Congratulations to six College of the Environment students recognized as the 2020 Husky 100! Included in this year’s Husky 100 are Michaela Leung from Earth and Space Sciences, Olivia Sanderfoot, Autumn Forespring and Sierra Red Bow from Environmental and Forest Sciences and Bee Elliott and Celine Fujikawa from the Program on the Environment. The Husky 100 actively connect what happens inside and outside of the classroom and apply what they learn to make a difference on campus, in their communities and for the future. Through their passion, leadership and commitment, these students inspire all of us to shape our own Husky Experience.

Michaela Leung

Bainbridge Island, WA
B.S., Earth and Space Sciences

“Experiences at the UW through my coursework, research and personal life have shaped my desire to become a professor and foster inclusive scientific communities. I have developed a strong personal identity as a scientist, and a passion for equity and diversity in education. My college journey with mentorship and leadership has transformed me into a strong and resilient woman with powerful dreams of a more inclusive academia.”

Olivia Sanderfoot

Madison, WI
Ph.D., Environmental and Forest Sciences

“I am proud to play a critical role in launching a novel research program to study the impacts of smoke and air pollutants on wildlife. After graduation, I hope to pursue a career in which I can leverage my expertise, communication skills and passion for wildlife conservation to fight for policies to improve the lives of birds and people.”

Bee Elliott

Fullerton, CA
B.A., Environmental Studies

“I’m an “artful activist” exploring and experiencing the interwoven powers that community and the arts hold for collective transformation and healing towards climate justice. From singing in the streets with our Seattle-based group, “The People’s Echo,” to organizing with Sunrise, 350 Seattle and our UW Sustainable Student Action Club, my work is deeply rooted in the powers we all hold for healing, storytelling, vision-sharing and mending our collective ability to feel through arts and culture.”

Autumn Forespring

Centralia, WA
B.S., Environmental Science and Resource Management

“The community I have found here is my reason for persevering in this exclusionary and inherently colonial institution. I owe my ambitions and successes to my colleagues in First Nations at the University of Washington; the ever-present faculty and staff of the American Indian Studies and Environmental Studies departments, the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity, and the wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ – Intellectual House; and my family. I intend to pursue a career in wilderness therapy after graduation.”

Celine Fujikawa

Guam, USA
B.A., Environmental Studies

“My vision for the diversifying the environmental sector has inspired me to be a model spokesperson for people in my community. It has prepared me with the resilience to work intentionally and has taught me how to communicate across diverse cultures and backgrounds. I want to take concrete steps to be a part of a movement that ensures every person, regardless of race, where you live or income level to have healthy air to breathe, clean water to drink and a land free of toxic chemicals.”

Sierra Red Bow

Virginia Beach, VA
B.S., Environmental Science and Resource Management

“Háŋ mitákuyepi. Pheži Ĥóta Naĝí-wiŋ emáčiyapi kštó. My English name is Sierra Red Bow. I am an Oglála Lakȟóta student double majoring in American Indian Studies and Environmental Science & Resource Management. As an Urban Native, my time at UW has allowed me to deepen my sense of community while revitalizing my culture and language. I look forward to sharing my Indigenous knowledge with others to empower the next generation to care for the environment with respect and reciprocity.”

Meet all the 2020 Husky 100 recipients

Meet the Husky 100 »

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In a world where valuable natural resources can be scarce, nature often loses when humans set their sights on something they want. But a new study published in the journal Ecological Applications shows that doesn’t always have to be true. Researchers found that with proper management of salmon fisheries, both humans and bears — who depend on a healthy supply of the fatty, oily fish — can thrive.

“We hear lots of stories about how fishing is decimating our oceans, and how humans are competing with wildlife,” says lead author Alexandra Lincoln. “This gives us some optimistic news instead, and highlights that if we have enough data to carefully manage fisheries and healthy habitat, we can manage a fishery to meet the needs of both wildlife and people.”

