Environment@Harvard

Fall/Winter 2009-10

Environment @Harvard H a r v a rd U n i ve r s i t y C e n t e r f o r t h e E nv i r o n m e n t www.environment.harvard.edu

Answers in the Ice Harvard researchers probe frozen landscapes for clues to Earth’s past and future

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n the wall of Jim Anderson’s Harvard office is a photograph of a man on a glacier, a small, dark figure in a vast expanse of snow and ice.

The man is Anderson, a Harvard professor who last year visited Greenland as part of a new research project to probe the mysteries of the ice there. Anderson, who calls Greenland “a very worrisome and impressive place,” says there’s something elemental about being on the ice, knowing it extends down a kilometer beneath his feet but not knowing exactly what it holds and what lies beneath.

Ice and uncertainty. Talk to scientists about the world’s ice and they’ll tell you tales of uncertainty. Even as they confirm that climate change is real and driven by human hands, researchers studying the world’s ice confess to how little they really know about its current state and behavior.

That lack of knowledge makes predicting the future difficult.

“The composition of the cryosphere represents one of the great unknowns, both in

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Answers in the Ice: Some scientists believe glaciers and sea ice hold the key to understanding Earth’s climate system—but complete understanding can’t come quickly enough.

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Letter from the Director

terms of what global warming is doing to the planet now and in the great impacts it will have on human society in the future,” says Hooper professor of geology and professor of environmental science and engineering Daniel Schrag, who directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE).

Though there are large gaps in our knowledge, we’re not entirely ignorant about ice. We know the globe’s cryosphere is massive, the largest part of the world’s climate system after the ocean. It contains 75 percent of the world’s fresh water, covers about 10 percent of the globe’s land surface, and caps 7 percent of the oceans.

Its shiny, reflective surface, a property sci9 Inspiration from Nature: HUCE director Dan Schrag talks with Wyss Institute director Don Ingber and Harvard professor Joanna Aizenberg about the vast potential of biologically-inspired engineering.

13 History and the Fate of the Planet: Incorporating environmental perspectives, Harvard historians are reshaping their field.

James G. Anderson, Philip S. Weld professor of atmospheric chemistry, on a research expedition in Greenland. The island’s barren landscape holds critical insights to understanding the behavior—and environmental implications—of melting ice.

entists describe in terms of albedo, plays an important role in how much heat the Earth absorbs, a critical consideration as scientists ponder feedback effects of human-driven climate change.

We know that a warming world means less ice bound up in mountain glaciers and in the world’s great ice caps, not to mention more familiar parts of the cryosphere: snow blanketing the land during winter and the ice crystals that bind up the frozen ground in permafrost. We also know that melting land-based ice means rising seas.

But when asked where the ice will melt, how much, and—most critically for those interested in sea level rise—how fast, scien-

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Courtesy of james anderson

by Alvin Powell

Letter from the Director A

t the start of 2010, the need for innovative solutions to our energy and environmental challenges has never been greater. In the aftermath of Copenhagen, the administration’s attention will soon turn towards energy and climate, working with a Congress polarized by the health care debate and upcoming elections. At the same time, the expansion of America’s natural gas reserves is stirring a new discussion among industry and environmentalists about the

Our first group of Ph.D. students from our new Graduate Consortium on Energy and Environment are just now completing the program requirements. With a new group of students added this fall, the program now has 43 students from 16 departments and six schools—truly a breathtaking success in bringing together scholars from across the University. Already we are seeing the impact of their exposure to coursework on energy technology, energy policy, and the consequences of energy choices as they look for ways to continue to engage with faculty and with each other on these compelling subjects.

Across the University, planning is underway to grow our community of scholars with new appointments and programs spread across all of Harvard’s schools. Faculty have formed working groups to brainstorm about ways to strengthen our programs in several areas: Energy Technology; Energy and Environmental Policy; Energy, Environment and Global Health; and Climate

“Our new Graduate Consortium on Energy and Environment now has 43 students from 16 departments and six schools—truly a breathtaking success in bringing together scholars from across the University.” role of natural gas in a carbon-constrained world, especially as the price of oil hovers ominously around $80 per barrel in the face of a worldwide economic recovery. Around Harvard, interest in these issues has never been greater, both among students and faculty.

At the Center for the Environment, we are working to integrate the different perspectives that the Harvard community provides, as well as connecting the university to the world beyond. This spring, our Future of Energy speaker series will bring industry leaders to Harvard to reflect on the impact that shale gas could have on America’s energy future. In other venues, we will bring thought-leaders from government, from the military, and from environmental organizations to understand the broader impacts of new drilling technologies on national security and environment.

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and Global Change. We hope to present our recommendations to President Faust and the Deans of the various schools later this spring.

One of the most exciting new ideas to come from this process is a plan to create a set of secondary fields in Energy and Environment that will make these issues accessible to undergraduates concentrating in a wide variety of disciplines. Students in the program would gain some exposure to the challenges in energy and environment through a sequence of courses outside their main concentration. Different tracks would cater to students with strong quantitative training in the natural sciences and engineering, to students interested in economics and the social sciences, and to students in the arts and humanities. Our hope is to launch this new program next fall, aided by the generous support of our alumni.

In this issue of Environment@Harvard we give you another glimpse into our vibrant community, which now includes more than 225 faculty members. We introduce you to some of our historians who have turned their attention to questions of energy and environment to understand the past. We look at the important role that ice plays on our planet, a subject that brings together scientists from diverse backgrounds including meteorology, oceanography, geophysics, and biostatistics. Finally, we share with you my discussion with Don Ingber and Joanna Aizenberg at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, probing them on their innovative approach to using biology to solve our environmental challenges. I hope you will get a sense for the excitement and broad engagement of this remarkable intellectual community. For me, this is a reason for optimism in the New Year.

Dan Schrag

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The Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE) encourages research and education about the environment and its many interactions with human society. By connecting scholars and practitioners from different disciplines, the Center seeks to raise the quality of environmental research at Harvard and beyond.

Environment @ Harvard is a publication of the Center for the Environment Daniel P. Schrag, Director James I. Clem, Managing Director Jenn Goodman, Communications Coordinator Jennifer Carling, Designer All portraits by Claudio Cambon unless otherwise noted.

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tists will tell you we’re way behind in our understanding of a world racing toward a warmer future.

Researchers affiliated with the Center for the Environment are working to fill those gaps. How much ice will melt, they say, is an open question. How fast is another critical issue about which we don’t have enough information. There are indications that the ice on Greenland, for example—whose complete melting would raise sea levels 7 meters—may disappear faster than originally thought, in centuries rather than millennia.

Consensus sea level estimates of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reflect that uncertainty.

A 2008 IPCC technical paper on how climate change will affect sea level rise projects an increase of between 0.18 meters and 0.59 meters by the end of this century. It cautions, however, that thermal expansion of gradually warming ocean water is the largest part of this estimate, 70 to 75 percent, and that models do not include the full effect of potential changes in ice sheet flow, something that makes the definition of an upper bound impossible.

“Partial loss of the Greenland and/or Antarctic ice sheets could imply several metres of sea level rise, major changes in coastlines and inundation of low-lying areas, with the greatest effects in river deltas and low-lying islands,” the report says. “Current modeling suggests that such changes are possible for Greenland over millennial time-scales, but because dynamic ice flow processes in both ice sheets are

already floating, is disappearing in the Arctic Ocean at an alarming rate.

