In This Issue
- First Annual Writer’s Festival and Photo Contest
- Alumnus Greg Marshall’s work with National Geographic
- 2nd Annual Open House
- Focus on Nicholas Fisher
Symposium culminates five years of Amazon research
An international symposium held in September in Niteroi, Brazil was the final exchange of the results of four cruises and five years of Amazon continental shelf studies. The project, names AmasSeds (A Multidisciplinary Amazon Shelf SEDiment Study) was carried out by five groups distributed among six Brazilian and eight American institutions and universities. Two of those five teams were based at and administered by the Marine Sciences Research Center- the sedimentology team headed by Charles Nittrouer and the bio-geochemistry team headed by Robert Aller.
The purpose of the study was to learn about the dynamic interactions between the Atlantic Ocean and the Amazon river, one of the world’s largest river systems, which discharges over a trillion cubic meters of water, a billion tons of sediment, and nearly a billion tons of sediment, and nearly a billion tons of dissolved solids annually. Once the discharged nutrients, metals, and other organic and inorganic materials reach the ocean, they undergo dynamic geological, chemical, physical and biological processes that are found only at the mouths of very large rivers, such as the Amazon and only a handful of other large rivers in the world. The large discharge of sediment particles, for example, greatly influences plant growth and creates fluid muds that dramatically alter sediment transport and its deposition to form the strata of the delta floor.
To understand oceanic processes, both ancient and current, the researchers gathered samples of seawater and sediment from several miles out on the continental shelf to the shore and took continuous cores across the continental shelf and inland several miles onto the coastal plain.
This type of grand-scale study could only be achieved through a large, international multidisciplinary project like AmasSeds. Besides all the accumulated knowledge, over its lifetime, the project has produced numbers of masters and Ph.D. theses, published articles, and student exchanges, including several Brazilian Students for MSRC.
Josephine Aller was the third faculty member who participated in the project and attended the Symposium, and students John Jaeger, Mead Allison, Panas Michalopoulos, and Kristin Chaloupka.
Pt. Jeff Ferry Crew aids MSRC Long Island Sound “PULSE” study
Initial interpretation of data obtained from this past year’s PULSE study of Long Island Sound water and sediments, is telling MSRC’s Robert Aller and a team of researchers that something important happens during the annual spring bloom. And almost as interesting as the data, was the means of determining the time of the spring bloom- with the help of crew members aboard the Bridgeport- Port Jefferson ferry.
PULSE is an outgrowth of the now completed five-year U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National Estuary Program’s Long Island Sound Study, whose goal was to understand the processes of oxygen depletion in both the water column and the sediments in the western Sound. While phytoplankton blooms-bursts of plant growth- are natural events, like the yearly spring bloom in Long Island Sound, the western Sound is stressed with too many nutrients. This can initiate blooms atypical for their massive size and time of appearance.
Following their explosive growth, the plant cells die and decay, then drift down to the sediments, delivering a large pulse of food for the the small animals and microbes that live there. It is the equivalent of a spring harvest after an impoverished winter. But while providing a bountiful food source for the sediment animals, the large dose of decaying matter is also responsible for depleting oxygen in the sediments. If oxygenated water is not circulated through the affected area, the result can be a large-scale die-off of sedentary animals.
Sampling oxygen in the water column during the EPA study was relatively easy, but the sediments give up their secrets grudgingly. “It is very difficult to measure dynamic chemical processes, Such as oxygen distributions, in the sediments,” said Robert Aller, who, along with a team of MSRC scientists, was responsible for the sediment studies.
Over the past year, the team has been trying to coordinate sampling the sediments at the time of the annual spring bloom to see how algal decay and decomposition alter the chemistry in the sediments and affect the health and activities of animals living there. They needed to know the exact time of the spring bloom by collecting water samples every few days and counting phytoplankton cells. But taking water samples so frequently in all types of sea conditions would have been impossible to do-until the ferry company’s vice president and general manager, Fred Hall, offered to let his chief engineers Chris Hayden, Dave Sweetser, Scott Belfield, and Harold Jacobson, collect samples every few days during ferry crossings for the duration of the study.
