Ciao from Roma

This year I have a NSF GK-12 fellowship and spend one day per week teaching science to 7th graders in Newport, NH. Below is a letter I sent them from a workshop in Rome:
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Ciao Newport 7th graders!

I’m here in Rome, Italy, for a week-long meeting for scientists who study how sea levels have changed over thousands of years. (Think of how the height of the ocean changes during high and low tides during the day, but much larger changes in height and longer time periods.) Folks here at the meeting all study some aspect of how the oceans have raised and lowered over time due to melting and re-growing of the ice sheets over past ice ages. (Trivia question: Do you remember the 3 ice sheets in the world??? Answer: Greenland, East Antarctic and West Antarctic).

There are a wide range of participants at the meeting. Some, like me, study how ice sheets and glaciers change, others study past sea levels using the height of coral reefs in tropical areas, and many people here use our data to create these fancy computer programs, called models, that they use to understand how sea-level changed over tens of thousands of years. We can then use these models to predict how sea-level will change in the future. This is especially important for many people who live in low-lying areas of the world. For example, New York City is very low-lying (that is, not very high above the ocean height) and is home to 8.3 million people. If you remember last year during Hurricane Sandy, many people’s homes were flooded in New York City and there were millions of dollars of damage to homes and infrastructure (good vocabulary word!?!)

It is very important that we understand how sea-level is going to change in the future due to the melting ice sheets because millions of people all over the world will be affected by changes in the sea-level. The scientists at this meeting all study how sea-level has changed in the past and we need to understand how it changed in the past before we can determine how it may change in the future.

Besides learning a lot from other scientists, I’ve also been eating a lot of good food (homemade pasta and pizza!), walking around the city of Rome and catching up with good friends. All in all a great trip!

Looking forward to seeing you all next week when I’m back in the U.S.

ciao! Laura

View of the outskirts of Rome from my hotel.

Scientists presenting and discussing data from their posters.

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IGERT Fellows Present Posters at IPY 2012

This past week six Dartmouth IGERT Fellows presented their work at the 2012 International Polar Year Conference in Montreal.  The five students who gave poster presentations spent time in front of their posters chatting with fellow researchers, educators, media and policy makers about their work and findings.

Check out the videos below to see Lauren Culler, Laura Levy and Ben Kopec giving a shortened version of their poster talk for the camera!

Laura Levy and her poster “Holocene glacier fluctuations, Scoresby Sund, eastern Greenland”

Ben Kopec and his poster “Lake water balance near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland and their interannual variability”

Lauren Culler and her poster “Temperature alters interactions between Arctic mosquitoes and their predators in snowmelt ponds in West Greenland”

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IGERTeer presents at 35th Annual Society of Ethnobiology Conference

Ethnobiology is the study of humans and their relationship to things biological, from plants to animals to nature itself. Sessions ranged from “Archeological methods” to “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Ethnobiology in the 21st Century (and Beyond): Changes, Innovations, and Issues of Justice” to an entire session dedicated to Acai. The Archeological Methods session was fascinating — Linda Scott Cummings presented a chemical analysis of residues found on ceramic sherds (in this circle they are called sherds and not shards) as support for the use of a plant in the Euphorbia family (same family as your Christmas friend, the pointsettia) in Samoa over 2000 years ago. Another presenter, Caroline A. Dezendorf, used her master’s research to recreate various processes of preparing maize. Using heirloom varieties of maize, she found that those kernels which underwent a lyme treatment match those found by archaeologists. Steve Wolverton used skeletal remains of white-tailed deer to determine that increased hunting pressure resulted in larger deer (due to increased forage).

While there I presented my results from my 2011 field season in South Greenland (see previous post). I was happy to share with the audience that plant knowledge is not disappeared from Greenland, but instead is shared among a small community of enthusiasts. I am working with my collaborator, Lenore Grenoble at the University of Chicago, to pull our results into a manuscript for submission to a journal. Unlike ecology journals, ethnobotanical journals favor including all the data within a paper. So far our manuscript is 4 pages long and the table with the results of our interviews is 10 pages long.  I’ve never seen more table than paper in an ecology journal!

Every talk about the Arctic requires acclimating the audience to a different perspective of the globe, one where the North Pole is the center of our perspective.

We found that knowledge varies from merely knowing who is knowledgeable about plants within the community to extensive knowledge about collection, preparation, storage and use of plants. We documented 171 uses of plants, divided into 7 categories: beverage, craft, food, medicine, fuel, spice or condiment, and ritual. The majority of uses were as medicine (~25%), food (~23%), beverages (~14%), and craft (~12%). Beverages include mostly teas and three instances of fermented drink. The craft category includes funeral wreaths and decorative bouquets of dried and fresh materials, including fabrication of Christmas trees from Juniperus communis. Medicines are topical and internal. Fuel includes material for fire and candlewicks. Spices are those plants used during cooking; condiments are those that are added to food once cooked. Ritual describes uses connected with spiritual practices, in this case to cleanse the home of bad energy or ghosts. Our work indicates that while few individuals hold knowledge, it does persist within the community and plants are used today both traditionally and with Danish influence.

A stormy day in the Rocky Mountains.

One of the highlights of the trip was a field trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. The four hour bus ride allowed plenty of time to get to know other conference participants, including Steve Weber, the founder of SoE, and a paleoethnobotanist. His research investigates how and why people adopt subsistence strategies. What I appreciated most about our conversation was to learn that he uses techniques with which I am familiar thanks to my IGERT connection with Earth Scientists, but to ask very different questions. My IGERT colleague, Laura Levy, uses lake core samples to measure the past extent of the Greenland ice sheet. Steve uses them to understand climate and agricultural practices in Pakistan. It was empowering to jump right into a conversation with the founder of an esteemed society with full understanding of his methods. Thanks, IGERT!

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