But it may be Greenland that is of greatest concern. With lakes of summer ice melt, iceberg-filled fjords, and the nearcertainty of melting at today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, Greenland fills observers with a train-wreck fascination and sends scientists rushing to figure out the nature of its ice melt.

Greenland’s ice sheet is vast, reaching depths of three kilometers along the gigantic island’s spine. The ice sheet is fed by high-altitude central snowfall that gets compressed and eventually moves into some 40 outlet glaciers that bulldoze their way to the sea in long, narrow fjords.

Those glaciers act as buttresses for the central ice sheet, and, as they speed up,

“The ice on Greenland—whose complete melting would raise sea levels 7 meters—may disappear...in centuries rather than millennia.” currently poorly understood, more rapid sea level rise on century timescales cannot be excluded.”

We’re farthest ahead in understanding where ice will melt. The world’s mountain glaciers have been shrinking since the 1800s, their retreat slowing between 1970 and 1990, only to speed up again in the time since. The vast East Antarctic ice sheet, on the other hand, appears to be stable, though the smaller West Antarctic sheet, which holds the equivalent of five meters of sea level rise, is not. Sea ice, which plays a role in the world’s energy flows but not in sea level rise because it’s

so does ice flow from that enormous central area. Though it expresses uncertainty about the estimates, the IPCC says that Greenland lost between 50 billion and 100 billion tons of ice annually between 1993 and 2003, and even more in 2005.

HUCE-affiliated scientists are examining issues critical to understanding the behavior of Greenland’s ice and how fast it will reach the ocean: the topography of the bed beneath the glaciers, the behavior of melt water when it reaches the bed, and the calving of icebergs where the glaciers meet the sea.

“The level of our ignorance of the details of the Greenland glacial structure and its

Monthly changes in the mass of Greenland’s ice sheet observed by satellites during 2005. Purple and dark blue areas indicate areas of largest mass loss.

underlying topography—which controls the flow of the glacial subsystems—is shocking,” Anderson says. “Greenland contains seven meters of sea level rise. It is in many ways the cusp of the public policy problem, yet we are profoundly ignorant about what the future holds, 10 years, 20 years, 40 years, 60 years out.”

Anderson, who for many years focused his research team’s efforts on atmospheric ozone, has grown so concerned about the problem of climate change that he has shifted his research to concentrate on it.

“One thing we do know, Greenland isn’t stable under the current level of carbon dioxide. It’s not a question of whether Greenland’s glacial system will disappear, it’s a question of how quickly,” Anderson says.

Understanding the interface between the ice and the ground, Anderson says, is critical if we’re to understand the behavior of the glaciers that stream from Greenland’s central ice sheet to the sea. He believes that the nature of that interface—smooth or irregular, obstructed or clear—is a factor in determining how quickly the glaciers move.

Anderson and his research team have therefore equipped a small, four-seater airplane, a Diamond DA42, with icepenetrating radar and modified it to fly robotically. The plane, Anderson says, is extremely fuel efficient and robust enough to withstand Greenland’s weather. When the plane flies over the ice, its radar will bounce a signal from both the ice surface and the

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ground deep beneath, providing two kinds of information. The craft, which Anderson hopes to begin flying in early 2011, will greatly increase the volume of data on the glacier beds, which is currently being collected by human crews flying in large manned aircraft. It should boost observing time from current levels of just 100 to 120 hours per year to between 2,000 and 3,000 hours per year.

After three years of observing, Anderson hopes to have not just an enhanced understanding of the ground beneath the glaciers, but also a thickness map of the entire ice sheet and thus an understanding of ice thickness and structure in areas where it is flowing to the sea.

“Each of those glaciers’ flow basins has a different geometry and the way in which the geometry affects ice dynamics—the movement of the ice—is right at the cusp of our understanding of how the systems

James Rice, Mallinckrodt professor of engineering sciences and geophysics. Rice’s research has highlighted the important role of iceberg calving.

operate,” Anderson says. “The velocity of the [glacier] flow can reach a number of kilometers a year. But it can accelerate or decelerate by a factor of two in a year or two. Why is this? What idiosyncrasies are involved? The ocean temperature at the tip? The insertion of water coming down through cracks and fissures at the surface because the surface melts?”

The project, called the Airborne Robotic Radar Greenland Observing System, or ARRGOS, is being conducted with the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University and Aurora Flight Sciences, an 4

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“If a large volume of water flows quickly to the glacier bed, it can create pressures high enough to actually float the enormous weight of the glacier off the bedrock.” aircraft firm specializing in the scientific application of robotic aircraft. It will involve perhaps 20 people, including fulltime staff charged with data analysis and archiving based at HUCE. Operational staff will be located at bases in Thule and Kangerlussauq, Greenland, while Cambridge-based faculty members will analyze the data. The group will triage the glacial systems, Anderson says, examining the fastest flowing glaciers first.

Beyond glacier bed topography, another factor that influences glacier behavior is the action of melt water where the ice meets the ground. Earlier this decade, researchers from the University of Washington monitored a glacial lake on Greenland’s ice.

The lake was large, roughly 5.6 square kilometers with an average depth of 8 meters, but once it started to find its way through the ice, it disappeared in a matter of hours, pouring through cracks at a rate that must have surpassed the flow of Niagara Falls.

James Rice, Mallinckrodt Professor of Engineering Sciences and Geophysics, who has spent much of his career studying the interaction of earth materials and water, was intrigued by the researchers’ report and the massive flow of water to the glacier’s base. In June 2008, he and then-graduate student Victor Tsai began a project building mathematical models to explain the behavior of water as it moves through Greenland’s glaciers.

The models show that if a large volume of water flows quickly to the glacier bed, it can create pressures high enough to actually float the enormous weight of the glacier off the bedrock for a short period, something that’s been confirmed by GPS measurements, Rice

says. When the glacier loses contact with the bedrock, it can slip downhill toward the sea more quickly than when it’s anchored to the rock or sediments below.

The high pressure, however, can’t be maintained forever. After a few hours, the water drains away into the subglacial water system, seeping through the till beneath the ice, and on occasion, through larger spaces and caverns.

“This is an interesting question to understand because the hydrology of a glacier is something some people think is important in deglaciation,” Rice says. “In Greenland, you get lots of surface melting in summer.

The water runs down like it would a bald mountain and collects in the low places and forms very large lakes. I’ve asked how rapidly the glacier bed can absorb that water and what the dynamics of that absorption are.”

Whether due to hydrology or other factors, observers have noticed that Greenland’s glaciers are speeding up in their journey to the sea. In one case, the increased pace was noticed by Harvard researchers who were exploring a new kind of earthquake, one they eventually tracked to the iceberg calving grounds at the glaciers’ end.

It was then-Harvard Professor Göran Ekström who first noticed the unusual long, slow earthquakes on seismographs, Rice says. The strange quakes sent waves through the earth with a period of 100 seconds, compared with 20 seconds for the shock of a regular earthquake. The rumbling, of a magnitude of about 5 on the Richter scale, could be detected around the world.

Ekström and Tsai, now a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey in Colorado, narrowed the location of these earthquakes to the coast of Greenland, an area not tectonically active. Tsai and Ekström were sure the quakes were from something dramatic happening to the ice, perhaps a sudden slip of a glacier that would take it down its bed hundreds of meters. Whatever was going on, it was happening more often. In 2006, they reported that the number of these earthquakes had doubled over the previous five years.