FOCUS ON RESEARCH
Charles Nittrouer – The Formation of Sub-sea Sedimentary Rocks
Geological oceanographer Chuck Nittrouer’s research objective is to provide the tools to understand the oceanic and environmental conditions millions of years ago that formed the sedimentary rocks geologists now find above sea level.
To do this, he must look at how similar rocks are forming below sea level. “I try to understand how the ocean creates signals, the diagnostic characteristics, within the strata to help other geologists interpret sedimentary rocks,” said Nittrouer. “This way they can understand the history of the Earth better, because most of its history is recorded in these rocks.”
Products of land erosion-sand, silt, and clay-head for the ocean in runoff, primarily through rivers, and end up on the ocean’s continental margins. This extends from the coastal plains, which can stretch inland tens of miles and out to the continental rise at depths of about 4,000 meters. Here, more than 90% of the Earth’s sedimentary rocks are formed when the layered sediments, or strata, are later compacted under the Weight of new sediment.
Nittrouer and his students look at how biological, chemical, and physical processes impart certain sedimentary characteristics and how groups of particles are layered together in the preserved strata. The researchers examine isolated or combined characteristics in a range of settings where the waves and tides are strong and where they are weak. They then try to isolate one factor, for example, the strength of the current, and measure this in a range of different settings-polar, temperate, and tropical.
Nittrouer’s team uses a unique approach, combining standard techniques that other geologists use (seismic profiling; measurements of waves, tides, and currents; mineralogical studies; and sedimentary structure and grain size) with a range of short- to long-lived radioisotope techniques that permit an evaluation of the time these layers were deposited. “If you can’t evaluate time, then you are not doing the geological investigation in the best way,” said Nittrouer.
Using this combination of techniques, they can look at a packet-a series of depositional events-and tell which marine physical processes are responsible for the various coarse- and fine-grained, thin and thick layerings, and when they occurred. They can tell, for example, what events happened over a period of 10-20,000 years; those that occurred in decades, years, or on seasonal time scales, such as peak flood and low stages of rivers; fortnightly tidal cycles; and even those that took seconds to happen, such as the period of a wave.
The Amazon is a good place to study rocks formed under natural conditions because it is one of the few large rivers still in a relatively natural condition. The resolution of layers is also very good at the mouth of the Amazon. Nittrouer is seeing a yearly sediment accumulation of many centimeters there, compared with less than a millimeter elsewhere, a result of the large sediment supply from the river.
Besides the Amazon, Nittrouer has been working around the world to contrast different sediment systems in different places. Since 1982 he has worked in the Antarctic, where sediments are a combination of both glacial and marine input, with 40% of the marine input being diatom shells. And he just received NSF funding for a subpolar project off the Southern Alaskan coast, where sediments are released in icebergs from glaciers that come down fjords to the Sea, as well as from rivers. He also hopes to contrast Amazon sedimentation with that in a different equatorial setting-New Guinea.
Besides understanding sedimentation processes from their analyses, Nittrouer and his students can see when major environmental changes have occurred. For example, over the past few thousand years, the Amazon continental shelf shows two drastic shifts, moving from environmental conditions where it was rapidly accumulating sediment to one where it was eroding sediment over most of the shelf, to once again where it is accumulating.
“This demonstrates that nature on its own went through some fairly dramatic fluctuations, which had nothing to do with humans stripping the rain forest,” said Nittrouer. “We are concerned about what humans are going to do to the environment, but in fact, nature can do even more drastic things to itself. If we can understand better how the system naturally responded in these dramatic situations, we could better predict what humans can do to the environment.”
Information Center Dedication: Connecting MSRC to the world’s libraries
The Marine and Atmospheric Sciences Information Center (MASIC) was officially dedicated on June 18 with a special tribute to Provost Tilden Edelstein for his role in creating the center. “MASIC was created with the help of Tilden Edelstein–the single greatest contribution to our facilities since I have been at Stony Brook,” said MSRC director Jerry Schubel. “I hope it will serve as a model in the way the university moves in the future.”
