column originally appeared in the Boulder Camera.

July 26, 2010

Professor Michael Radelet

A new study examining death sentences in North Carolina over a 28-year period ending in 2007 shows that among similar homicides, the odds of a death sentence for those who are suspected of killing whites are approximately three times higher than the odds of a death sentence for those suspected of killing blacks.

The study, to be published in The North Carolina Law Review next year, was conducted by Michael Radelet, a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Glenn Pierce, a research scientist in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston. It is the most comprehensive study of the modern administration of the death penalty in North Carolina to date.

“It’s just kind of baffling that in this day and age — race matters,” said Radelet, one of the nation’s leading experts on the death penalty.

One of the top states to use the death penalty over the past 30 years, North Carolina has one of the nation’s largest death rows with 155 men and four women facing execution.

And with its passage of the Racial Justice Act last year, North Carolina became the second state in the nation after Kentucky to allow murder suspects and those already on death row to present statistical evidence of racial bias. The law is aimed at ensuring that the race of the defendant or victim doesn’t play a key role in the sentence a person receives in death penalty cases.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that statistical evidence of racial bias could not be considered in individual cases, but that states could pass their own legislation to do so. The study by Radelet and Pierce is the first to be released since North Carolina passed the Racial Justice Act.

Radelet and Pierce examined 15,281 homicides in North Carolina between 1980 and 2007, of which 368 resulted in death sentences for those convicted.

Using Supplemental Homicide Reports from the FBI, as well as other records from the North Carolina Department of Correction and the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the authors obtained information on all death row cases in which the victim was either black or white. The other 16 cases were eliminated.

The authors also looked for any additional factors — such as multiple victims or homicides accompanied by an additional felony, such as rape or robbery — that might explain the disparity in death penalty sentencing. These additional factors partially explained death penalty decisions, but even after statistically controlling for their effect, race remained an important predictor of who was sentenced to death.

An examination of these factors “show that the reason why the probability of a death sentence is higher for those who are suspected of killing whites than for those who are suspected of killing blacks is not because the former cases tend to be more aggravated,” the authors wrote. “Regardless of whether there are zero, one or two additional legally relevant factors present, cases with white victims are more likely to result in a death sentence than are cases with black victims.”

Specifically, the study found that the odds of receiving a death sentence in North Carolina “in a white victim case are on average 2.96 times higher than are the odds of a death sentence in a black victim case.” The finding is statistically significant and the probability of obtaining a similar result if racial bias were not an option is less than 5 percent, according to the authors.

“Given these findings the authors would advocate continuous monitoring of the death penalty in North Carolina to see if patterns of racial bias change,” Radelet said.

By Peter Caughey
Office of News Services
This originally appeared on the news services site

July 2010

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology

By Reiland Rabaka, associate professor of ethnic studies

Lexington Books

In this intellectual history-making volume, multiple award-winning W. E. B. Du Bois scholar Reiland Rabaka offers the first book-length treatment of Du Bois’s seminal sociological discourse: from Du Bois as inventor of the sociology of race to Du Bois as the first sociologist of American religion; from Du Bois as a pioneer of urban and rural sociology to Du Bois as innovator of the sociology of gender and inaugurator of intersectional sociology; and, finally, from Du Bois as groundbreaking sociologist of education and critical criminologist to Du Bois as dialectical critic of the disciplinary decadence of sociology and the American academy.

“Against Epistemic Apartheid” brings new and intensive archival research into critical dialogue with the watershed work of classical and contemporary, male and female, black and white, national and international sociologists and critical social theorists’ Du Bois studies.

“Against Epistemic Apartheid” offers an accessible introduction to Du Bois’s major contributions to sociology and, therefore, will be of interest to scholars and students not only in sociology, but also African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as scholars and students in “traditional” disciplines such as history, philosophy, political science, economics, education and religion.

“This is a powerful book! Professor Rabaka not only shows how DuBois produced against all odds an alternative epistemology to challenge the social scientific discourse of his period. And since the ‘epistemic apartheid’ remains firmly in place, we all would be well-served by understanding the DuBoisian episteme.”

—Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Author of “White Logic, White Methods”

Newly detected rising sea levels in parts of the Indian Ocean, including the coastlines of the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, Sri Lanka, Sumatra and Java, appear to be at least partly a result of human-induced increases of atmospheric greenhouse gases, says a study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The study, which combined sea surface measurements going back to the 1960s and satellite observations, indicates anthropogenic climate warming likely is amplifying regional sea rise changes in parts of the Indian Ocean, threatening inhabitants of some coastal areas and islands, said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Weiqing Han, lead study author. The sea level rise — which may aggravate monsoon flooding in Bangladesh and India — could have far-reaching impacts on both future regional and global climate.

The key player in the process is the Indo-Pacific warm pool, an enormous, bathtub-shaped area of the tropical oceans stretching from the east coast of Africa west to the International Date Line in the Pacific. The warm pool has heated by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, or 0.5 degrees Celsius, in the past 50 years, primarily caused by human-generated increases of greenhouse gases, said Han.

“Our results from this study imply that if future anthropogenic warming effects in the Indo-Pacific warm pool dominate natural variability, mid-ocean islands such as the Mascarenhas Archipelago, coasts of Indonesia, Sumatra and the north Indian Ocean may experience significantly more sea level rise than the global average,” said Han of CU-Boulder’s atmospheric and oceanic sciences department.

A paper on the subject was published in this week’s issue of Nature Geoscience. Co-authors included Balaji Rajagopalan, Xiao-Wei Quan, Jih-wang Wang and Laurie Trenary of CU-Boulder, Gerald Meehl, John Fasullo, Aixue Hu, William Large and Stephen Yeager of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Jialin Lin of Ohio State University, and Alan Walcraft and Toshiaki Shinoda of the Naval Research Laboratory in Mississippi.

While a number of areas in the Indian Ocean region are showing sea level rise, the study also indicated the Seychelles Islands and Zanzibar off Tanzania’s coastline show the largest sea level drop. Global sea level patterns are not geographically uniform, and sea rise in some areas correlate with sea level fall in other areas, said NCAR’s Meehl.

The Indian Ocean is the world’s third largest ocean and makes up about 20 percent of the water on Earth’s surface. The ocean is bounded on the west by East Africa, on the north by India, on the east by Indochina and Australia, and on the south by the Southern Ocean off the coast of Antarctica.

The patterns of sea level change are driven by the combined enhancement of two primary atmospheric wind patterns known as the Hadley circulation and the Walker circulation. The Hadley circulation in the Indian Ocean is dominated by air currents rising above strongly heated tropical waters near the equator and flowing poleward, then sinking to the ocean in the subtropics and causing surface air to flow back toward the equator.

The Indian Ocean’s Walker circulation causes air to rise and flow westward at upper levels, sink to the surface and then flow eastward back toward the Indo-Pacific warm pool. “The combined enhancement of the Hadley and Walker circulation form a distinct surface wind pattern that drives specific sea level patterns,” said Han.