When Ekström moved to Columbia University, Tsai began working with Rice

Shrinking Alpine Glaciers

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ontinental ice sheets are not the only ones embroiled in the climate mystery.

Glaciers in the high places of the world, from the poles to the equator, also play a role.

Though mountain glaciers are thought to be better understood and are known to be retreating on average, estimates of their behavior are based on measurements of just a small fraction of the world’s roughly 100,000 mountain glaciers. With one-sixth of the world’s population relying on glacier-fed rivers for their drinking water and populations imperiled by glacial lakes bursting their dams, two Harvard professors are teaming up because they think the stakes are too high to rely on shaky estimates.

“After I read the IPCC report [on mountain glaciers], I said, ‘That’s it? That’s all we have to go on?’” says assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Peter Huybers. “A glacier is really exquisitely sensitive to the environment it exists in. And if you change its temperature and change its precipitation, you can pretty much predict what’s going to happen. In so much as we know which regions are warming and where precipitation is changing, I don’t think there are going to be big surprises. But not being surprised by just how quickly glaciers are receding or how they tie into other things, like public water supplies, is quite different from having an accurate estimate with which to prepare for the future.”

Huybers is beginning a new cross-faculty collaboration with Armin Schwartzman, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health and an expert in image analysis. Their project, which recently received HUCE seed funding, seeks to harness Huybers’ experience with glaciers and modeling and Schwartzman’s expertise in medical image analysis to do something glaciologists have generally found to be difficult: interpret the ample supply of satellite images of the world’s mountain glaciers to better understand just what they’ve been doing in recent decades.

“If glaciers existed on a perfectly flat plain,

on the problem. The two shifted their focus from the idea that the quakes were caused by sudden accelerations of glaciers to calving events at the glaciers’ terminus.

Tsai’s models showed that the calving had to be relatively sudden, as a more gradual

under a cloudless sky, with no dirt on them, it would be an extremely easy problem,” Huybers says. “But glaciers carve their own canyons.... As they’re in these valleys, they’re shaded so you go from places that have bright sun to places that have shadowing…. Impurities Armin Schwartzman, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the collect on a glacier Harvard School of Public Health, sees many parallels between the over time, and as analysis of medical and satellite imagery. you get toward the terminus, those impurities tend to gather long will a village have water, for example.” toward the surface—rocks and dust, for For a glacier, Schwartzman says, they may example—so you have a more gradual tranmeasure the intensity of pixels along its path and use an edge detection algorithm sition from ice to terminus. Thus, gauging to estimate the location of its terminus. their size from space is not easy.”

Schwartzman got in touch with HuyThey’re initially going to use images from bers out of his own concern about climate NASA’s Landsat satellite missions, which change and a desire to lend his statistical have observed the Earth since 1972. But skills to the problem. Schwartzman says they may also examine images from satelthere are many parallels between analysis of lites using other wavelengths to help determedical scans of the brain, for example, and mine the glaciers’ edges. satellite images of a glacier.

In its early stages, the project will focus on “It’s a similar type of data,” Schwartzman developing that edge detection algorithm says. “In brain imaging—MRI, PET—you using well-studied glaciers, such as New have to identify regions with changes Zealand’s dramatic Franz Josef, which Huybers has visited twice and on which he has where there’s a tumor. There are many techniques that can transfer to other kinds ongoing projects. The well-studied glaciers of image analysis. Studies may have a sewill allow them to check their techniques quence of images, for example, [where we] against data gained on the ground, the two try to find areas in the image that might be say. Once the project is up and running, changing over time, perhaps as a function they’ll focus on critical glaciers, like those in of disease. the Himalayas which supply essential drink“In the case of Landsat [satellite images ing water. of glaciers], if you are taking pictures of the Within a year, the two say, they’d like same site over and over again, you also have to have the algorithm developed and the a sequence of images where most things analysis under way. The goal, Huybers says, stay constant and it’s all those small changes is to set up a system in which a student can that you’re after…. Being able to track the work up the history of a glacier—analyzing extent of a glacier over time will allow us to the available imagery taken during recent make better predictions for the future: How decades—in a single day.

release of ice wouldn’t generate the necessary seismic waves.

Rice says the quake-generating events are quite dramatic. Though the ice thins by the time it reaches the sea, the glaciers can still be a half-kilometer thick there.

“When these glaciers come to the fjords they are towering objects, so you have to think of something like a vast skyscraper standing above the level of the water in the fjord,” Rice says. “And that skyscraper —and all the skyscrapers on the block

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with it—suddenly fall over.”

When the ice falls, the top either pitches into the sea, grinding the base against the ice behind, or it slides bottom first into the fjord, grinding the top against the glacier as it goes. The scraping slows the event down providing the long-period seismic waves that were detected. Rice’s and Tsai’s suspi-

cions were confirmed by a research team that was on a glacier when one of the glacial earthquakes occurred. GPS monitoring equipment showed no sudden increase in movement as would happen if the glacier began to slide very rapidly on its bed. It did, however show a more gradual acceleration, as would happen to a glacier that

A Hat Trick!

Peter Huybers receives three prestigious honors

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eter Huybers, assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, HUCE faculty associate, and former Environmental Fellow, had quite a fall semester. First, he was named a 2009 MacArthur Fellow. Fellowship recipients are awarded “genius” grants of $500,000 to pursue “their own creative instincts for the benefit of society.”

Huybers (High-bers) also received the 2009 James B. Macelwane medal, which is awarded by the American Geophysical Union “for significant contributions to the geophysical sciences by an outstanding young scientist less than 36 years of age.”

HUCE Director Dan Schrag, also a former Macelwane medalist and MacArthur Fellow, presented the award to Huybers at the annual AGU meeting in December.

And to finish off his fall of accolades, Huybers was also named a David and Lucille Packard Fellow, an honor accompanied by a five-year, $875,000 grant to support his research.

Taking a multifaceted look at climate change, Huybers studies the history of Earth’s glaciers and ice sheets, as well as the temperature fluctuations seen across the planet’s surface over the course of a typical year. He has also participated in efforts to reconstruct Earth’s past climate based on the relatively little evidence available to us.

Huybers’ research seeks to clarify the as yet poorly understood processes that have driven the waxing and waning of Earth’s stores of ice over the past 3 million years.

During the planet’s ice ages, ice has covered much of the northern continents; today’s relatively ice-free conditions represent something closer to a historic minimum.

Huybers also studies the tremendous 6

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annual temperature variations seen across much of the Earth’s surface. Earlier this year, his analysis of global temperatures between 1850 and 2007 shed new light on this question, showing that winter temperatures have risen more rapidly than summer temperatures.

Among other effects, this imbalance has led spring to arrive, on average, nearly two days earlier than just 50 years ago, with implications for everything from the bud-

ding of trees to bird migration to the annual dissolution of sea ice. Huybers became an assistant professor in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in 2007, in the midst of postdoctoral work as an HUCE Environmental Fellow. He received his B.S. in physics from the U.S. Military Academy in 1996 and his Ph.D. in climate physics and chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004.

Portions of this article have been reprinted with permission from the Harvard News Office.

lost a binding ice plug at its terminus.

