Earth and Mineral Sciences

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Astrobiology: The Search for Life in the Universe

1/1/01

Once it was asked in whispers, or with winks. The timid among us, though undeniably curious, feared raised eyebrows. Jokes about little green men. Who could take such a question seriously, yank it from the misty realms of science fiction and drop it under the searchlight of science? Well, our national space agency, for one. What's more, NASA seems pretty confident these days about the answer: Astrobiology, as defined on an official agency Web site, is "the study of the living universe."

Filling the Pit

1/1/01

Locals call the 400-acre plot of scarred land just south of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, the "Big Gorilla." Piles of leftover coal hulk over the brown earth. A 90-foot-deep pit filled with acidic water covers almost 17 acres. Hundreds of feet below the pool, abandoned tunnels snake along a coal seam. Acid mine drainage flows into the nearby Little Schuylkill River.

Desperately Seeking

9/1/00

Kitchen appliances.

Type words in little white box. Click "Search." Wait. See results pop up. Click on first link. Skim webpage. Log off.

"That's how searching the World Wide Web seems to work for most people," explains Purvi Shah. "They log on, enter a query or two, scan a web page, and log off."

Stumped

9/1/00

The lab is littered with stumps. Matt Beaty heaves one onto the counter and runs his fingers along its severed edge and over its rough-hewn surface, where its autobiography has been written in the language of tree rings. Luckily for Beaty, he's fluent in Tree Ring. He knows the grammar of ring width, the syntax of discoloration, and the context clues of scar patterns that tell the story of one tree's life—and the scenes that interest him most are those in which the tree was injured: forest fire.

CAUSE 2001

5/1/00

Policy debates—the students' idea—drove the second semester of CAUSE 2000. "There are lots of characters in the class, lots of different points of view," says student Kate Darby. "Some people are technical and some aren't. It's a diverse group, which makes it interesting," she says.

Seeing Students As Resources

5/1/00

The world of energy, says Semih Eser, "is so broad and diverse; it's rapidly changing." Changing so rapidly that Eser learned a thing or two about energy during the CAUSE 2000 cross-country tour.

Hard Choices

5/1/00

We all know about rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And we know it's a problem: most researchers link carbon dioxide emissions with global warming. But as an industrialized society, can we make energy choices that will help reduce carbon dioxide levels? What are the costs and consequences of those choices?

Tough questions to tackle. Undaunted, 15 undergraduates—engineering, science, and social science majors—spent the year 2000 exploring solutions.

Birdcasting

5/1/00

George Young tracks birds. He begins with satellite data: maps of yellow, green, and red blobs indicating the heat that radiates from grassy fields, patches of shrubbery, and parking lots. From experience, Young knows which birds live in those habitats. "In grassy areas you might see a short-eared owl or a horned lark," he says.

Student Power

5/1/00

Last November, CAUSE student Kate Darby attended the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in the Netherlands with other students, scientists, lobbyists, heads of state, and presidents of countries with environmental concerns. (Al Gore and Bill Clinton would have attended had it not been for the on-going presidential election.) The conference goal was to negotiate a final draft of the Kyoto Protocol, which sets greenhouse gas emission limits on countries in an effort to curb climate change.

At the Edge of the Map

5/1/00

A portrait is an abstraction of a person. If it is drawn well, the viewer can sense the character of the person in the portrait. The artist can emphasize certain attributes while eliminating others--it's all in how the artist wishes to portray the person. And so it is with maps.

Going to the Source

5/1/00

"Twenty of us were together"—15 undergraduates, two instructors, and three graduate students to help with the driving—"for 24 hours a day, for two weeks," says student Kate Darby. "By 7 am, we had to be out and ready to go for a long day."

Traveling Man

5/1/00

Talk about a traveler. When the "economy in Britain was in the toilet in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s," says Derek Elsworth, he took a stand-by flight to Canada to find an engineering job. With a bachelor's degree in engineering geology from Portsmouth Polytechnic, and a master's degree in rock mechanics from Imperial College (both schools in England), Elsworth knew that he was marketable. And 24 hours later, he landed a job in Calgary.

Whole Brain Workout

5/1/00

The CAUSE seminar allowed undergraduate Kristy Fruit to take her liberal arts education and "smash it together with the technical stuff," she says.

Ocean Extinction

1/1/00

When the continents were moving together to form the giant landmass Pangaea, over 250 million years ago, more than 500 animal families lived in the ocean. There were rugose and tabulate corals, trilobites, bryozoans, and brachiopods, as well as some fish and amphibians. At the end of the Permian period 95 percent of these marine species were extinct.

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