Roger Kelly, head of MASIC, explained that the workstations available for use by all Stony Brook students, faculty, and staff, offer greater flexibility than the terminals in the main and other branch libraries, which are dedicated to searching STARS, the online catalog service at Stony Brook. MASIC workstations, on the other hand, offer networked CD ROM databases for MSRC research, access to STARS and other facilities on the campus network, as well as access to the Internet’s several hundred participating libraries around the world.
“This type of installation offers the flexibility to adapt to the evolving technologies of libraries,” said Kelly. During the dedication, the workstations were connected to local CD ROMS, the STARS catalog on campus, Cornell’s library catalog, and the University of Queensland in Australia.
FACULTY AND ALUMNI NOTES
Alumnus John Reinfelder has received the prestigious Lindeman Award from the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography. The award was for the 1991 Science article, co-authored with his MSRC graduate supervisor Nicholas Fisher, titled, “The Assimilation of Elements Ingested by Marine Copepods.” Reinfelder is Currently a postdoctoral fellow at M.I.T.
Malcolm Bowman gave a talk in May for the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at McGill University in Montreal on “Estimation of velocity gradients in the Ocean using the Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler.” He was keynote speaker and co-organizer of a meeting on the “East River Tidal Barrage,” at Columbia University in April.
Bowman also attended the Books Board of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C. in July and was conference chairperson for a Gordon Research Conference on Coastal Ocean Circulation in June in Plymouth, New Hampshire. For this conference, he received grants from National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard, Minerals Management Service, and the Department of Energy.
Other grants Bowman received were a Hudson River Foundation grant with Kamazima Lwiza for “Interactions of the Hudson River Estuary with the adjacent coastal waters of the New York Bight and a New Jersey Sea Grant award for “Impact of Hudson River
Jane Fox presented “The escape of O and H from Mars,” at the May meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Baltimore. In June, she gave an invited talk, “Photochemistry on Venus and Mars, or, What we have learned from planetary atmospheres that enhances our understanding of the terrestrial atmosphere?” for the Eighth Annual Meeting of CEDAR (Coupling Energetics and Dynamics Of Atmospheric Regions) in Boulder Colorado. She also presented “The nightward fluxes of O⁺ in the Venus ionosphere” (J. L. FOX and J. F. Brannon) at the 7th Scientific Assembly of International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy in Buenos Aires, Argentina in August.
Fox has recently been awarded a three-year grant from the Venus Data Analysis Program (NASA) to study the nightside ionospheres of Venus and Mars.
Cindy Lee was Distinguished Lecturer at the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomans, Maryland in April. In May, she chaired the Strategic Planning Meeting for the Oceanography Division of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and also chaired the meeting of the NSF Advisory Committee on Ocean Sciences in Washington, D.C.
In June, Lee lectured in a European Community Course on the “Analysis of marine particles,” at the University of Bergen (Norway) and in July received the Norwegian Marshall Fund Award to visit Tronso, Norway in August 1994.
Gordon Taylor attended an Office of Naval Research workshop on Marine Environmental Quality in July, held at the Airlie Foundation, Airlie, Virginia.
Taylor has received three new grants: “The role of bacteria and microalgae in unexplained juvenile oyster mortalities” (with Monica Bricelj) from Northeastern Regional Aquaculture Center; “Effects of episodic disturbances on microbial degradation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in coastal sediments,” (with Bruce Brownawell and Glenn Lopez) from the Office of Naval Research; and “Pelagic microbiological processes and hypoxia in western Long Island Sound” from New York City Department of Environmental Protection and New York Sea Grant.
Minghua Zhang attended a joint meeting of Department of Energy (DOE) AMIP/FANGIO in Bologna, Italy in May; the Fourth Workshop on the Community Climate Model in Boulder Colorado in June; and the DOE ARM/CHAMMP Workshop in Fort Collins, Colorado early September.
In Bologna, Italy, he presented the following talks: “Approaches to compare clear-sky radiative fluxes between GCMS and ERBE: Methods III and IV; and “An approach for understanding climate feedback processes in atmospheric general circulation models.
In June at the NCAR meeting, he gave the talk, “Climate sensitivities from three atmospheric general circulation models.
