Earth and Mineral Sciences

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Urban Shadows

1/1/98

From her window on the sixth floor of Walker Building, Traci Arthur can see wooded mountain ridges and, in the valley below them, the sprawling influence of the University. In her office she analyzes data reflecting the similar urbanization of Chester County. Just west of Philadelphia, Chester County is one of the fastest growing areas in Pennsylvania. On Arthur's maps, development looks like a red finger stretching west through green country-side along U.S. Route 30. The finger's shadow spreads out from the highway: areas of anticipated development.

Terrible Beauty

6/1/96

"Surveying on the summit of Merapi at dawn is marvelous," we quoted geophysicist Barry Voight as saying in the March 1990 Research/Penn State. "An array of dark cones—Sumbing (9,000 feet high), Sundoro (7,500), Dieng (7,500), and Slamet (9,000)—pierce the sea of clouds, marking the spine of Java. A golden band rims the horizon.

PSUkraine

3/1/96

The large, white-walled room feels almost empty. A desk looks dwarfed pushed against one wall. A scattering of other furnishings seems faceless and nondescript. In the middle of the floor, however, is a machine, an apparatus, that commands attention.

Regional Outlook

12/1/95

Sitting on his back deck in rolled sleeves and loosened tie, looking out over his crop of soybeans, Rod Erickson can't resist a few teacherly observations.

"See how they turn their leaves away from the sun?" he notices. "But we've been lucky this year with beating the heat. Some of those rows are waist-high already."

Erickson shared a quiet lunch hour on a hot day in late July, four weeks after his installation as dean of Penn State's graduate school. He made the sandwiches.

Cool Fuel

12/1/95

Getting a jet to go to mach 4—four times the speed of sound—is a tricky business. Powerful-enough engines would run too hot, a bigger cooling system would add too much weight. The engineers' answer? Use cool fuel.

"In the emerging generation of advanced supersonic aircraft, jet fuel is the only coolant on board," says Jun Li, a graduate student in Penn State's fuel science program.

Lightning Strikes

12/1/95

The shuttle sits on the launchpad, in stark black-and-white, a flash of lightning bowed out from cloud to ground beside it, wrapping around it like a closing parenthesis, in the photograph on Matt Pearce's office wall.

It's a constant reminder of the research team's goal: to forecast a lightning strike 20 to 30 minutes in advance—time to get the shuttle secure, get the crew out, for the driver of the rocket-fuel truck on the wide-open access road to reach cover

. . .

The World According to Algae

9/1/95

They can't talk. They're not measurably intelligent. They can't even move on their own. Yet Katherine Freeman of Penn State University's geosciences department has been learning something from common marine algae.

"We're trying to look back in time," says Freeman, "to see if the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was higher when the temperature was higher." By understanding Earth's ancient atmosphere, scientists hope to predict the consequences of modern-day greenhouse gas emissions.

Understanding the Big Picture

9/1/95

Aside from the occasional impromptu napkin scribble, the last time I had to draw a map was in second grade, when Mrs. Heimer gave us brightly colored workbooks that showed just how it was done. One hour, three afternoons a week, we drew the various symbols guaranteed to be useful for life: tiny trees for forests, wavelets covering splotches of blue for lakes or seas, and my favorite, the bridge. It looked something like two reversed brackets ][ but Mrs. Heimer promised it was universally read as "bridge."

Island Aquifer

9/1/95

Isla de Mona, a four-by-six-mile island of carbonate rock, "sits like a limestone tile in the Caribbean," says Myrna Martinez, a Penn State doctoral student in geosciences.

Halfway between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, Mona juts up, 50-meter cliffs supporting the high plateau that takes up all but a small strip of its land mass, a small coastal plain along the southwest border.

The World According to Algae

9/1/95

They can't talk. They're not measurably intelligent. They can't even move on their own. Yet Katherine Freeman of Penn State University's geosciences department has been learning something from common marine algae.

"We're trying to look back in time," says Freeman, "to see if the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was higher when the temperature was higher." By understanding Earth's ancient atmosphere, scientists hope to predict the consequences of modern-day greenhouse gas emissions.

A Richer Experience of Place

6/1/95

On a hot Sunday in June, 62 professors from the United States, Canada, and Scotland were following Peirce Lewis, Penn State professor of geography, up and down the hills of Bellefonte, stopping when he stopped, crowding beneath sidewalk linden trees for the scant shade they offered, as Lewis, a man with cropped grey hair, a trim grey-white beard, and a frank, folksy manner, demonstrated how to read Bellefonte like a book.

Or, to use Lewis's vocabulary, like a "document."

A Sense of Sea Ice

6/1/95

In the bestselling Danish novel Smilla's Sense of Snow, the sea ice is primeval, beautiful but deadly, intertwined in human lives in ways mysterious yet real.

Balmy Old Mars

3/1/95

Present-day Mars is bone dry and freezing cold, capable of sustaining neither water nor life. Global mean temperature on the Red Planet is 218 degrees Kelvin, or about -67 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Genesis of Oxygen

9/1/94

In the beginning, was there air?

The answer depends, of course, on how you define "beginning," and what you mean by "air." According to Hiroshi Ohmoto and Takeshi Kakegawa of Penn State's department of geosciences, however, "by about 3.4 billion years ago" (more than three billion years before the earliest dinosaurs) "the atmosphere contained appreciable amounts (more than approximately one percent of the present atmospheric level) of free oxygen."

Changing Wood into Coal

6/1/94

Ancient forests that once stood tall and dark are now buried, making their way back into daylight as coal. Researcher Patrick G. Hatcher wants to know how.

"One problem with studying how wood converts to coal is that the reactions take place over an extremely long period," said Hatcher, who is an associate professor of fuel science and geosciences at Penn State. When trying to duplicate those chemical reactions in the laboratories, he added, "We are faced with comparing something that occurs over a billion years with something modern."

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