Building on a nearly two decade-long dataset, Lincoln and her colleagues looked at the relationship between wild brown bears and their staple food source, sockeye salmon in Alaska’s Wood River and Iliamna Lake watersheds. This vast network of forests, mountains, streams and rivers empties into Bristol Bay to support its world-famous salmon fishery. With intense fishing pressure on this delectable ocean-going fish, the question of whether enough fish return to the system to not only spawn — critical for supplying the next generation of fish — but also feed hungry bears is critical. Good news according to the data: yes, there is.

One of the study’s key findings shows a repeating pattern over the years of bears reaching a saturation point in terms of feasting on salmon. In other words, researchers found that bears often reach a point of satiation, and that adding more fish into the system doesn’t translate to bears eating more. And because there is no shortage of fish, the bears in many cases eat only the high energy good stuff, like the brains, bellies, eggs or the giant hump that develops on the backs of male sockeye during spawning.

“I was surprised at how regular that pattern of saturation was,” says Lincoln. “Seeing how picky these bears can be and all the leftovers, it’s hard to believe that bears would be starving and leave all these fish bits everywhere.”

It’s important to note that scientists did not see satiation occur in all years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the bears go hungry. “Bears often forage in areas containing several adjacent spawning streams, allowing them to move back and forth among neighboring streams over the course of a day or two,” says Aaron Wirsing, professor of environmental and forest sciences and a project lead. “Thus, bears without enough food on one stream often have better fishing options nearby.”

The Wood River and Iliamna Lake watersheds are a rare place where scientists can isolate the effects of fish harvest on the health and wellbeing of bears. The watershed is relatively untouched and massive, and the study sites scientists visit are not shared by other salmon species besides sockeye. Brown bears are the major top predators in the region as black bears and wolves are rare. With only one dominant salmon species, and one dominant predator, scientists can determine cause-and-effect more precisely than in other systems where they may be other complexities.

“We can’t apply all of what we’ve learned to all systems,” says Lincoln. “This fishery is data rich” which isn’t always true for other heavily managed ecosystems that produce goods that people want. That wealth of data contributes to the success of what is regarded as one of the best managed fisheries in the world — the Bristol Bay Sockeye Salmon Fishery — and continued data collection gives researchers the ability to use decades-old data to connect management to parts of the ecosystem like brown bears.

Scientists from UW and elsewhere have been studying these watersheds for over 70 years through the Alaska Salmon Program, and collecting brown bear data for nearly 20. Under the direction of Tom Quinn, a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences and one of the Alaska Salmon Program’s lead scientists, researchers walk several creeks every day during spawning season counting salmon. They count alive fish, dead fish and fish that have been killed by bears or seagulls. They note the condition of the salmon carcass — is there just a bite of the belly, or has nearly the entire animal been consumed? This level of detail, and the time series over which the data were collected, was key to uncovering the insights they published. “Leveraging two decades of work offered us a unique opportunity to explore patterns of bear predation in relation to the ebb and flow of salmon availability,” notes Wirsing.

“Over the 20 years, we’ve counted something like 325,000 dead fish,” says Lincoln. “Some days we’ll count 10,000 live fish in a stream 2 km long. Seeing a stream chock full of fish, with wall-to-wall red salmon backs sticking out of the water, is a highlight of this work.”

Lincoln received her master’s degree at the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences working on bear-salmon interactions in Alaska, and now brings her expertise working as a senior ecologist with King County.

Get a feel of what it’s like to be a scientist collecting data in the salmon streams of the Wood River watershed in UW’s previously published story A Living Laboratory.

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SLIDESHOW // A view of Mount Saint Helens erupting with a thick column of smoke, ash, and gas pouring into the sky.

SLIDESHOW // This photograph, taken in 1923 reads "The glaciers and snowfields regulate the stream flow of the Toutle, Kalama and Lewis Rivers."

SLIDESHOW // Mount St. Helens, one day before the devastating eruption. The view is from Johnston Ridge, six miles (10 kilometers) northwest of the volcano.

SLIDESHOW // As a result of the eruption, 24 square miles (62 square kilometers) of valley was filled by a debris avalanche, 250 square miles (650 square kilometers) of recreation, timber, and private lands were damaged by a lateral blast, and an estimated 200 million cubic yards (150 million cubic meters) of material was deposited directly by lahars (volcanic mudflows) intothe river channels.

