Native American youth launch high-altitude balloons for unique perspective on solar eclipse
Mark Stone/UW
Students prepare to launch the balloons.
While many people donned viewing glasses and prepared to watch the solar eclipse on August 21, a group of 100 teens from Pacific Northwest tribes launched balloons thousands of feet into the air.
The high schoolers released balloons from Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs land in north central Oregon, in the path of totality. Close to 400 people, mainly tribal members and students, gathered to watch. The event, organized by University of Washington-based Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium and the Northwest Earth and Space Sciences Pipeline, was the largest effort involving Native American tribes during the eclipse.
In addition to launching the giant weather balloons, students from each school attached culturally significant items, called payloads, to the balloons and sent them high into the sky. Their artifacts nearly reached space before returning to the ground.
“This is the first time many of the students get to participate in a cutting-edge experiment of this type,” said the consortium’s director, Robert Winglee, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences. “Seeing their own payloads at the rim of space is quite exciting. This different perspective will hopefully awaken other ideas for gaining different perspectives on their own lives and their own career paths.
Total Solar Eclipse Q&A with Earth and Space Sciences' Erika Harnett
Erika Harnett
Erika Harnett in the field.
The UW Department of Earth and Space Sciences’ Erika Harnett is a geophysicist who studies weather in space. She looks at how solar wind interacts with weakly magnetized planets, like the Moon or Mars. Among other things, Erika is also the is the Associate Director of the Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium.
She’ll be in eastern Oregon for the upcoming Total Solar Eclipse on August 21, and in advance of the once-in-a-lifetime solar event, we caught up with her. In this quick Q&A, she tells us more about eclipses, why this one is special and the kinds of data she and her team will be collecting as it happens.
What is a solar eclipse?
A solar eclipse is when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, and the shadow of the Moon falls on the Earth. The Moon’s orbital period is 27 days, so you might think that this should happen once a month. In fact, it happens only about every 18 months because the plane the Moon orbits in is not aligned with the Earth’s equator. Most of the time, that means the shadow does not fall on the Earth.
Also, the upcoming eclipse is a total eclipse, which means that the Moon will completely block the view of the Sun in the path of totality. Because the Moon’s orbit is also not a perfect circle, sometimes eclipses occur and the Moon appears to be smaller than the Sun (it is called an annular eclipse).
What makes the upcoming eclipse so special?
What makes this event special is that this is the first total eclipse viewable from the U.S. since 1979, and the path of totality will go from one coast to the other, creating a large swath in which people from around the country will be able to see the eclipse.
You’ll be in Oregon collecting data as the eclipse happens. What kind of information will you be collecting?
I will be in Culver, Oregon assisting with high altitude balloon launches — provided the forest fire nearby doesn’t get any closer! The hope is that cameras on the balloons will be able to capture pictures of the shadow on the Earth, and record atmospheric changes associated with the rapid decrease in temperature that will occur during the eclipse. While many of those observations could be done other ways, there has been an orchestrated effort on the part of NASA Space Grant offices to use this event as a teaching moment. All of the balloon teams around the country have significant effort by students in building and launching the balloons. It is hoped that this will spur increased scientific ballooning capacity at high schools and universities throughout the country.
What challenges do you face in relation to this type of data gathering?
Getting to the location and recovering the balloons afterwards! There are predictions of very large traffic jams as the result of the large number of people traveling to rural areas that do not have the roadway infrastructure to support so many visitors.
What can people in Seattle expect to see (or not see) during the eclipse?
People in the greater Seattle area will be able to see between 92-95 percent of the Sun blocked by the Moon. It will never be safe to look at the Sun without special eye protection to decrease the intensity of the Sun or through special solar viewing telescopes. But enough of the Sun will be blocked for air temperatures to decrease significantly, which is likely to cause a marine layer to form over our waterways and clouds to form. If the marine layer push is not too strong, people should also see the brightness of the day decrease significantly, but it will not become completely dark.
Should non-scientists be interested in the eclipse?
Of course! A total eclipse is something few people get to see in their lifetimes. It also gives people an opportunity to experience the wonder of a celestial event and think about our place in the universe.
What kinds of opportunities does an event like this provide to scientists working in your field?
Total solar eclipses were used in the past to prove Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, as scientists were able to observe light from stars directly behind the Sun, off to the side of the Sun. This proved the Sun’s mass was bending the light so that scientists could see what was behind the Sun. Now a total eclipse allows scientists to view the extended atmosphere around the Sun (called the corona) at totality, and identify structure within the corona associated with the Sun’s magnetic field.
Scientists to create digital encyclopedia of 3-D vertebrate specimens
Ed Stanley/Florida Museum of Natural History
CT scan of an eastern hog-nosed snake, Heterodon platyrhinos, showing its last two meals: a salamander and a toad.