The international research team used several different sophisticated ocean and climate models for the study, including the Parallel Ocean Program — the ocean component of NCAR’s widely used Community Climate System Model. In addition, the team used a wind-driven, linear ocean model for the study.

“Our new results show that human-caused changes of atmospheric and oceanic circulation over the Indian Ocean region — which have not been studied previously — are the major cause for the regional variability of sea level change,” wrote the authors in Nature Geoscience.

Han said that based on all-season data records, there is no significant sea level rise around the Maldives. But when the team looked at winter season data only, the Maldives show significant sea level rise, a cause for concern. The smallest Asian country, the Maldives is made up of more than 1,000 islands — about 200 of which are inhabited by about 300,000 people — and are on average only about five feet above sea level.

The complex circulation patterns in the Indian Ocean may also affect precipitation by forcing even more atmospheric air down to the surface in Indian Ocean subtropical regions than normal, Han speculated. “This may favor a weakening of atmospheric convection in the subtropics, which may increase rainfall in the eastern tropical regions of the Indian Ocean and increase drought in the western equatorial Indian Ocean region, including east Africa,” Han said.

The new study indicates that in order to document sea level change on a global scale, researchers also need to know the specifics of regional sea level changes that will be important for coastal and island regions, said NCAR’s Hu. Along the coasts of the northern Indian Ocean, seas have risen by an average of about 0.5 inches, or 13 millimeters, per decade.

“It is important for us to understand the regional changes of the sea level, which will have effects on coastal and island regions,” said Hu.

The study was funded by a number of organizations, including NCAR, the National Science Foundation, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy.

By Jim Scott
Office of News Services
This originally appeared on the news services site

July 2010

A pocket gopher hastily plucks a stalk of grass then ducks back into its tunnel. (Photo by Jeff Mitton)

By Jeff Mitton

I sat with family and friends at a scenic overlook, enjoying the view. Then someone observed the furtive activity at our feet. Several small mammals were sticking their heads out of burrows, grabbing stalks of grass and ducking back in. I had never seen pocket gophers “in the wild” before.

The northern pocket gopher,Thomomys talpoides, is a small mammal, six to 10 inches long with brown fur, a short tail, small ears and small eyes.

Perhaps their most distinctive feature is their large yellowish-orange incisors, two upper and two lower, that are always visible and always growing. When the incisors first develop, they pierce the upper and lower lips, so the lips close behind their incisors, allowing gophers to carry rocks with their incisors while keeping their lips sealed.

They are stocky animals, with short, powerful limbs and large front paws and claws used for digging. Pocket gophers have cheek pouches that open externally, in which they carry food and nesting materials.

Pocket gophers are fossorial, meaning that that they live underground, in burrows excavated in the soil. Their burrow systems are elaborate, multilayered and may be 500 feet long.

A shallow level, approximately one foot below the surface, is used to store feces. A deeper layer, two feet or more below the surface, is used for the nest and food storage. A third layer is constructed in winter, at ground level but beneath the snow. Pocket gophers fill their snow tunnels with soil excavated in winter, and these tubes of soil, called eskers, remain behind when the snow melts, leaving ubiquitous evidence of gophers in mountain meadows.

Northern pocket gophers have an immense range, from New Mexico to Manitoba and from northern California to eastern North Dakota. Their range of habitats is also broad, including sagebrush, meadows embedded in forests and alpine tundra. Their immense geographic range, great variability in color and size, and large ecological amplitude inspired biologists to describe more than 50 subspecies of northern pocket gophers, six of them in Colorado.

One of the subspecies,T. talpoides macrotis, has a tiny geographic range due south of Denver in northern Douglas County. In recent years, while one group of citizens was pressing for protection forT. t. macrotis, a developer was seeking permission to place a new residential subdivision right on top of them. The Colorado Division of Wildlife, seeking information to inform the management of the gophers, asked my laboratory to contribute genetic data to determine if this subspecies was unique and worthy of protection.

Renee Culver earned a master’s degree comparing DNA sequences of six subspecies of northern pocket gophers. Decades before, the chromosomes of the subspecies had been studied by professor C. S. Thaeler. The numbers of the chromosomes varied among geographic regions from 40 to 48, but there was little or no correspondence between chromosome numbers and subspecies. Chromosomal differences interfere with development of offspring and thus impose reproductive isolation, one of the definitions of species.

Culver found thatmacrotishad the same DNA sequences as its geographically adjacent subspeciesretrorsusandrostralis. That is, DNA sequences did not provide justification for recognizing these three subspecies.

Culver noted excellent correspondence between DNA sequences and chromosome counts. For example,T. talpoides kaibabensis, isolated on the Kaibab Plateau of northern Arizona, was so distinctly different for chromosome numbers and DNA sequences that it is surely a distinct species. Similarly, correspondence between chromosomes and DNA sequences will likely lead to splitting of the northern pocket gopher into four distinct species in Colorado.

Jeff Mitton (mitton@colorado.edu) is chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado. This column originally appeared in the Boulder Camera.

July 19, 2010

From left to right, Ashley Ballantyne of the University of Colorado at Boulder, Dara Finney of Environment Canada and Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature search for fossils in a peat deposit at Strathcona Fiord on Ellesmere Island in Canada's High Arctic. Photo courtesy Dara Finney, Environment Canada.

A new study shows the Arctic climate system may be more sensitive to greenhouse warming than previously thought, and that current levels of Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide may be high enough to bring about significant, irreversible shifts in Arctic ecosystems.

Led by the University of Colorado at Boulder, the international study indicated that while the mean annual temperature on Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic during the Pliocene Epoch 2.6 to 5.3 million years ago was about 34 degrees Fahrenheit, or 19 degrees Celsius, warmer than today, CO2 levels were only slightly higher than present.  The vast majority of climate scientists agree Earth is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping atmospheric gases generated primarily by human activities like fossil fuel burning and deforestation.

The team used three independent methods of measuring the Pliocene temperatures on Ellesmere Island in Canada’s High Arctic. They included measurements of oxygen isotopes found in the cellulose of fossil trees and mosses that reveal temperatures and precipitation levels tied to ancient water, an analysis of the distribution of lipids in soil bacteria which correlate with temperature, and an inventory of ancient Pliocene plant groups that overlap in range with contemporary vegetation.

“Our findings indicate that CO2 levels of approximately 400 parts per million are sufficient to produce mean annual temperatures in the High Arctic of approximately 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees F),” Ballantyne said.  “As temperatures approach 0 degrees Celsius, it becomes exceedingly difficult to maintain permanent sea and glacial ice in the Arctic.  Thus current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere of approximately 390 parts per million may be approaching a tipping point for irreversible ice-free conditions in the Arctic.”

A paper on the subject is being published in the July issue of the journal Geology.  Co-authors included David Greenwood of Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada, Jaap Sinninghe Damste of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Adam Csank of the University of Arizona, Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and Jaelyn Eberle, curator of fossil vertebrates at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and an associate professor in the geological sciences department.