SLIDESHOW // After May 18th five more explosive eruptions of Mount St. Helens occurred in 1980, including this spectacular event of July 22nd. This eruption sent pumice and ash 6 to 11 miles (10-18 kilometers) into the air, and was visible in Seattle, Washington, 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the north. The view here is from the south.

SLIDESHOW // Plumes of steam, gas, and ash often occurred at Mount St. Helens in the early 1980s. On clear days they could be seen from Portland, Oregon, 50mi (80km) to the south. The plume photographed here rose nearly 3,000ft (910m) above the volcano's rim. The view is from Harrys Ridge, 5mi (8km) north of the mountain on May 19, 1982.

It wasn’t supposed to be Mount St. Helens.

In the 1970s, scientists including Emeritus Research Professor Steve Malone (then a postdoctoral researcher at UW) investigated what they believed to be earthquakes on Mount Rainier. Further work determined they were “glacier quakes” instead: As glaciers on a mountain shift, the energy created mimics an earthquake.

Then in 1975, Mount Baker began to steam. Researchers, including Malone, placed seismographs (instruments that measure the earth’s motion), on the mountain and tracked them for several years — but that was a bust.

And then there was Mount St. Helens, which was just another volcano until after a 4.2 magnitude earthquake on March 20, 1980.

Shake it

According to the geological theory of plate tectonics, all earth’s land and water sits on large and shifting plates made of various kinds of rock. The plates slide over, under and away from each other. When they do, melted rock, or magma, may rise up through the plates. Volcanoes and earthquakes tend to occur near these plate boundaries.

Major volcanoes in the Cascade mountain range — such as Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, and Mount St. Helens — share a common tectonic plate and regularly experience earthquakes.

Mount St. Helens, however, gets the most in the entire Cascade chain.

Ironically, Malone and UW researchers had been planning on heading to Mount St. Helens in the summer of 1980 to explore its seismic activity. The March 20 quake kick-started them into action: Early the next day, they headed up the mountain to install additional seismographs to relay information to their lab on campus. They also brought recorders that would log any earth movement for five days at a time; after that, the tapes would be exchanged for fresh ones and their data analyzed by hand.

“We thought there would be some aftershocks and they’d die out, which is typical of earthquakes,” Malone recalls. “But that didn’t happen. Things were picking up, instead. We were having an earthquake swarm. That concerned me.”

He contacted the Forest Service and told the Ranger the earthquakes were continuing and likely to trigger avalanches; this led them to close the mountain to climbers. Then Malone called the U.S. Geological Survey Office, who flew out staff to determine the hazards of a potential eruption on the mountain. Malone then worked to install more seismograph stations to pick up more data.

Less than a week later, the earthquakes were coming fast and furious.

“The records at our station at St. Helens west, closest to the volcano, were saturated. You couldn’t tell one earthquake from another,” Malone says.

On March 27, Mount St. Helens got everyone’s attention with a small steam and ash eruption.

It wasn’t simply the number of earthquakes or their magnitude. It was the types of earthquakes that were happening, Malone explains.

Most earthquakes caused by tectonic plates moving — like the 1989 Loma Prieta 7.1 earthquake or the 1994 Northridge 6.2 earthquake — emit a high frequency in the type of energy waves they give off. Volcanic earthquakes, on the other hand, generally put out a lower frequency.

These were low-frequency earthquakes.

Also, location mattered. The St. Helens earthquakes were shallow. Not miles-deep under the earth, but just a few kilometers below the earth’s crust, underneath the mountain. Also, they were happening on the north slope of St. Helens.

This meant magma was rising into the volcano.

Magma in motion

Earthquakes are a sign of volatility in a volcano’s subterranean plumbing system. Thousands of earthquakes may happen in the span of a month: Volcanologists call this “harmonic tremor.” As earthquakes move toward the surface, this suggests magma moving around, like water in a building’s pipes.

