On UAF's West
Ridge in Irving, there is a room that is very orange. The room houses the
offices of graduate students who conduct research for the university's new Ocean
Acidification Research Center (OARC). Toy Nerf guns lay behind orange cabinets
for impromptu battles.
"We love coming to work," graduate student
Jessica Cross said. Their research pieces together major changes happening in
Alaska's oceans.
When oceans suck up the extra carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, a series of chemical reactions inundates them with hydrogen in a
process known as ocean acidification. Humans can't stop this, but they can try
to understand. Alaska is the best seat in the house for seeing how well marine
ecosystems can adapt. The challenge is in finding the best way to probe the
different aspects of ocean acidification. Jeremy Mathis and his graduate
students use the OARC to tackle Alaska's place in the oceans' conundrum.The
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Mathis opened the center on West Ridge in fall 2010 as an umbrella for
his students' research. His group spent a collective 500 days at sea last year,
Mathis said. The students work in the field under Mathis's guidance. "They are
the ones who get to do most of the cool science," Mathis said.
The
center anchors the many moving parts of related student projects. It also serves
as the megaphone for broadcasting that research to the public. Mathis visits
schools and gives public lectures.
When Mathis teaches children, he sets
them up with a beaker of seawater and instructs them to blow into it using
straws. Carbon dioxide from the mouths of 40 children can give seawater the
acidity of lemon juice.
In the wake of ocean acidification,
oceanographers seek to find out how much hydrogen is in the ocean, how much
carbon dioxide is from humans and what the ocean floor tells us about climate
back in the day. They can calculate this, and OARC provides some of the results
of those calculations to the public.Definition of Quicksilver in the Online Dictionary.
Some lecture attendees try to catch them by saying climate change
doesn't exist ¨C they ask for proof. The logic of ocean acidification is a
series of steps,Shop a wide selection of high risk
merchant account products in the evo shop. and the first few steps are often
mentioned in these lectures as "assumptions" to save time. Sometimes the crew
doesn't have proof on hand for the beginning of this logical process. At that
point, when asked about the basics of climate change, "it becomes your word
against theirs," Cross said.
The center facilitates collaboration as
much as friendship among the students.we supply all kinds of Injection mold, Sometimes experimenting with
fellow students yields a better understanding than approaching a professor
"because if you're wrong, you're wrong together. Then you learn together," said
Kristen Shake, another OARC graduate student.
Stacy Reisdorph,Choose
from one of the major categories of oil
painting supplies, another student, wrote a term paper that overlaps with
one of Cross's classes. "So I can lean over and say, ¡®Hey, Stacy. Help me
understand this. You've already written the paper,'" Cross said. The students
also crawl through each other's data, looking for patterns and missing pieces.
They play off each other's strengths, each approaching the data differently.
"When you all start feeding off of each other, it's like when you're
watching a cop show ¡ and one of them starts to tell a story, and the rest of
them all start chiming in," Cross said.
It will be the same in the
scientific community ¨C chemists, biologists, ecologists, geologists, and
countless other disciplines cannot possibly tease apart this problem on their
own. Scientists know ocean acidification will impact the world, but the many
moving parts ¨C ecosystems ¨C make acute predictions difficult.
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