Arctic temperatures have risen by about 1.8 degrees F, or 1 degree C, in the past two decades in response to anthropogenic greenhouse warming, a trend expected to continue in the coming decades and centuries, said Ballantyne.  Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million during the pre-industrial era on Earth to about 390 parts per million today.

During the Pliocene, Ellesmere Island hosted forests of larch, dwarf birch and northern white cedar trees, as well as mosses and herbs, including cinquefoils. The island also was home to fish, frogs and now extinct mammals that included tiny deer, ancient relatives of the black bear, three-toed horses, small beavers, rabbits, badgers and shrews. Because of the high latitude, the Ellesmere Island site on the Strathcona Fiord was shrouded by darkness six months out of the year, said Rybczynski.

Artist’s rendering of the Beaver Pond site on Ellesmere Island, in Canada's High Arctic, as it may have looked about 3 to 5 million years ago. Image credit: George "Rinaldino" Teichmann

Fossils are often preserved in a process known as permineralization, in which mineral deposits form internal casts of organisms.  But at the Ellesmere Island site known as the “Beaver Pond site,” organic materials — including trees, plants and mosses — have been “mummified” in peat deposits, allowing the researchers to conduct detailed, high-quality analyses, said Eberle.

Ballantyne said the high level of preservation of trees and mosses at Ellesmere Island allowed the team to measure the ratio of oxygen isotopes in plant cellulose, providing information on water absorbed from precipitation during the Pliocene and which yielded estimates of past surface temperatures. The team also compared data on the width of tree rings in larch trees at the Beaver Pond site to trees at lower latitudes today to help them estimate past temperatures and precipitation levels.

The researchers also analyzed the distribution of ancient membrane lipids from soil bacteria known as tetraethers, which correlate to temperature.  The chemical structure of the fossilized tetraethers makes them highly sensitive to both temperature and acidity, or pH, said Ballantyne.

The last line of evidence put forward by the CU-Boulder-led team was a comparison of Pliocene ancient vegetation at the site with vegetation present today, providing a clear “climate window” showing the overlap of the two time periods.  “The results of the three independent temperature proxies are remarkably consistent,” said Eberle. “We essentially were able to ‘read’ the vegetation in order to estimate air temperatures in the Pliocene.”

Today, Ellesmere Island is a polar desert that features tundra, permafrost, ice sheets, sparse vegetation and a few small mammals.  Temperatures range from roughly minus 37 degrees F, or minus 38 degrees C, in winter to 48 degrees F, or 9 degrees C, in summer.  The region is one of the coldest, driest environments on Earth.

“Our findings are somewhat disconcerting regarding the temperatures and greenhouse gas levels during the Pliocene,” said Eberle.  “We already are seeing evidence of both mammals and birds moving northward as the climate warms, and I can’t help but wonder if the Arctic is headed toward conditions similar to those that existed during the Pliocene.”

Elevated Arctic temperatures during the Pliocene — which occurred shortly before Earth plunged into an ice age about 2.5 million years ago — are thought to have been driven by the transfer of heat to the polar regions and perhaps by decreased reflectivity of sunlight hitting the Arctic due to a lack of ice, said Ballantyne.  One big question is why the Arctic was so sensitive to warming during this period, he said.

Multiple feedback mechanisms have been proposed to explain the amplification of Arctic temperatures, including the reflectivity strength of the sun on Arctic ice and changes in vegetation seasonal cloud cover, said Ballantyne. “I suspect that it is the interactions between these different feedback mechanisms that ultimately produce the warming temperatures in the Arctic.”

In 2009, CU-Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center showed the September Arctic sea ice extent was 649,000 square miles, or 1,680,902 square kilometers, below the 1979-2000 average, and is declining at a rate of 11.2 percent per decade.  Some climate change experts are forecasting that the Arctic summers will become ice-free summers within a decade or two.

In addition to its exceptional preservation of fossil wood, plants, insects and mollusks, the Beaver Pond site on Ellesmere Island is the only reported Pliocene fossil site in the High Arctic to yield vertebrate remains, said Rybczynski.

Eberle said there is high concern by scientists over a proposal to mine coal on Ellesmere Island near the Beaver Pond site by WestStar Resources Inc. headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. “Paleontological sites like the Beaver Pond site are unique and extremely valuable resources that are of international importance,” said Eberle. “Our concern is that coal mining activities could damage such sites and they will be lost forever.”

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council in Canada, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the European Research Council.

By Jim Scott
Office of News Services
This originally appeared on the news services site

June 2010

To the untrained eye, University of Colorado at Boulder Research Associate Craig Lee’s recent discovery of a 10,000-year-old wooden hunting weapon might look like a small branch that blew off a tree in a windstorm.

Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Lee, a research associate with CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research who found the atlatl dart, a spear-like hunting weapon, melting out of an ice patch high in the Rocky Mountains close to Yellowstone National Park.

Lee, a specialist in the emerging field of ice patch archaeology, said the dart had been frozen in the ice patch for 10 millennia and that climate change has increased global temperatures and accelerated melting of permanent ice fields exposing organic materials that have long been entombed in the ice.

“We didn’t realize until the early 2000s that there was a potential to find archaeological materials in association with melting permanent snow and ice in many areas of the globe,” Lee said. “We’re not talking about massive glaciers, we’re talking about the smaller, more kinetically stable snowbanks that you might see if you go to Rocky Mountain National Park.”

As glaciers and ice fields continue to melt at an unprecedented rate, increasingly older and significant artifacts — as well as plant material, animal carcasses and ancient feces — are being released from the ice that has gripped them for thousands of years, he said.

Over the past decade, Lee has worked with other researchers to develop a geographic information system, or GIS, model to identify glaciers and ice fields in Alaska and elsewhere that are likely to hold artifacts. They pulled together biological and physical data to find ice fields that may have been used by prehistoric hunters to kill animals seeking refuge from heat and insect swarms in the summer months.

“In these instances, what we’re finding as archaeologists is stuff that was lost,” Lee said. “Maybe you missed a shot and your weapon disappeared into the snowbank. It’s like finding your keys when you drop them in snow. You’re not going to find them until spring. Well, the spring hasn’t come until these things started melting for the first time, in some instances, in many, many thousands of years.”

The dart Lee found was from a birch sapling and still has personal markings on it from the ancient hunter, according to Lee. When it was shot, the 3-foot-long dart had a projectile point on one end, and a cup or dimple on the other end that would have attached to a hook on the atlatl. The hunter used the atlatl, a throwing tool about two feet long, for leverage to achieve greater velocity.

Later this summer Lee and CU-Boulder student researchers will travel to Glacier National Park to work with the Salish, Kootenai and Blackfeet tribes and researchers from the University of Wyoming to recover and protect artifacts that may have recently melted out of similar locations.

“We will be conducting an unprecedented collaboration with our Native American partners to develop and implement protocols for culturally appropriate scientific methods to recover and protect artifacts we may discover,” he said.