By April 1980, activity was far from over: The north face of the mountain was changing. Geodetic surveys, using reflectors to measure land movement, showed the volcano was bulging out the north side. Steam explosions would come and go. It became dangerous to change the tapes at the monitoring stations: Researchers could feel the earthquakes under their feet.

This changed how Malone and others notified the volcano hazard experts at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) about potential dangers to people living nearby.

“There were red zones near the mountain, where only essential personnel could go, and then orange and yellow zones throughout the area where others could travel if needed,” Malone says. “I stayed behind the scenes, giving information to the hazards people who advised the U.S. Forest Service, county sheriff and state.”

He continues, “On May 17, many property owners had gone to their cabins to get stuff. They’d wanted to stay there. Highway patrol said no. So they planned to go back the next day. Of course, they didn’t.”

Even just the day before, it still wasn’t clear that the giant bulge on the north side would slide off and uncork all the magma that had moved in.

Shaking a soda can

“It’s no surprise that St. Helens would manifest spectacular unrest in our lifetimes,” UW Earth & Space Sciences professor George Bergantz says. “But in hindsight, it was tragically obvious what was about to happen.”

On May 18, 1980, a 5.2 magnitude earthquake caused the north side of Mount St. Helens to collapse, a phenomenon called a debris avalanche. Once the debris avalanche took out the mountain’s north side, magma exploded from it with the force of 1500 Hiroshima atom bombs. Instantly, the mountain’s elevation plunged from 9,600 to 8,300 feet. Ash, rocks, gas, and melted ice formed a slurry, or lahar, and careened down the mountain at 100 mph. The magma that remained vented out the top of the mountain.

“Take a soda can. Then shake it and poke a hole in the side. Liquid will shoot out,” says Bergantz. “Then if you pop the can’s top, liquid will fizz up from there as well.”

Although researchers had been monitoring seismic activity around the clock, the eruption took everyone by surprise, Malone says. They’d seen no change in the level or type of earthquakes detected from the volcano. It wasn’t an accelerating progression of any kind.

Scientists agree: This was an unbelievable event — and a discouraging one.

“Our worst-case scenario was far, far exceeded,” Malone says. “The hazard experts thought the blast might extend 10 kilometers: It went 30, instead. Fifty-seven people died. We’d had two months of warning, but nothing on a socially useful timescale, where you can react and do enough. Months are too long, and seconds are too short.”

Volcanologists at UW

In the 40 years since the eruption, much has changed, especially the technologies volcanologists use.

In 1980, all seismic changes were recorded on paper, then analyzed by hand. Now, software allows scientists to speedily process all this data and create models from it. Four decades ago, GPS tools didn’t exist. Today’s volcanologists use satellite technology to provide images at a resolution that would have been unheard of 40 years ago. And nowadays, lab-piloted drones collect samples of gases emanating from a volcano; results can indicate its potential explosiveness.

The size and scope of UW’s seismology program has also grown since the 1980s. Back then, Malone guesses, there were fewer than 10 students in the group; these days, it’s quadrupled. Teamwork has also increased: In the ensuing decades since the eruption, UW has helped create the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN), a collaboration among UW, the University of Oregon, the USGS, the U.S. Department of Energy and the States of Washington and Oregon.

Harold Tobin

Malone is a former director of the PNSN; its current director is Department of Earth and Space Science Professor Harold Tobin. As director, he sets the agenda for PNSN’s understanding of seismic activity. The organization monitors 24/7 for any earthquakes in the area, but also works to understand the research that goes along with the surveillance.

“We investigate all activity. At the most fundamental level, we’re looking at how the earth works in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where we’re located. It spans so much, from offshore earthquakes that cause tsunamis to the summits of inland volcanoes,” Tobin says.

And today

Learning is crucial — and outreach is too, says Malone. “Our role is not only to do science and teach students, but also to provide information to the public. That’s a very serious responsibility.”

Tobin adds, “Today, we understand a lot more about what we see, and can better warn of an impending eruption. It’s like having a stethoscope on a volcano.”