Rice says the research solved a scientific puzzle and may have focused people’s attention on the important role played by iceberg calving. “What we do not understand is what physical attributes of the surrounding water—temperatures and the like—would promote calving.” It’s one of the main things, Rice says, “that would help an ice flow to speed up. Ice buttresses itself at the head of the fjord. If the buttress falls down it removes resistance to flow.”

Developing a better understanding of calving Rice says, is therefore “very important.”

Fractures in the Antarctic Less well understood than Greenland’s glaciers is ice in the Antarctic. Amply illustrating this is the fact that the IPCC, which aggregates data in an attempt to reach scientific consensus, says it doesn’t know whether Antarctic ice grew or shrank between 1993 and 2003.

Specifically, competing estimates say that Antarctica’s ice may have shrunk by 200 billion tons a year in that period or that it may have grown by 50 billion tons a year—or any amount in between. In case the large range of the estimates isn’t caution enough about their reliability, the IPCC further notes that the small number of measurements used in forming the estimates, the differing techniques used in the measurements, and the presence of systematic errors makes the estimates so uncertain that they can’t assign statistical confidence limits.

The IPCC further cautioned against using the midpoint as a best estimate.

Behind those official figures, scientists believe that the vast East Antarctic ice sheet, which covers the bulk of the continent, is either stable or growing. The West Antarctic ice sheet, however, is another story. Just as Greenland’s central ice sheet is buttressed by its glaciers, scientists say the ice of West Antarctica is being buttressed by enormous floating ice shelves that extend into the surrounding ocean. It is these ice shelves, scientists say, that are preventing West Antarctica’s land ice from sliding into the sea and raising sea level as much as five meters.

Like Greenland, West Antarctica makes scientists concerned about climate-induced sea level rise nervous. The region has surprised scientists before, and not in a good way. In 2002, the massive Larsen B ice shelf—a mass of floating ice more than 200 meters thick and covering an area the size of Rhode Island, broke up in less than a month after an estimated 5,000 to 12,000 years of stability, a speed that one researcher called “staggering.”

HUCE Director Schrag says that, in understanding the future of West Antarctica, as in other places, the problem is the lack of information. For example, he says, it is known that even slightly warmer water can rapidly erode ice shelves from beneath, but researchers don’t understand conditions and potential changes to the seawater beneath Antarctica’s large ice shelves. “Our best observations of temperature and salinity come from instruments strapped to the backs of seals,” he says, when what we really need to know about are changes 600 meters deep in the water creeping in over the Antarctic ice shelf. “The ice shelves of Antarctica—the big Ross and Ronne ice shelves—buttress the land ice.”

If those shelves collapse, as Larsen B did, they would expose grounded ice in West Antarctica that not only would most likely begin flowing into the sea more quickly, but, since it sits on land that is below sea level, could pop off in larger chunks.

Glaciologists say that if the ice shelves collapse, all bets are off on estimates of sea level rise. “We are really flying blind on this one,” says Schrag.

At Harvard, Roiy Sayag GSAS ’09, under the tutelage of Eli Tziperman, the McCoy professor of oceanography and applied physics, examined one way Antarc-

tica’s ice gets to the sea: little-known areas of fast-moving, land-based ice that, though they cover just 10 percent of the ice sheet surface, account for 90 percent of its discharge into the sea. These moving rivers of ice, called ice streams, can be tens of kilometers across, hundreds of kilometers long and flow at hundreds or thousands of meters a year, compared with just meters per year in the surrounding ice sheet.

The work involved designing computer models of the ice, whose motion is believed to be independent of the topography of the ground beneath and rather to be related to the flow of water where the ice and ground intersect. As with the lubricated beds under Greenland’s glaciers, it is thought that when water pressure becomes high enough, it allows ice in the region of the stream to flow more quickly than that surrounding it.

A Stark Warning With ice and ocean tightly intertwined, scientists say it is critical to consider not only what the ice is doing to the ocean, but also to listen to what the ocean is telling us about the ice.

Harvard’s ice whisperer is professor of geophysics Jerry Mitrovica, a recent arrival from the University of Toronto. Mitrovica employs an unusual ally in his efforts to read the seas for signs of ice melt: gravity.

When one considers gravity, Mitrovica says, one realizes that perhaps the biggest misconception about sea level rise due to

melting ice is that it will be uniform like the changes that occur when you drop an ice cube in a glass of water or add a bucket of water to a bathtub.

Because we often think of gravity’s attractive force in the context of planets, it is easy to overlook when thinking about smaller masses. But ice, Mitrovica realized, has a gravitational pull just like anything else. And a lot of ice, like that stored in the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, has a significant gravitational pull.

Mitrovica uses this idea to better understand the reason that sea level change has not been uniform around the world.

This lack of uniformity was once used as an argument against the idea that global warming was resulting in sea level rise.

But Mitrovica says that something far more intricate, subtle, and intriguing is actually going on.

The change in sea levels around the world results, in part, from the gravitational effects of the enormous masses of ice from which the water comes. The ice is so massive that it exerts a strong gravitational pull on the water itself. That means two things happen when the ice melts.

The first is that, as expected, more water goes into the ocean, adding to its overall volume. The second, however, is a gravitational shift as the ice loses mass and its pull against the water becomes weaker.

The result is one of the most counterintuitive findings Mitrovica says he has ever been involved with. If the ice melts in a

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corbis

The peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in east Africa as seen from an aircraft in 1992 (left) and 2005 (right). The famous ice field that is just three degrees south of the equator could completely melt away in the next 20 years, scientists say, if the earth continues to warm at the current rate.

left: NASA; right: courtesy of Ted Scambos, National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado, Boulder

Left: Satellite view of Antarctica. Right: Antarctica’s major ice shelf areas. While the eastern sheet is thought to be relatively stable, scientists are gravely concerned about the disappearing western sheet and its implications for potentially dramatic sea-level rise.

place like Greenland, sea level will actually decrease close to Greenland because the lessened gravitational pull will mean that water will move away from the melting ice sheet. It will also cause water levels to rise disproportionately higher in the ocean farther from Greenland.

Recent work by a graduate student of Mitrovica’s showed that, though estimates of sea level rise in the case of the West Antarctic ice sheet’s collapse are about five meters globally, adding in the gravitational change means sea level will actually rise higher farther from Antarctica. New estimates of that change are nontrivial, putting the rise along the U.S. east coast at closer to seven meters than five.

These global variations in sea level present a potential treasure trove for scientific sleuths, Mitrovica says. Sea level rise at each point on the globe is a function not just of how much ice has melted into the sea, but the distance from the melt point.

The signals may be complex, Mitrovica says, but researchers can read the varying sea levels as overlaid patterns like fingerprints that, once untangled, can tell them not just how high the sea is rising, but also where the meltwater is coming from.

Mitrovica’s work tracking the fingerprints of past episodes of sea level rise has him looking worriedly at West Antarctica today. His research indicates that 14,000 years ago sea level rose suddenly—20 to 8

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25 meters in just 200 years. He traces that rise back to Antarctica, and argues that the past shows there may be more danger from sea level rise right now than people think.

“I personally think that ice sheet is more unstable than people think, and that it’s more unstable than the IPCC reports suggest,” Mitrovica says. “I don’t think there’s any doubt whatsoever that sea level is doing anomalous things: the ice sheets are melting, sea level is changing, and it’s changing in relatively predictable patterns.

I see significant cause for concern.”