Quick retrieval of any organic artifacts like clothing, wooden tools or weapons is necessary to save them, because once thawed and exposed to the elements they decompose quickly, he said.

An estimated 10 percent of Earth’s land surface is covered with perennial snow, glaciers and ice fields, providing plenty of opportunities for exploration, Lee said. However, once organic artifacts melt out of the ice, they could be lost forever.

“Ninety-five percent of the archaeological record that we usually base our interpretations on is comprised of chip stone artifacts, ground stone artifacts, maybe old hearths, which is a fire pit, or rock rings that would have been used to stabilize a house,” Lee said. “So we really have to base our understanding about ancient times on these inorganic materials. But ice patches are giving us this window into organic technology that we just don’t get in other environments.”

By Jim Scott
Office of News Services
This originally appeared on the news services site

June 21, 2010

Marilyn Krysl

The words of Marilyn Krysl’s grandparents, who read the Bible aloud every morning before breakfast, still echo in her mind. And Jesus said… . And Paul said… . Thou shalt and thou shalt not… . There is a time to sow and a time to reap.

Such words were enthralling and musical. “I had little understanding of what the words meant, but I fell under the spell of the music in that language,” she recalled in an interview with the University of Notre Dame.

She also became enamored of music itself. But the mumps took the hearing from one ear. “I felt deeply wounded, and I felt this loss prevented me from continuing in music,” she said.

Though she endured a loss, there was also a gain: “That loss made me feel more sensitive to, more aware of, loss, my own and the losses of others. Perhaps it engendered an ability to feel compassion for others,” she said.

That compassion, combined with a deep love of and appreciation for language, no doubt helped propel her into a life of writing. But her conception of “writing,” like the depth of her compassion, might fairly be described as atypical.

“As a child, I thought words came out of the ground and wind blew them into our mouths,” Krysl said in a recent interview with Mary Crow, Colorado’s poet laureate.

“Then I was taught not to believe this, but now I believe it again. Everything in the natural world is connected, and I am a place, a location in space, time and greenery where arrangements of language arrive on a current of air, and I write the words down, word for word. ‘I’ do not make these soundings up; they appear.”

Krysl echoed this view in a 2009 interview with Oregon Quarterly, the Magazine of the University of Oregon, saying: “I feel that as writers we trick ourselves into imagining that we are actually doing this thing called writing. Such egos! I am very sure that I’m not doing anything other than occupying this place where some interesting language seeps through.”

If so, she’s held an auspicious place. Krysl, a retired English professor from the University of Colorado, was named as a finalist for a 2010 Colorado Book Award. The nod was for her most recent collection of poems, “Swear the Burning Vow.”

Cover of "Swear the Burning Vow"

Another poet, Bin Ramke, won the award. Krysl describes him as a “formidable talent.” But Krysl’s credentials are no less impressive.

Krysl has published seven books of poetry and four of stories. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic and others.  Her stories appear in Best American Short Stories 2000, O. Henry Prize Stories, Sudden Fiction, Sudden Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

She has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and the Lawrence Foundation Prize for fiction, is former director of CU’s Creative Writing Program and a founding editor of Many Mountains Moving, a literary journal.

Her work draws praise from many corners.

The late John Updike, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, wrote. “Krysl is funny, fierce and feminist in the best possible way, and a technician of variety and resourcefulness. I read her short stories with considerable pleasure, surprise and admiration.”

Katherine Eggert, associate professor and chair of the English Department, said Krysl has left her mark on the university. “In her nearly three decades of teaching creative writing in the English Department, Marilyn Krysl was a profound influence on several generations of student poets and a great mentor for younger faculty,” Eggert said.

“Her powerful and lyrical writing, both poetry and prose, focuses on the profoundest of topics: pain, war, famine, and injury, but also healing, human connection, and love.”

Krysl has faced these profound and painful topics directly and in person. She has taught English as a Second Language in the People’s Republic of China, served as artist in residence at the Center for Human Caring, worked as a volunteer for Peace Brigade International in Sri Lanka, and volunteered at the Kalighat Home for the Destitute and Dying administered by Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity in Calcutta. She volunteers with the Lost Boys of Sudan.

Her passion for teaching is as palpable as her commitment to being a conduit for poetry.

Beginning writers, Krysl told Crow, should start with immersion: “Steep yourself in the rich soup of raw language. And choose as your addiction reading the great works from the past and present.

“I urge students to listen to the music in language,” Krysl continued. “We’re mostly unconscious of this inherent musicality, but when a waiter asks you what you want to drink, and you say ‘a glass of California chardonnay,’ you’ve spoken an iambic pentameter line, the most common line in English poetry.”

She added: “Writers are musicians, you body is your instrument, and language jams.”

But such music might never be heard without encouragement. As Krysl told the University of Notre Dame, a good teacher’s influence can be profound. She recalls in high school having a “wonderful teacher named Jane” who urged her to write. “One day, I used the word ‘ligneous’ in a composition, a word I’d learned reading Faulkner, and Jane didn’t know this word and had to look it up.

“She was delighted with me; I could feel her delight. I felt truly loved by this teacher, and I’ve never forgotten it. The right teacher at the right time can make a very great difference.”

Also see the University of Notre Dame’s interview with Krysl. Read one of Krysl’s poem’s in a 2002 edition of The Atlantic.  See “Writing the Wind” in Oregon Quarterly.  And see the author’s web site.

Dean Todd Gleeson and Stephanie Weber meet for a quick break during Bike to Work Day at a stand on the Boulder campus.

On a designated Wednesday every June, thousands of people hop on (and perhaps dust off) their bicycles and pedal into work. Bike to Work Day aims to persuade people to ride, or take other alternative transportation, more often.

Todd Gleeson joined the legions of riders this year. But he doesn’t need the encouragement.

With notable regularity, he bursts into the office, bike in hand, clad in bright Spandex and offering colleagues a chipper “good morning.”

In Boulder, committed bike commuters are common. But relatively few, it’s safe to say, hold positions as prominent as Gleeson’s: dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado.

It is no surprise that Gleeson transformed his avocation into something useful and, for many students, critically needed.

On a fundraising ride for Children’s Hospital eight years ago, Woody Eaton a CU alum, retired dentist and philanthropist, was riding with Gleeson when a question presented itself: Why they couldn’t launch a bicycling event to fund scholarships at CU?

There was no reason they couldn’t. And they, along with help from a committed band of volunteers, made it happen.

Their creation, the Buffalo Bicycle Classic, made its debut in 2003 with 980 riders who pedaled routes designed for all ability levels: 14, 35, 50, 70 and 100 miles. Since then, annual ridership has nearly tripled, and riders have raised more than $1.2 million for scholarships for good students who have demonstrable need.

In March 2006, Bicycling Magazine dubbed the Buffalo Bicycle Classic the “cool event” in Boulder.

What makes it even cooler is that the BBC is the single largest source of scholarships within the College of Arts and Sciences, which is the largest and oldest college at the university.