Over the past several years, UW, along with the USGS, has created a national volcano early warning system: They evaluate all the volcanic systems in the U.S., develop threat assessments and act accordingly. For example, while Mount Hood, already has some hazard instrumentation, it will receive additional resources to extend the current coverage as will Mount Baker and Glacier Peak.

But gathering information isn’t as easy as trekking up with a backpack and planting a flag in the soil. Many volcanoes are located in national parks or wilderness lands, which have strict rules and extreme permitting processes.

Marc Biundo/University of Washington

For example, researchers can’t use any power equipment; everything must be done by hand. In remote areas such as on Glacier Peak, scientists must arrive and depart via a day-long hike each way. Occasionally they can enlist a helicopter to bring in heavy equipment — but only for a single trip.

Regardless, Mount St. Helens itself continues to serve as a significant national laboratory. In the last 40 years, the team agrees, we have gained a fresh appreciation of the richness of life in extreme environments as well as knowledge of how a landscape regenerates and adapts, from microbes to plants to animals.

“Research at Mount St. Helens has yielded an incredible scientific record of the lifecycle of an eruption,” Bergantz says. “Although it began with a tragedy, from that tragedy we have a new understanding about how volcanoes can behave.”

More on this story

The PNSN hosted a virtual event on Monday, May 18, 2020 on their YouTube channel. The group streamed prerecorded talks from four speakers and then hosted a live Q&A of questions on the network’s Facebook page.

Mount St. Helens’ mysteries still astound scientists, 40 years after eruption

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced May 20 that it has selected the University of Washington to host NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies.

The new regional consortium will include faculty and staff at the UW, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Oregon State University. Members will contribute expertise, research capacity, technological development, help train the next generation of NOAA scientists, and conduct public education and outreach.

The selection comes with an award of up to $300 million over five years, with the potential for renewal for another five years based on successful performance.

The purpose of the cooperative institute is to facilitate and conduct collaborative, multidisciplinary research to support NOAA’s mission; educate and prepare the next generation of scientists to be technically skilled, environmentally literate and reflect the national diversity; and engage and educate the citizenry of the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and the nation about human-caused impacts on ecosystem health and socioeconomic sustainability.

The new cooperative institute will address some of the major research themes that have been the focus of NOAA’s previous cooperative institute hosted by UW, the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, including climate and ocean changes and impacts, and will expand to include new research areas and involve additional universities.

“We’re excited to build on JISAO’s research and education traditions through our regional research consortium,” said director John Horne, a professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “The expanded research and education portfolios will enable us to better serve NOAA’s mission.”

The center’s members will work alongside scientists at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, NOAA Fisheries Alaska Fisheries Science Center and Northwest Fisheries Science Center, all based in Seattle.

“The challenges we face related to climate, oceans, and coastal ecosystems require ongoing collaboration that crosses sectoral, disciplinary and geographic boundaries,” said Lisa J. Graumlich, Dean of the College of the Environment and Mary Laird Wood Professor at UW. “This ongoing partnership with NOAA, UAF and OSU allows us to collaborate at a scale that we have never seen before in the Pacific Northwest. NOAA’s investment leverages our incredible federal and university resources to understand and confront problems that no one institution could tackle alone.”

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The world of climate modeling is complex, requiring an enormous amount of coordination and collaboration to produce. Models feed on mountains of different inputs to run simulations of what a future world might look like, and can be so big — in some cases, lines of code in the millions — they take days or weeks to run. Building these models can be challenging, but getting them right is critical for us to see where climate change is taking us, and importantly, what we might do about it.

Dave Allen

The models are a powerful tool, but they are only as good as the parameters and assumptions they are built on. Those need to be scrutinized and validated by scientists—and that’s where Lettie Roach, a postdoctoral researcher in Atmospheric Sciences at UW, and her collaborators come in. Their recent publication in Geophysical Research Letters evaluates 40 recent climate models focusing on sea ice, the relatively thin layer of ice that forms on the surface of the ocean, around Antarctica, and was coordinated and produced to inform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“I am really fascinated by Antarctic sea ice, which the models have struggled more with than Arctic sea ice,” says Roach. “Not as many people are living near the Antarctic and there haven’t been as many measurements made in the Antarctic, making it hard to understand the recent changes in sea ice that we’ve observed through satellites.”