Switches and Feedbacks Not only does melting and freezing land ice affect sea level in ways both mundane and surprising, as revealed by Mitrovica, floating sea ice plays a modulating role in the dance of ice and ocean in at least two distinct ways.

By changing the planet’s reflectivity, or albedo, and by serving as a gatekeeper for oceanic moisture, sea ice serves as a climate “switch,” turning on and off the great glaciations of the past, according to work

by Tziperman and his student at the time, Hezi Gildor, now at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Because sea ice can rapidly expand and retreat—as we’re seeing now in the Arctic —the switch that controls its extent and thickness can flip on and off relatively quickly, according to theories worked out

by Gildor and Tziperman. Sea ice, they theorize, plays a role not only in the long, 100,000-year glacial cycles of the ice ages, but also in shorter, more abrupt warming events called Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations, which occur over a matter of decades, as well as in Heinrich events, which

occur over centuries.

Events leading up to the sea ice switch begin in the warm interglacial periods, with an ice-free ocean and land ice just beginning to form. With ample atmospheric moisture from the oceans, snow accumulation exceeds melting, allowing land ice to grow. This increases the planet’s albedo, reflecting more energy into space and lowering temperatures—locally at first. This process continues for tens of thousands of years, during which the global atmospheric and ocean temperatures fall, while land ice continues to grow. Once ocean temperatures drop far enough, sea ice begins to form, increasing the planet’s albedo even more and dropping temperatures further.

This creates a positive feedback which spurs rapid sea ice growth.

Eventually, however, the ice covers enough of the ocean to both insulate it from further cooling and to cut off the ocean’s moisture from the atmosphere.

This point is the glacial maximum and the point at which the sea ice switch flips again, triggering a warming cycle.

The planet begins to warm because the ice has reduced the flow of moisture from the ocean to the air, cutting off snowfall to the glaciers. As glaciers shrink, the planet’s albedo declines, causing temperatures to slowly increase. After several thousand years, the ocean warms enough to cause sea ice to retreat, decreasing the albedo further and causing temperatures to climb further, sending the planet once again into an interglacial period.

Gildor and Tziperman’s work on this sea ice switch is one example of scientists looking to the past to understand the climate system’s workings and, perhaps, gain some

Image courtesy of Oregon State University

insights for the present, or even the future.

Those looking at Earth’s deep history, in fact, have discovered evidence for extreme climate states in the distant past.

In 1998, Harvard scientists Paul Hoffman, Dan Schrag, and co-authors revitalized an idea from the 1960s and 1980s that the Earth may once have been almost entirely glaciated. Such a Snowball Earth scenario, they hypothesized, resulted from a runaway feedback where the albedo of the growing sea and land ice reflected ever larger amounts of radiation into space, causing greater and greater cooling. Hoffman and Schrag found evidence of such an extreme glaciation event in cap carbonate sediments in Namibia. The Earth, according to the theory, was trapped in this extreme frozen form for millions of years until carbon dioxide-laden volcanic emissions raised atmospheric carbon dioxide to levels high enough that rising temperatures from the resulting greenhouse effect melted the ice.

Researchers struggling to understand all possible climate futures are now examining a period in the earth’s past called the Eocene, which, with warm temperatures from the equator to the poles, was the climate opposite of Snowball Earth. Their efforts, however, have met with more than a little frustration.

During the Eocene, which extended from 55 million to 38 million years ago, the planet was not just warmer on average than today, but the extremes of temperature between the equator and the poles were far less— today’s 50 degree Celsius difference was perhaps half as large then. This so-called “equable” climate existed at a time when there was no ice anywhere in the world.

Evidence of 12 to 15 degree Celsius ocean water flowing from the poles toward the equator along the sea floor—water that Collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica in 2002.

today is 2 degrees—prove that even the polar seas were ice-free year-round.

Places considered cold today were warm enough to support tropical life then, including crocodiles and palm trees. Eoceneera fossils of both these cold-intolerant species have been found as far north as Wyoming, “which is remarkable because temperatures there can sink into the minus tens of degrees Celsius in winter,” Tziperman says. “The fossils mean that temperatures never dropped below freezing…, even in the coldest winter. [The Eocene] was very, very warm.”

Until recently, however, climate scientists had been unable to explain the fossil evidence. Their climate models couldn’t sufficiently warm the globe—no matter how high researchers jacked up the carbon dioxide content—to account for the warmth so far north.

The answer to this anomaly may lie in the role of clouds.

Schrag and Anderson have proposed that the development of high stratospheric clouds in the Arctic would have warmed the region by trapping heat during the po-

lar night. The two believe that carbon dioxide-induced greenhouse warming could lead to the formation of such high clouds, which would have the effect of decreasing the temperature difference between the equator and the poles. This, in turn, would trigger decreased interactions between the lower atmosphere, called the troposphere, and the upper atmosphere, called the stratosphere. This self-reinforcing stratification would result in a warmer tropical stratosphere, which would absorb more moisture. A moister stratosphere would lead to higher stratospheric clouds, which would act as a blanket, retaining heat over the poles.

Tziperman and former doctoral student Dorian Abbot, Ph.D. ’08, propose a different wrinkle, suggesting changes to the circulation in the troposphere, or lower atmosphere, over the poles. Induced by levels of carbon dioxide triple those of today, such changes would make the polar troposphere look much like that of the modern tropics, with tropical-like convection, more rain, and increased cloud cover.

This would look “exactly [like] what we have in the tropics today,” Tziperman explains. When you account for cloud cover, suddenly—at high concentrations of carbon dioxide—the Arctic atmosphere becomes tropical.

“It develops tropospheric clouds and these high clouds keep it nice and warm.”

Though the work is intended to explain a warm period in the Earth’s past, Tziperman points out that the computer models he uses were intended to predict the Earth’s future and, if current carbon dioxide release rates aren’t reduced, 1,000 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is possible as early as 2150.

“You’ll have an ice free ocean,” Tziperman says of the potential return of equable climate to the world. “You’ll be able to take a tropical vacation in the Arctic during the polar night.”

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Inspiration from Nature

I

Joanna Aizenberg

n December, Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE) Director Dan Schrag spoke with leaders of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Founding director Don Ingber, Folkman proAn interview with bioengineers Don fessor of vascular biology at Harvard Medical School and and Joanna Aizenberg a professor of bioengineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is best known for discovering that living cells are built using a form of architecture first described by Buckminster Fuller, known as tensegrity, and that mechanical forces are critical regulators of cell growth and function. Joanna Aizenberg, the Smith Berylson professor of materials science and the Wallach professor at Radcliffe, is an expert in bio-inspired inorganic materials synthesis who serves on the Institute’s operating committee. The Wyss Institute’s mission is to uncover the engineering prinThe skeleton of the brittlestar, a cousin of ciples that govern living things, and to use the starfish, has a dual mechanical and optical this knowledge to develop solutions for the function: it is both a bone and an eye at most pressing healthcare and environmental the same time. The Aizenberg lab aims to issues facing humanity. Schrag, Aizenberg, create materials like this that are optimized and Ingber discussed the shared goals of the for multiple roles and functions. Each lens Institute and the Center for the Environis about 1/3 the width of a human hair. ment. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow: principle or organizational architecture, Schrag: What exactly is “biologicallyand use them in a completely different, inspired engineering?” completely synthetic setting—and often Ingber: In the past, engineering was basifor a different function. That would be cally a technology push, using engineering bio-inspired engineering. principles to solve medical life-science Ingber: Right. I think in the early days of problems. But at the Wyss, we feel we’re biomimetics, people were trying to make going to come up with entirely new engithings that look just like a thing that you neering principles by figuring out nature’s see in nature. For example, a recent visitor way of doing things. to the Institute lecturing on biomimicry showed a high speed photograph of a bird Schrag: That doesn’t necessarily mean the diving straight down into water with its end product is biological? beak to catch a fish—and there were no Ingber: That’s absolutely true. ripples. The bird has to do that so it can Aizenberg: The distinction I make is see its target. But it’s the shape of the beak between bio-derived and bio-inspired: that allows that waveless entry. bio-derived, meaning that we use biology and biological molecules or organisms to Schrag: I’ve seen these birds diving and it’s do things for us; and bio-inspired, meanamazing. It’s just like a knife cutting into ing that we just take principles that we the water. learn from biology, whether it’s a structural Ingber: The bullet train in Japan goes so 10

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fast that it makes a sonic boom when it comes out of a tunnel.