This year’s ride, which is scheduled for Sept. 12, features a new turnaround point for the century ride: Instead of turning south at Horsetooth Reservoir, century riders this year will enjoy a beautiful spur up Buckhorn Road in Larimer County.

The event has introduced a new registration system that should be more user-friendly than the previous system. Please let us know what you think.

As Gleeson notes, the Buffalo Bicycle Classic appreciates its success, particularly because the fruit of this labor is better access to higher education. But the event is continuing to evaluate new features—a longer ride for the extra-ambitious, for instance, or the addition of a timed section.

Those who have feedback are encouraged to send it to bbc@colorado.edu. Meantime, keep pedaling, and we hope to see you on the road Sept. 12.

By Clint Talbott

Young people who have inherited a genetic variation leading to increased feeling of dizziness from smoking their first cigarettes have a higher risk of becoming addictive smokers, a team of researchers led by Marissa Ehringer of the University of Colorado has found.

Though scientists worldwide have spent decades studying the receptors to which nicotine binds, Ehringer’s team has established a link between the genes that code for these receptors, dizziness, and lifelong nicotine addiction. The findings add depth and clarity to an emerging picture of genetic vulnerability to tobacco addiction.

“People who say they experience a lot of dizziness tend to be the ones who go on to become dependent” on tobacco, notes Ehringer, associate professor of integrative physiology and director of the Genetics of Substance Abuse Laboratory at CU’s Institute for Behavioral Genetics.

Marissa Ehringer, associate professor of integrative physiology and director of the Genetics of Substance Abuse Laboratory at CU’s Institute for Behavioral Genetics

Ehringer’s collaborative study with a team led by Dr. Laura Bierut, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University in St Louis, was published earlier this year in the American Journal of Medical Genetics. It included 789 smokers and 811 people who had smoked at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetimes but had not become dependent on nicotine.

The test subjects were asked if they experienced—and how intensely they experienced—any of eight feelings: pleasant sensations, unpleasant sensations, nausea, relaxation, dizziness, pleasurable rush or buzz, coughing or difficulty inhaling.

Those who recalled feeling extremely dizzy after smoking were more likely to harbor a specific genetic variation in a nicotinic receptor gene (CHRNA10).   “Nobody cared about alpha 10,” Ehringer recalls. Now that they’d found a link between a subjective experience and a new gene, the team was left with a question: “What the heck is alpha 10?”

She mentioned this to Michael Marks, an IBG researcher and international expert on the nicotinic receptor genes, who said the finding was interesting, because CHRNA10 genes are expressed in the inner ear. “Their location in the inner ear corresponds nicely with a possible involvement in mediating a ‘dizziness’ phenotype” (a trait traceable to genetics), Ehringer’s team writes.

Marks’ insight highlights IBG’s wide expertise and collaborative spirit, Ehringer notes. “How much fun is that, to be able to work with the people who are the experts?”

Ehringer acknowledges that a feeling of dizziness, which is unpleasant for many people, might seem a counter-intuitive harbinger of tobacco dependence. But those who are predisposed to an addiction might be attracted to such intense feelings, even if it the feelings seem out of control, she adds.

A prior study by Ehringer’s group, led by Joanna Zeiger and Brett Haberstick at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics, had established a link between another genetic variant in the CHRNB3 gene with dizziness and tobacco addiction. Along with prior studies, they help identify genes that contribute to nicotine addiction.

The work of Ehringer, Zeiger and other scientists employs new methods of associating subjective human experiences—such as dizziness—with specific genetic variants. She says being able to link people’s response to smoking with specific genes is the result of a new, “cool, analytical approach” that allows researchers to associate genes not only with what people do (smoke habitually) but also with how they feel (dizzy).

As Ehringer notes, one long-term aim of such research is to help identify those who are at higher risk of nicotine addition. “We have this hope that if you could tell someone, ‘You’re loaded; please don’t even try smoking,’ that that would go somewhere.”  But also understanding the genetics of addiction provides insight into the biology of addiction, which may lead to improved treatments.

Ehringer hopes that the study on dizziness and CHRNA10 is replicated. This study drew upon adults’ recollection of their initial smoking experiences. Studies of younger people, including studies of adolescents before they start smoking, are logical next steps.

The work of Ehringer’s team builds on an emerging body of evidence showing potential links between certain genes that code for different receptor proteins, (which impact nicotine’s attachment to the receptor) and a host of smoking behaviors, including addition addiction, age of first smoking, pleasure derived from first cigarettes, lung cancer and now dizziness. These genes are also implicated in alcohol dependence and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

As Ehringer notes, in most cases, about half of the factors contributing to human behaviors are believed to stem from multiple genetic factors and half from multiple environmental factors.

This means that genetic susceptibility to tobacco dependence does not doom people to addiction or disease. But it does indicate that those “loaded” with genetic predispositions are more likely to start smoking and have more trouble stopping.

Genetic research on tobacco dependence has blossomed in recent years.

In 2008, three groundbreaking articles appeared in the journals Nature and Nature Genetics. They reported that people with certain neuronal nicotinic receptor genes on chromosome 15 were more likely to become addicted to tobacco, more likely to smoke more cigarettes daily (thereby worsening the addiction), and more likely to develop lung cancer.

The scientists could not determine if the higher incidence of lung cancer were because of the genetic variation or because of the excessive smoking. “We still don’t know the answer to that,” Ehringer notes.

But researchers have amassed a rapidly increasing body of knowledge linking these genetic variants to tobacco addiction, responses and disease.

“It’s complicated,” Ehringer observes. “Unfortunately, that’s what makes behavior complicated. But the complexity is also what makes behavior unique and interesting.”

Tobacco use kills more than 5 million people annually and is a risk factor for six of the eight leading causes of death, according to the World Health Organization. Though tobacco use has declined in recent decades in the United States, about 20 percent of U.S. adults use the drug, reports the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and prevention.

Ehringer’s research is supported by the National Institutes of Health  (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and National Institute on Drug Abuse). This year, she was promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure, and the Department of Integrative Physiology noted that it is “fortunate to claim a colleague of her caliber among our ranks.”

A mobile fish lab on Boulder Creek is helping researcher assess the health of fish exposed to endocrine-disrupting chemicals polluting the waterway that can cause male fish to be feminized and decline in numbers. Image courtesy Alan Vajda, University of Colorado Denver.

Male fish are taking longer to be “feminized” by chemical contaminants that act as hormone disrupters in Colorado’s Boulder Creek following the upgrade of a wastewater treatment plant in Boulder in 2008, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

But the problem of fish feminization — which causes males to develop characteristics of females and to decline in numbers — is a global one that is growing as a result of increasing chemicals like natural human reproductive steroids, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, shampoos and soaps making their way into waterways, said CU-Boulder Professor David Norris, who led the study.

Norris, a professor of integrative physiology at CU-Boulder, said the multimillion-dollar general upgrade of the Boulder Wastewater Treatment plant northeast of Boulder, Colo., designed to solve multiple problems has had a dramatic effect on delaying symptoms of male fish feminization. The team compared fish populations below the wastewater treatment plant on Boulder Creek in 2006 before it had upgraded and again after the upgrade had been completed.