Roach and her colleagues found that all models project decreases in the aerial coverage of Antarctic sea ice over the 21st century under different greenhouse gas emission scenarios, but the amount of sea ice loss varies considerably between the lowest emission scenario and the highest.

Lettie Roach

The models they examined are known as coupled climate models, meaning they incorporate atmospheric, ocean, terrestrial and sea ice models to project what the future holds for our climate system. We are all familiar with the story of soon-to-be ice-free summers in the Arctic and the implications that may have on global trade. But what’s driving change around Antarctic sea ice and what’s expected in the future is less clear. Her team’s assessment of Antarctic sea ice in the new climate models is among the first.

“This project arose from a couple of workshops that were polar climate centered, but no one was leading an Antarctic sea ice group,” said Roach. “I put my hand up and said I would do it. The opportunity to lead something like this was fun, and I’m grateful to collaborators across many institutions for co-creating this work.”

The Antarctic is characterized by extremes. The highest winds, largest glaciers and fastest ocean currents are all found there, and getting a handle on Antarctic sea ice, which annually grows and shrinks six-fold, is critically important. To put that into perspective, that area is roughly the size of Russia. The icy parts of our planet — known as the cryosphere — have an enormous effect on regulating the global climate. By improving the simulation of Antarctic sea ice in models, scientists can increase their understanding of the climate system globally and how it will change over time. Better sea ice models also shed light on dynamics at play in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, which is a major component of our southern hemisphere.

“The previous generation of models was released around 2012,” says Roach. “We’ve been looking at all the new models released, and we are seeing improvements overall. The new simulations compare better to observations than we have seen before. There is a tightening up of model projections between this generation and the previous, and that is very good news.”

Lettie Roach

This process, where scientists critically evaluate climate models, has long been part of the IPCC approach. Scientists verify those model assumptions make sense, compare predictions to see if they align with observations from the field and make sure the highest quality data were used to underpin model performance. Asking these questions helps fine-tune models to perform at their best. These assessments have occurred for decades and continue to become more sophisticated as the models themselves become more sophisticated and powerful—  and that’s great news as they continue to play an essential role in helping us all make sense of the world around us and how it is changing.

The scientific community works together very cohesively to develop climate projections for the IPCC reports. “The international effort that goes into developing models and sharing their output is hugely collaborative,” says Roach. “There’s a ton of work that goes into these models. I think they are the best tools we have to help us to understand climate change and what will happen in the future, and to provide good information for the policymakers to make decisions on.”

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When you try to imagine what a happy, calm beluga whale looks like, what images do you conjure up? A smiling white blob, reclining on a chaise lounge with a shrimp cocktail? A zen-like cetacean emerging from a meditation workshop session with a rolled-up mat under its flipper? For Manuel Castellote, a researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies (CICOES), the image is less absurd but more exciting. He pictures a beluga “with a large social group, with calves, in an environment where they don’t have trouble finding food and the only threats they face are natural predation.”

For many of the beluga whales living in our oceans, this kind of existence is rare and hard to come by. Fortuitously, while the COVID-19 pandemic brings the world to a grinding halt, our planet’s more sensitive wildlife, including beluga whales, are being given a welcome reprieve from the anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) stressors that usually pose a threat to their existence.

Research by Castellote and colleagues at NOAA and CICOES identifies various human-caused noises — such as those produced by ships, jet engines, and mechanical drilling — as one of the leading threats to the wellbeing of beluga whales. Castellote, a behavioral ecologist, has been using acoustic techniques to study beluga whales and other cetaceans for more than 20 years. He and his colleagues use recording devices to monitor and measure the noise surrounding beluga habitats in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, along with the sounds the whales make. Listening to audio samples collected by Castellote (included below), in which the gentle sounds of whale song are drowned out by passing ship engines and mining activities, it’s easy to see how the wellbeing of these creatures is challenged when they live alongside large or industrialized communities of humans.

(more…)

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