Engineers redesigned its shape to be like this beak. And now not only does it not make a sonic boom, it reduced the drag by 20 or 30 percent, allowing Ingber for greater energy efficiency.

This is an example of simple mimicry. But now we include biological processes too, like evolution and natural selection, and design principles and control mechanisms like tensegrity and dynamic networks. We even deal with stochasticity— the fact that all living systems are characterized by enormous variability and noise. Traditionally, engineers try to minimize noise, but nature has figured out how to harness it and to combine it with other processes, such as natural selection and evolution, to get incredible power and robustness.

But there are certain things people actually do better. For example, using microfabrication, we can make more robust materials with highly controlled topography. So we’re now using techniques that people developed to manipulate living materials, cells, and molecules.

Schrag: Let’s talk about that for a moment in the context of energy and environment.

There is a lot of work underway on the biologically-derived side, using bugs to make biofuels for example.

Aizenberg: That’s right. Using whole genome engineering of biological organisms [such as algae] to do the work for us. That’s bio-derived. (See “A Future for Biofuels” Spring/Summer 2009 newsletter, page 8.)

Schrag: I hope that approach comes up with something great. At the same time, I am also aware of some of the limitations.

For example, when it comes to nature producing biomass, there has been heavy selective pressure for rapid growth through 400 million years of evolution of land plants. So the idea that we can magically genetically engineer organisms that grow even faster is very difficult. But the bioinspired side, where we could actually learn from the way nature deals with light and turns it into energy, for example, is where

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Rebecca Henderson

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ast summer, about the time Rebecca Henderson accepted the position of Heinz professor of environmental management at the Harvard Business School, Greenpeace activists climbed atop Hewlett Packard’s headquarters and painted Hazardous Products on the roof.

Several months later HP announced a goal to reduce the energy it uses (and reduce greenhouse gas emissions) by 40% below 2005 levels, and to do so by 2011.

Henderson, who spent 20 years at MIT’s Sloan School largely focusing on the strategic and organizational challenges firms face in adopting new technologies, sees the information technology sector as potentially one of the success stories in the effort to find more efficient ways to use the globe’s natural resources and, more importantly, reduce the negative impact that utilization is having on the environment.

Unfortunately, Henderson believes such success stories are too few and, perhaps, too late.

“It’s terrifying,” says the London-born Henderson, “the risks we run as we continue to put greenhouse gases into the environment.”

Today, the list of Henderson’s fears is long. She believes there is a serious risk that global climate change will result in ever more extreme events, such as droughts in India and floods in Pakistan. Disasters like these will affect first those countries that are already the poorest, most unstable, and least able to cope.

the most inspiring ambitions lie. We could actually make systems that are more robust than living creatures, and that won’t require nutrients, or have to reproduce, and do all sorts of other things.

Aizenberg: Right. One research platform in the Wyss Institute, called Adaptive Architecture and Robotics, is about energyefficient, bio-inspired strategies. We try to engineer systems that use biological principles to respond to environmental cues. The idea is to design materials that respond adaptively and dynamically to inputs such as changing temperatures or humidity, or light. There is a whole range of strategies that we consider to create the

However, Henderson holds out hope that, because it is in their best interest, businesses will develop new models and processes that will “leave our natural resources in no worse shape than when we first started to exploit them.” “For example,” she says, “Unilever has a fish business, and overfishing is obviously a cause for concern.” Focusing on sustainability also forces businesses to “think about the efficiency of their processes.”

Along with improving efficiency (always a good thing, especially in recessionary times), Henderson notes that for some brands—Patagonia, for instance—caring about the environment aligns them with their customers. Indeed, Henderson sees more and more young consumers becoming sensitive to the environmental policies of the companies whose products they buy.

She thinks that increasingly they will choose brands that have made doing business in a “green” way a priority. And these young people are not just consumers; they are also employees. “IBM,” says Henderson, “generated enormous employee energy by focusing on green initiatives.”

Finally, businesses that implement green initiatives now will get a head start preparing for the governmental carbon regulations that Henderson is sure will come. “It’s only a matter of when,” she says. In the near future,

most efficient and sustainable structure with the least environmental impact.

For example, we are developing materials that attract moisture when it’s too dry outside and repel it when it’s raining. We engineer coatings that prevent ice formation, and coatings incorporating light gathering microlenses that adaptively reorient themselves to the sun. The structures of these materials are borrowed from natural systems we study. Now we put them on a wall, and they collect light more efficiently. This is bio-inspired because we take nature’s strategies out of context and use them to create responsive, adaptive, dynamic, energy-efficient architectures.

she predicts, “carbon will have a price.”

Still, even as she notes successes—the IT sector has reduced its carbon footprint; the World Fisheries Council has brought business and government together, and the apparel industries have created sustainability standards for themselves and their suppliers—she still wonders if people can act responsibly when the consequences of their actions may not be felt for years.

“I’ve a very good friend who says it is important to distinguish between what’s plausible and what’s possible,” Henderson continues. “Plausibly, I think we’re in for a very rough time over the next 50 years. But it is possible that we will turn things around.

“The human race,” she concludes, “is eminently smart and capable.” But when it comes to our environment, our resources, and our climate, says Henderson, time is most decidedly not on humanity’s side.

—David Rosenbaum

Schrag: Ice-repelling material would be wonderful. Imagine all that ethylene glycol we could save from airports, and the reduction in flight delays.

Aizenberg: Another of nature’s important engineering principles is that biologically designed materials and structures are usually—maybe always—multi-functional.

One example I like is the brittlestar—a cousin of the starfish—which literally sees through its bones by creating skeletal elements that are coated with exceptional lenses, thus optimizing one material for several functions. But we don’t do it this way. We design one structure for optical applications, and yet another one for

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structural applications, and each of them takes energy and costs money to create.

Ingber: Think of buildings, where you have materials that are physical supports, then you have your plumbing system, your electric systems and your control systems.

Why not have microfluidic systems distributed through the walls of buildings to regulate temperature, for example, as living organisms do?

One thing I want to do at the Wyss is to get people who work in industry or medicine to identify real-world problems.

Joanna has organized meetings to explore the potential of adaptive architecture and what we can do together with the School of Design. Similarly, I hope we can begin working with HUCE to home in on the specifics of the really big energy challenges. We’ve being doing this already with architecture in terms of sustainability.