Norris participated in a press briefing at the Endocrine Society’s 92nd annual meeting held June 19-22 in San Diego. Other team members included Alan Vajda of the University of Colorado Denver, Ashley Bolden and John Woodling of CU-Boulder, Larry Barber of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Water Resource Division in Boulder and Heiko Schoenfuss of St. Cloud University in Minnesota.

In the 2006 study Norris and his colleagues used a mobile fish exposure facility situated on Boulder Creek northeast of Boulder that collected both water from upstream of the plant and effluent water directly from the treatment plant. After exposure to equal parts of effluent and upstream water for only seven days, adult male fathead minnows became feminized, looking and acting like females and showing elevated levels of a protein known as vitellogenin that is normally produced by females.

Contaminants identified in Boulder Creek included ethinylestradiol — a chemical used in most contraceptives — as well as other reproductive steroids produced naturally by humans. Estrogen-related chemicals found in the water included bisphenyl A and phthalates associated with plastic, nonylphenols associated with detergents, and pesticides. Most of the compounds came from products flushed down toilets and drains, according to Norris.

In the new study following the treatment plant upgrade, the team studied adult male fathead minnows in 100 percent effluent water, those in a mixture of half effluent and half upstream water, and those in tanks containing all upstream water. Norris and his team saw no effects on male sex characteristics of the minnows in the tank containing 100 percent effluent water directly from the treatment plant until 28 days after exposure.

As part of the study, Norris and his colleagues also analyzed reproductive organs from preserved fish specimens from CU’s Museum of Natural History that had been collected from Boulder Creek between 50 and 100 years ago. The researchers and found no evidence of feminized or intersex fish in the museum specimens, he said.

The CU research team also tested brown trout populations below a wastewater treatment in Vail, Colo., said Norris. The trout showed no increases in vitellogenin.

In addition to chemicals that trigger fish feminization, biologists are finding increased concentrations of fluoxetine, a common antidepressant taken by millions of Americans, in waterways across the nation, said Norris. Fluoxetine has been shown to enter the brains of fish and affect fish behavior, said Norris.

Between 2000 and 2002, Norris and his group were among the first in the nation to document the problem of intersex fish following their stream surveys of Boulder Creek, the South Platte River near Denver and Fountain Creek near Colorado Springs in 2000. The researchers found feminized fish at all of the sites and as well as skewed sex ratios showing there were more females than males. Since that time biologists have been reporting feminized male fish and intersex fish in waterways across the globe.

“I look at the problem of fish feminization in waterways as a canary in a mine shaft,” said Norris. “This is not the problem of water treatment plants, it’s our problem as human beings. We excrete natural and synthetic estrogens and use shampoos, detergents and cosmetics containing a variety of hormone disrupters that wind up in waterways. All of these different chemicals we are putting into the environment have the potential to alter the biology of animals and to affect ecosystems.”

It boils down to a growing human population problem, he said. Ways to mitigate effects of chemicals include using reduced amounts of detergents and shampoos. Another way people can lessen the problem is to avoid antibacterial soaps, which can disrupt thyroid function in fish.

“People have shown they can consciously mitigate some of these issues,” said Norris. “One example is the refusal of some to buy milk from cattle that contain growth hormones.”

He said the bulk of all pharmaceuticals people ingest generally wind up in urine and feces within 24 hours and are flushed or drained into treatment plants. In addition, chemicals from plastics and canned food can pass through humans and travel into waterways, affecting fish populations as well as the health of people. “Our bodies are being exposed every day to a variety of chemicals capable of altering our physiological development, including impacts on sensitive human fetuses.”

The research was supported by grants from the Environmental Protection Agency and the city of Boulder. The next step of the team will be to re-survey some of Colorado waterways using a grant from the National Science Foundation.

By Jim Scott
Office of News Services
This originally appeared on the news services site

June 22, 2010

Soviet photographers recorded Nazi atrocities, but state’s message changed after Stalin and after Soviet Union’s collapse; CU professor notes the significance of overlapping narratives and memories

By Clint Talbott

Soviet photojournalists working for the country’s most important newspapers were among the first to document the unfolding Holocaust in their homeland, and they were also witnessing and recording the slaughter of Soviet citizens who, like the photographers themselves, were Jewish.

But the extent to which the Nazis targeted Jews was obscured in the dominant Soviet press during World War II and was suppressed in the Cold War era, during which the Soviets dwelled on the depravity of “fascist troops” murdering “peaceful Soviet citizens.”

The Soviet Union’s collapse allowed scholars to see a fuller picture of what happened, and to understand the overlapping narratives of Soviets and Jews.

David Shneer, associate professor of history and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado

David Shneer, associate professor of history and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, began researching this issue in 2002, when he visited a photography gallery in Moscow.

The exhibition was titled “Women at War,” and Shneer noticed that the photographers’ names sounded Jewish. He asked the curator, who said, “Of course they’re Jewish. All the photographers were Jewish.”

Before the war, many of those developing the profession of Soviet photojournalism were Jewish, Shneer notes.

The German Army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Within days, the leading illustrated magazine, Ogonek (the Life magazine of the Soviet Union), published its first atrocity photo. That picture, retrieved from the camera of a dead German soldier, showed Nazis forcing Jewish victims to dig a grave for a pile of corpses.

As Shneer notes in the February issue of the American Historical Review and in his forthcoming book “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes,” the Soviet Army regularly urged its press to publish stories and photos of Nazi atrocities.

“This material would function as visual evidence of the Nazi crimes and as propaganda to rile up the anger of the population,” Shneer writes.

But the photo caption did not specify that the victims were Jewish. Instead, it said, “Those sentenced are forced to dig their own graves.”

During World War II, the Soviets saw an advantage in framing the Nazi assault as being against the entire nation, not just Jewish people. As Shneer observes, there was a rationale: “Do you think a bunch of Russian peasants wanted to go fight a war because of Jews?”

Professional Soviet photographers, who were Jewish, did not witness the mass-murders of Jews until late 1941. The first photographs of Nazi killing fields came after the Soviet liberation of the city of Kerch in southern Russia. The Germans occupied Kerch for about six weeks before being driven out by the Red Army.

While in Kerch, the Gestapo registered 7,500 Jews. In the first week of December, the Nazis moved the victims to an anti-tank ditch on the outskirts of town and murdered them.

On Dec. 31, Kerch was one of the first Russian cities with a significant Jewish population to be liberated from Nazi occupation, “which meant that the city was one of the first places where Soviet soldiers, journalists and photographers saw what we now call the Holocaust with their own eyes.”

The sight was appalling.

In February 1942, Ogonek published photos of the carnage. One showed a barren, winter landscape strewn with bodies and lifeless except Soviet soldiers surveying the dead. Another photo showed a close-up view of some of the dead: a mother surrounded by children.

The photographer, Mark Redkin, was Jewish.