Thousands of vertebrate specimens will come off museum shelves as part of a $2.5 million project funded by the National Science Foundation. Using a CT scanner, Co-Principal Investigator Luke Tornabene, an assistant professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at UW, and his colleagues at 15 other universities will create data-rich, 3-D images of 20,000 vertebrates. All the images, part of the openVertebrate project, will be available online to researchers, educators, students and the public.
With virtual access to specimens, researchers could peel away the skin of a passenger pigeon to glimpse into its circulatory system, a class of third graders could determine a copperhead’s last meal, undergraduate students could 3-D print and compare skulls across a range of frog species and a veterinarian could plan a surgery on a giraffe in a zoo.
“In a time when museums and schools are losing natural history collections and giving up due to costs, we are recognizing the information held in these specimens is only getting more valuable,” said Tornabene, who’s also UW’s curator of fishes at the Burke Museum. “I think this project is going to help create a renaissance of the importance of natural history collections.”
A team of University of Washington scientists is partnering with more than a dozen other institutions — with funding from National Science Foundation (NSF) — to create a digital encyclopedia of 3-D vertebrate specimens. Among them? Smaug giganteus, whose genus was named after the dragon of the same name in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.http://www.washington.edu/news/2017/08/24/scientists-to-create-digital-encyclopedia-of-3-d-vertebrate-specimens/
Researchers, students on annual expedition to maintain internet-connected deep-sea observatory
Mitch Elend/University of Washington
Deborah Kelley (left) and undergraduate students in Newport, Oregon, on Aug. 9 at the end of the first leg of the cruise.
UW researchers, engineers and students are on a annual expedition to the Oregon coast, where they’re working to maintain a deep-ocean observatory called the Cabled Array. The array brings power and broadband internet to the seafloor and waters above.
The cruise, funded by the National Science Foundation, left July 25 from Newport, Oregon, and will be back Aug. 29. Deborah Kelley, UW professor of oceanography, is chief scientist on the cruise that recently began its second leg.
While at sea, a deep-sea robot will brave the crushing pressures and cold temperatures, while the team works day and night to direct the dives and prepare equipment above water. The researchers will be removing marine life from instruments and swapping out sensors that collect hot spring fluids and DNA samples. The team is posting regular updates from the ship.
Genetic sequencing tools help UW scientists distinguish coral species
Julie Barber
James Dimond snorkeling to collect coral in Belize. He collected 27 coral samples from different environments and with a range of branch thicknesses.
Corals are key to ocean health because they support the densest, most diverse ecosystems and harbor species from turtles and algae to reef fish. UW scientists from the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences are looking at the burgeoning field of coral genetics to better predict, and maybe even prepare for, future threats to coral.
In a new study, Ph.D. student James Dimond and Professor Steven Roberts use modern DNA-sequencing tools to figure out the relatedness of three similar-looking corals.
“In the past we’ve relied on physical characteristics, like the coral skeleton, to determine what constitutes a coral species,” Dimond said. “But the problem with that is that corals can vary their skeletal architecture. So disentangling whether you have two different species or just a single species that’s varying itself due to environmental conditions can be really tricky.”
Defining a species matters for conservation, because you can’t monitor and protect a species if you don’t know it exists. And where a 2014 study found that the three corals in question were the same, Dimond and Roberts found genetic evidence suggesting that they’re actually three different species. Their results will be published in an upcoming issue of Molecular Biology.
Probiotics help poplar trees clean up toxins in Superfund sites
John Freeman/Intrinsyx Technologies Corporation
The darker, taller poplar trees shown at the test site at the end of their third season were inoculated with microbes, while the shorter, lighter-green trees (center row) were not given the bacteria.
Trees have the ability to capture and remove pollutants from the soil and degrade them through natural processes in the plant. It’s a feat of nature companies have used to help clean up polluted sites, though only in small-scale projects.
Now, a probiotic bacteria for trees can boost the speed and effectiveness of this natural cycle, providing a microbial partner to help protect trees from the toxic effects of the pollutants and break down the toxins plants bring in from contaminated groundwater.
Researchers from UW and several companies have conducted the first large-scale experiment on a Superfund site using poplar trees fortified with a probiotic, or natural microbe, to clean up groundwater contaminated with a common pollutant found in industrial areas that’s harmful to humans when ingested through water or inhaled from the air. Their results were published in final form Aug. 11 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
“These results open the door,” said corresponding author Sharon Doty, a UW professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. “We have known about this process for a long time from our laboratory research, but it hasn’t been used in practice because there were no field results. Now, engineering companies can start using this in real life.”