Our first visiting scholar, Chuck Hoberman, has built a building in the Middle East with windows that open and close automatically, responding to light, in order to minimize thermal gain. He does it with motors, which require energy, but his work points to the idea of designing materials that are actuators—like those in an organism—which respond to light by creating forces that actually move things. Or take our robotics team, which works on biologically-inspired algorithms to control numerous robots collectively, as if they’re cells self assembling simultaneously into all of the different structures and organs of a living embryo. Why not control all the fans and motors and heating elements in buildings, that right now are on all the

time, and dumb, so that they act as a collective entity?

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office

Schrag: It’s beyond the smart grid—a total, smart end-use solution. Roy Gordon, creator of dynamic coatings that make windows more energy efficient, is a pioneering hero in this movement. (See Profile page 14.) But this goes a step further?

Ingber: Correct. We are also exploring the potential power of nanomaterials engineering; the ability to program materials to build any structure we want, and to place chemical or catalytic activities precisely where we want them. For example, Wyss core faculty member William Shih has developed CAD software that allows you to design DNA molecules that fold in on themselves to create any shape you want at the nanometer scale. This allows us to make very strong, very porous, high surface area materials with completely defined spatial positioning of molecules, which is going to be really exciting for biocatalysis. So while many of our faculty are now studying the pathways in an organism critical to photosynthesis, for example, or trying to reengineer living organisms to produce bioenergy, in the future I can imagine more robust inorganic nanoscale systems that enable catalytic cascades of channeled chemical reactions which are not diffusion-limited, and hence have much higher conversion efficiencies. In fact, this is precisely the solution that living cells have discovered that enables their own energy efficiencies.

Schrag: It strikes me that like the Apollo mission, the technologies that come out of these research efforts may find wide application.

Ingber: Absolutely. I truly believe the biggest impact from the molecular biology revolution is going to come when it hits the non-medical world—which never was touched before that.

Schrag: Thinking of a potential application, one of the big problems with fuel Don Ingber, Folkman professor of vascular biology at Harvard Medical School and profesor of bioengineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, directs the Wyss Institute.

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Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office

“I truly believe the biggest impact from the molecular biology revolution is going to come when it hits the non-medical world.”

Joanna Aizenberg, Smith Berylson professor of materials science and Wallach professor at Radcliffe, with examples of her bioengineering work.

cells is the cost of platinum as a catalyst.

Ingber: Exactly. These programmable molecular structures could be used as molds to then make a porous platinum catalyst that has one one-thousandth the amount of platinum and 1,000 times the surface area. This is where the research is going to take us in the next couple years.

Schrag: What about biocatalysis, which doesn’t require expensive metals like platinum?

Ingber: Yes, electric eels don’t have this problem.

Schrag: But biocatalysis does face a different kind of limitation. The manufacture of synthetic fuels or fertilizers—processes that take tremendous energy—requires catalysis at temperatures so high that carbon-based biology isn’t going to work. Have you thought about biologically-inspired engineering solutions under temperature and pressure conditions far outside the biological norms? Are there lessons from how biology does things like biocatalysis, biological principles that you guys are identifying— Ingber: Absolutely. Channeling of reactions— Schrag: Channeling of reactions—that could increase the efficiency of the process many-fold— Ingber: Yes. Or as Joanna says, could just thinking about biology make you do something in the inorganic world in a different way? Can it get you to think about things differently? That’s one of the greatest things about the Wyss. But we need people who are in the energy trenches. We need to figure out where in the energy sector our research efforts can add the most value. That’s where HUCE can help us.

Schrag: We look forward to it.

History and the Fate of the Planet The Environmental Perspective

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n May 22, 1960, the largest recorded earthquake in modern history occurred off the coast of southern Chile.

Registering an unfathomable 9.5 in magnitude, it set off a Pacific-wide tsunami that reached Hilo, Hawaii, about fifteen hours later, killing 61 people and causing $23 million worth of damage. Seven hours later, it arrived in the small fishing village of Miyako, Japan, completely unannounced.

Along Japan’s northeast coast, the great wave claimed more than 120 lives.

Assistant Professor of History Ian Jared Miller got a clear picture of the tsunami’s scale fifteen years ago while climbing a mountain face near Miyako one hot summer day. A few hundred feet above the town where he was living—looking down on the tops of homes and schools—Miller came upon a small monument marking the peak of the 1960 wave that devastated the town. “It sent a chill down my spine,” he remembers.

But he found his reaction was uncommon—at least locally. When tsunami warnings were issued during Miller’s stay in Miyako, locals would typically run to the 25-foot concrete tsunami wall so they could watch the water drawback ahead of any incoming wave, rather than running for higher ground.

“There are important cultural dimensions

to mass disasters. One of the central problems with tsunamis is social memory,” says Miller. “The [really big] tsunamis tend not to happen twice within a single human generation, and so people will forget.” The experience in Miyako has stayed with him, and people’s reaction to natural disaster—specifically tsunamis— has since become one of Miller’s academic interests.

Destruction in Hilo, Hawaii in the aftermath of the 1960 The topic allows Miller to tsunami. The tidal wave, which resulted from an earthquake expand his research beyond the centered near Chile, caused fatalities across the Pacific Ocean strict confines of history. Massive from South America to Japan. natural disasters often inspire strong governmental responses, across Harvard have become engaged by so Miller must address the political imenvironmental topics within their fields, plications. Understanding the causes of examining the political significance of tsunamis requires research into the geologi- German waterways, using historical accal sciences, while assessing the human counts from the first millennium to pull response—finding out how people have together a more complete global climate tried to detect tsunamis and reduce their history, and studying the significance of destructive impact—demands study of the natural world to people across space the history of technology and engineering. and time. “Environmental problems don’t To write a true history of tsunamis, says recognize disciplinary boundaries,” says Miller, you have to ignore the walls that Miller. “And I’m interested in finding separate these disciplines. places where I can begin to ask questions Although Harvard doesn’t have a single that allow for that complexity.” environmental historian, Miller is not alone in his recognition of the natural Where the Material Meets the Virtual world’s importance to his field. Historians David Blackbourn found that place in the waterways of Germany. In his 2006 book, Conquest of Nature, Blackbourn, Coolidge professor of history and specialist in modern Germany, uses a hydrological history to show how the Germans transformed their landscape by shifting their waterways through dams and drains, and then examines the cultural, political, and ecological reasons behind the changes as well as their ramifications.

“In the book, I’m trying to bring all these different things together,” says Blackbourn. “And, particularly, I’m trying to bring together the material and the cultural dimensions.”

This marriage has been a goal of Blackbourn’s since the late 1980s, when he first David G. Blackbourn, Coolidge professor of history, directs the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies.

Harvard University Center for the Environment

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NOAA

by Dan Morrell

began considering environmental history as a research topic. Back then, Blackbourn recalls, historians seemed keenly focused on culture, and there was a fixation in the field on topics liked “imagined” communities—which saw national identity as more of a collective thought rather than an actual institution. “That era was the moment, in some ways, when history was taking what is called ‘the cultural turn,’ and everything was becoming virtual,” recalls Blackbourn. “I had this concern that if everything became a matter of cultural meaning and this history lost its anchor in the material world, that we would be the losers. We should be able to hold both things in our heads at once.”