As Shneer notes, the photograph’s caption said Hitler’s “bandits” and “thugs” were ordered to “annihilate the peaceful Soviet population.” The Nazis were called Hitlerites or Germans, but the victims’ ethnic identity was obscured. “No mention is made of the fact that most of the dead women and children so grotesquely splashed across the pages of the magazine were Jewish women and children.”

A month later, Ogonek published two pages of photos taken by Dmitrii Baltermants and Israel Ozerskii along with an article. Though all of the journalists were Jewish, they, too, obscured the primary target of the Nazis, writing that the “German occupiers” killed 7,500 residents “indiscriminately—Russians and Tatars, Ukrainians and Jews.”

Still, the truth was discernable.

This 1942 photo of the Kerch atrocities carried this caption: “Kerch resident P.I. Ivanova found her husband, who was tortured by the fascist executioners.” Photo courtesy of Michael Mattis.

A 1942 photo of the Kerch atrocities carried this caption:  “V.S. Tereshchenko digs under bodies for her husband. On the right: the body of 67-year-old I. Kh. Kogan.” Shneer notes that the Jewish-sounding Kogan (Russian for Cohen) was married to the Ukrainian-sounding Tereshchenko, adding:

“Although this multi-ethnic marriage reflected the Soviets’ idealized notion that their diverse empire was a happy, integrated ‘brotherhood of nations,’ the fact could not have been lost on the reader that after the Nazis left town, the Ukrainian Tereshchenko was alive and the Jewish Kogan was dead.”

After the war’s end in 1945, the Soviets seldom discussed Nazi crimes because, as Shneer notes, the former “Hitlerites” and “bestial Germans” were now “liberated German people” who would be eventually become part of the Soviet constellation in East Germany.

Even as the Soviet press covered the Nuremburg Trials, the victims were again portrayed as peaceful Soviet citizens or as humanity itself. “Jews were included in both of those rubrics, of course, but only implicitly.”

“I like to point out that Jews were peaceful Soviet citizens,” Shneer says.

In the Yiddish-language Soviet press, which comprised two newspapers in the 1940s, a different “but equally Soviet story” unfolded, Shneer writes.

One of those newspapers, Unity, published an article headlined “Why Do the Fascists Hate the Jews So Much?” The Russian-language original was called “About Hatred” and did not mention Jews.

In the Yiddish press, photographs of Jewish burial sites and the Warsaw ghetto clearly noted that the victims were Jews. Shneer notes that while the Russian-language press stressed a national Soviet experience, “it was precisely the point of Unity to develop a specifically Jewish narrative of the Soviet war.”

Consistently in the wartime coverage of the Yiddish press, Shneer notes, journalists articulated a clear perpetrator (the Nazis) and a victim (Jews).

But the war’s end changed that. The Soviet press simply “stopped talking about war in general and Nazi atrocities in particular,” Shneer writes. Under Stalin, the war represented an unfortunate time—one best forgotten—during which 25 million to 30 million Soviets died.

In the 1960s, however, Soviet leaders strove to reinsert World War II into the nation’s memory. In 1963, a Czech publication called Praha-Moskva published a series of Baltermants photographs, including one of a grieving woman, P.I. Ivanova, whose husband was murdered by Nazis near Kerch.

When Ivanova’s photograph was published in Ogonek in 1942, the image was tightly cropped around the woman herself, and it was published with the intent to convey the enormity of the Nazis’ war crimes.

Two decades later, the photograph then titled “Grief” showed an expansive scene of suffering: scattered mourners around a wide landscape littered with corpses, all under a dark and menacing sky. Ivanova herself is shown leaning over her husband’s body, her arms plaintively open, her hands half-closed.

The photo was no longer about German atrocities, Shneer writes, adding that “it was now about the nature of evil and fostering a new national memory of the war.”

The caption on the 1965 photograph of the Kerch killing ground says that “fascist troops shot thousands of peaceful Soviet citizens, tossing their corpses into a nearby anti-tank trench.”

As Shneer notes, there is no mention of Germans, Hitler or Jews. “By 1965, Germans were liberated friends, not barbaric enemies, and the Great Patriotic War, as World War II was called in the Soviet Union, was figured as a battle of ideologies, not peoples, Soviets against fascists, not Germans against Jews, Russians and others.”

And while the photo came to serve a new purpose in the Soviet national memory, the photographer himself showed an altered memory. In published interviews in the ‘60s and later, Baltermants said “Grief” and other atrocity photographs “were never published during the war” (which was not true).

As Shneer suggests, Baltermants might have been downplaying the wartime history of his photographs and the mass-murder of Kerch’s Jews so as to “make this photo function as a visual icon in the Soviet war memory that emerged in the 1960s.” And by claiming to have been censored by Stalin, Baltermants might have been following the trend “toward universalizing the story of the Holocaust and toward highlighting his own oppression under Stalin.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union facilitated yet another shift in national memory—one that explicitly acknowledged the centrality of anti-Semitism in Nazi atrocities. That alteration was seen in the work of another wartime photographer, Evgenii Khaldei, whose most famous image is of the Soviet flag being raised over the Reichstag in Berlin in May 1945.

A photo by Evgenii Khaldeai showing a Jewish couple wearing stars as they were required to do in Nazi-occupied areas. Photo courtesy of Evgenii Khaldeii and the Fotosoyuz Agency

Khaldei also photographed a Jewish couple wearing yellow stars in Budapest in 1945. Jews in Nazi-occupied areas of Europe were forced to wear the stars as a form of identification. In 1945, the photo appeared in the Soviet Yiddish newspaper Unity.

It did not appear again until after the Soviet Union’s collapse, whereupon it became famous. In the last seven years of his life, Khaldei was interviewed repeatedly about his work. In an interview with a Western writer, Khaldei recalled meeting the couple and telling them, in Yiddish, that he, too, was Jewish.

But when interviewed by a Russian journalist in the 1990s, Khaldei says he spoke to the couple in German and told them he was “Russian, Soviet.” In that interview, however, he does not use the word “Jew.”

In the 1990s, Shneer writes Khaldei “presented different selves and different frameworks for his photograph to audiences that 50 years later had very different memories of the war.”

Shneer emphasizes that his intent is not to impugn the photographers. As a historian, his interest is in determining what happened during the war, and to pose a question: How did the journalists’ position in the state lead to their position in forgetting?

Additionally, Shneer notes, his intent is to explore the relationship between individual and collective memory, which he says are inseparable.

“Returning iconic photographs to their original news context shows how photographs function in the creation of narratives and memories,” Shneer writes. “Soviet Jews, Baltermants and Khaldei among them, saw the war as many tragedies in one—personal, family, communal and national.”

When viewing these photographs in all of their historic complexity, he continues, “the distance between Soviet and Jewish, the war and the Holocaust, and Baltermants and Khaldei collapses.”

Shneer’s book “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes” will be published later this year. It can be pre-ordered through the publisher, Rutgers University Press.

By Clint Talbott

Disease in humans and animals has been rising while human use of agricultural fertilizer has skyrocketed. A team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Colorado cites evidence that those two trends are related, but they say much is still unknown.

The relationship between “nutrient enrichment” and disease involves a “fair amount of smoke and a little bit of fire, though how much fire we don’t know yet,” says Alan R. Townsend, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at CU.

He and his colleagues hope for more widespread research on this topic, which has large implications for human and ecosystem health.

Nutrient enrichment is both a boon and a bane. The advent of mineral fertilizer facilitated the Green Revolution, which began in the 1940s and greatly improved agricultural yield. But it also introduced vast amounts of reactive nitrogen and phosphorous into the environment.

Those nutrients have been linked with an array of human and animal diseases, notes a new study led by Pieter T.J. Johnson, CU assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. The study was co-authored by fellow CU faculty Townsend and Valerie McKenzie, along with researchers from several other institutions and was published in the January edition of the journal Ecological Applications.

As Townsend notes, the incidence of disease is rising worldwide, and there is a potential contributor: “Global changes in nutrient cycles are the most rapid and most startling of any human change in the last hundred years … far greater than what we’ve done to the carbon cycle.”

“We’ve used more fertilizer in the last 20 years than in all of human history,” Townsend emphasizes. While there is a probable connection between nutrient enrichment and disease, he adds, “What you really want to know is what’s under the hood.”

Valerie McKenzie, a CU assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology

McKenzie, a CU assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, notes that relationship between disease and land-use changes is still a partly open question. But, “We’re highlighting the role of nutrients.”

Exposure to nitrogen compounds, such as nitrates in drinking water, can cause blue-baby syndrome, reproductive problems, and some forms of cancer. And while nutrient enrichment can improve human health and reduce malnutrition, human introduction of such nutrients “frequently correlate with increases in prevalence, severity or distribution of infectious diseases in nature,” the authors write.

While emphasizing how much remains to be studied, the scientists identify evidence that nutrient enrichment increases illness via three main avenues: by transmitting diseases directly, indirectly and through a complex series of interactions.

Coral reefs appear to suffer from increasing concentrations of nitrogen, for instance. Scientists have used time-release fertilizer pellets in controlled environments to gauge the effects of nutrient enrichment on corals that are already diseased. The extra nutrients doubled the severity of yellow band disease and black band disease, which kill coral tissue.

Malaria and West Nile virus are examples of diseases that can be indirectly influenced by nitrogen. In these cases, parasites carried by a “vector,” mosquitoes, infect human hosts.

Malaria kills about 2 million people annually, most of them children under 5, according to the World Health Organization. As the authors note, nutrient enrichment can increase the growth of larval mosquitoes.

Such a change in the system could give a reproductive advantage to one species of mosquito that, incidentally, more efficiently transmits the malaria parasite.

Pieter T.J. Johnson, CU assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology

An instance of such a trend has been found in Belize, where phosphorus runoff has favored different and denser plant life, which has increased the abundance of a mosquito that is a more efficient carrier of the malaria parasite, the authors note.

Nutrient-rich environments can allow mosquitoes to breed more profusely. As McKenzie notes, the result is straightforward: “More vectors, more disease.”

Johnson has studied the complex transmission of disease due to nutrient enrichment. He found that aquatic environments with high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus, usually from fertilizer runoff or cattle grazing, precipitate a chain-reaction of parasitic infections in three species: birds, snails and amphibian larvae.

Johnson’s team was the first to report the mechanism of cascading events from excessive nutrient enrichment, or eutrophication. Freshwater snails become larger and more numerous with eutrophication.

According to Johnson, nitrogen and phosphorus from eutrophication promote algae growth, which increases the number and vigor of the herbivorous snails. Parasitic worms, called trematodes, infect these snails.

Those more robust and numerous snails harbor more trematodes, which in turn infect more frogs, he found.

Frogs infected with parasitic trematodes frequently suffer limb deformities, growing extra or malformed legs, Johnson found. Frogs with limb deformities are easier prey for birds, which eat the parasitically infected frogs and whose waste perpetuates the cycle.

This frog displays a limb deformity caused by parasitic trematodes.

While scientists have found evidence of all three types of nutrient-enhanced disease transmission, much more research needs to be done, Townsend notes.

Additionally, there is a link between nutrient enrichment and non-infectious diseases. Fertilizer runoff into rivers and coastal areas has been linked to “dead zones” in oceans, which damages marine life and the industries that depend on it.

Fertilizer runoff can also cause harmful algal blooms, in which algae and cyanobacteria spread rapidly, killing fish and contaminating seafood and drinking water, the authors note.

“It is important to note that the effects of nutrient enrichment vary among pathogens and do not always elicit higher disease risk; exacerbation of a broad suite of diseases does appear possible, but the decline or elimination of others is also possible,” the authors write.

The genesis of the Green Revolution is a century-old discovery that atmospheric N2 gas (which is inert) could be converted into reactive, biologically available forms of nitrogen. The rate of conversion from inert forms of nitrogen to reactive forms has increased 10 times faster than the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2, Townsend says.

The United States and European Union are the leading users of fertilizer, but developing countries in the tropics, which are striving to feed themselves as global population swells toward 9 billion, are rapidly increasing their use of nitrogen and phosphorous compounds.

“They all want to eat meat too,” Townsend observes.

McKenzie concurs, adding that by 2015 most of nitrogen impacts will be seen in the tropics.

And Townsend adds: “We’re going to be loading up the part of the world that is most disease rich and the part where people are the most impoverished.”

To that sobering observation, Townsend adds another: “As bad as climate change is, it’s at least possible to imagine a carbon-free future. It’s impossible with nutrients. You’ve got to have them. People have to eat.”

But the authors say there’s no need abandon hope, all ye who grow here.

Alan R. Townsend, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at CU

The gloom-and-doom side of it is the scale and pace of change, Townsend says, adding: “That’s all spooky stuff. The silver lining to me is that I believe 100 percent that this is a problem we can fix.”

Reducing inefficiency is one opportunity. About 93 percent of fertilizer is wasted, Townsend notes. When fuel prices spiked recently, farmers sought ways to use fertilizer more efficiently, and such lessons could be extrapolated, Townsend suggests.

McKenzie, meanwhile, notes that the collaboration among three experts with different strengths advances scientific understanding and is one of CU’s strengths. Townsend is a biogeochemist, while McKenzie and Johnson study disease in overlapping but slightly different areas.

“CU is one of the best places I’ve ever been around for fostering interdisciplinary work in environmental science,” Townsend says. “Now that we’re facing these big complex challenges, that’s what you need to solve them.”

With CU’s cooperative institutes and collaborative culture, he adds, “It’s no accident that CU’s been one of the top universities for environmental science for two decades.”

And while emphasizing that much remains unknown, Townsend says, “Five to 10 years of focus on this will put us in a totally different position.”

“That’s the excitement of science, that there’s a lot of work to be done.”

The trio’s work is funded by the National Science Foundation, and Johnson is supported by a fellowship from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.