The German landscape, Blackbourn thought, was the perfect topic—the intersection of cultural meaning and physical, material change. When Germans dramatically altered the course of the Rhine or drained moorland or built a dam, they

also wrote about what those changes to the landscape meant, positive or negative. In the wake of dam building, there were those who wrote about how they regretted the disappearance of the valley, while others celebrated the romanticism of the beautiful, glistening surface of the reservoir.

Blackbourn says his undergraduate students have appreciated the introduction of environmental strands into his German history classes. In a recent course, Germany in the World: 1600-2000, his lectures included discussions of German forestry as a craft which spread throughout the world, as well as a focus on the swell of invasive species.

“I am trying to push the boundaries of how we define German history beyond national borders,” says Blackbourn. “There’s a quite strong environmental aspect to it, and I think the students quite like that.”

His graduate students are also consistently bringing in new environmental research topics like water

and forestry. One of his grad students is even examining the idea of the desert in the German imagination. To Blackbourn, the environment’s academic ascension is natural and warranted.

“I think if we want to teach and write a broad, multidimensional history, then we have to add the natural world on to the list of usual suspects, which includes economic, social, political, cultural, and—latterly—gender,” he says. “I would compare the natural world and the environment to gender as a category so important that all historians need to consider it.”

The Price of Change For twenty years, professor of history Emma Rothschild has watched some of the most interesting and exciting young historians—economic, social, cultural, intellectual, transnational—begin to incor-

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Roy Gordon

R

oy Gordon, Cabot Professor of Chemistry, has been at Harvard “as long as I can remember;” he entered as a freshman in 1957. But Gordon’s romance with chemistry began when he was growing up in Akron, Ohio, which had the second most chemists per capita of any city in the United States, he points out, because the rubber companies making tires for the auto industry had their research labs there.

“I had a chemistry set,” Gordon recalls, “with interesting and dangerous stuff they can’t sell to kids today—mercury, colored compounds. We’d make explosions and smells and all the stuff kids like to do. I still have scars from those days,” he says, rolling up his sleeves to display them proudly. “I think one of the reasons chemistry doesn’t attract as many people today as it used to is because it’s taught as a bunch of equations instead of as a way to manipulate atoms to make things that affect your life.”

And Gordon has affected lives. He began doing “abstract work” at Harvard, but during the oil crisis of 1973 he read that a quarter of all the energy used in the US went into heating and cooling buildings, and a good percentage of that energy leaked out through the windows. A window that would let light 14

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pass through while keeping heat in seemed like a good idea. It took Gordon a year in the lab to find the right compound to coat the window (tin oxide); another year to figure out how to coat the glass evenly (chemical vapor deposition), and another year to find a manufacturer willing to take a chance on developing his process.

But today, Gordon’s energy efficient windows are ubiquitous. Happily, the tin oxide compound that allowed light to pass through was also an electrical conductor, which made it a natural for photovoltaic (PV) cells, allowing Gordon to move from conserving energy to generating it.

Indeed, Gordon has installed solar cells on the roof of his Cambridge home. “My goal is to get my electricity usage down to where it’s all being produced by my roof,” he says. “Right now we’re getting about threequarters, but I hope to get it to 100 percent.

“The good news,” says Gordon, “is that we have the technology” to create a world that can be run on sustainable energy. “The bad news,” he says, “is that there’s a lot of inertia in the system. Buildings should have air-to-air heat exchangers, to provide fresh

air while conserving energy. And buildings should be better insulated. But to get everyone to throw out their furnaces and get heat exchangers, or build a new house—it’s not going to happen soon. We’ll have most of the current housing stock for the next 50 years. “Consequently, we’re going to have to do a lot of adapting. The technology is there,” Gordon stresses. “But the political will needs to be developed further.”

—David Rosenbaum

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Douglas Dockery

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ouglas Dockery’s interest in air pollution began with people. While studying meteorology at MIT, Dockery couldn’t stop wondering about the real world application of his theoretical work—that is, “What’s the relevance of the science for people?”

After a stint working at the Environmental Protection Agency in Boston, he came to the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) as a graduate student in the early 1970s to learn about the impact of environmental contaminants on populations. “I got involved with studies on the health effects of air pollution,” says Dockery, now an internationally recognized expert in the field, “and that has resonated with me ever since.”

Over the past 35 years, Dockery—a professor of environmental epidemiology at HSPH and chair of its Department of Environmental Health—has trained public attention on the consequences of pollution for both children and adults, especially the fine, invisible particles emitted from cars, power plants, indoor cooking fires, and other sources. This type of pollution has been linked to chronic respiratory and cardiovascular disease, as well as increased hospitalizations and deaths.

Dockery was a principal investigator of the seminal Harvard Six Cities Study, a 20year examination of the respiratory health effects of air pollution from coal-fired power plants. This study showed that fine particle air pollution leads to shorter life expectancy, which in turn has led to new federal rules regulating fine particles.

Dockery went on to study the risks of various environmental pollutants, from

industrial society” by fusing together economic, environmental, and energy policies.

“It would be a commitment to current as well as capital expenditures; to a Transportation Security Agency, for example, composed not only of people who search passengers in airports but of people who drive electric buses in inner cities,” she wrote.

It’s exactly the kind of pioneering, crossdisciplinary approach that Rothschild sees cropping up more frequently in the social sciences’ approach to the environment. “I think what’s very exciting is that the environment is coming into many parts of the

Suzanne Camarata/harvard school of public health

porate environmental perspectives into their research.

“Historians are interested both because of what’s happening within the field and because of their own concerns as citizens,” says Rothschild. “I think it’s a reflection of just how involved so many of us are in large questions about the environment.”

Then last year, Rothschild took part in a workshop at Harvard on history and sustainability. Among the speakers was Anthony LaVopa, a professor emeritus from North Carolina State University and an editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History. “He is someone who is interested in the history of concepts and ideas, and he was really excited about the history of sustainability,” says Rothschild. There are now plans to publish a forum in the journal based on their workshop. “That’s something which I think would have been almost inconceivable maybe even three years ago—that a journal in intellectual history would be interested in environmental ideas.”

Rothschild has contributed her own voice, writing an article in the New York Review of Books following the bailout of the auto industry—a subject she’s followed since her 1973 book, Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Auto-Industrial Age—that makes the argument for an increased focus on public transportation.

“I think the improvement that can be expected from increases in fuel efficiency and lowered emissions from individual motor vehicles is just not going to get the United States to where it will have to be if climate change objectives are taken even remotely seriously,” says Rothschild.

People will have to live their lives differently, eschewing cars for bicycles or trolleys whenever possible. The shift will take some imagination. But change won’t happen, Rothschild says, by forcing people to take public transportation. Rather, in this age where the need to remain connected has made texting while driving an international hazard, she suggests that offering public transportation as a way to stay connected could change people’s perceptions about riding the bus or taking the train. “It seems to me to be a really exciting moment to be thinking about convenient, attractive collective transport options,” she says.

Her article in the New York Review of Books suggested that the federal government’s bailout of the automotive industry should be just one part of an investment that would completely transform the “auto-

tobacco smoke to toxic waste at Superfund sites. More recently, he examined whether reductions in fine particle (measuring 2.5 microns or smaller in diameter) air pollution during the 1980s and 1990s have contributed to longer life expectancy.

After accounting for other factors that can affect longevity such as smoking, his team found cuts in air pollution added nearly five months to the average lifespan. “We were surprised at how strong the effect turned out to be,” the genial Dockery says, noting that the project is now expanding from the original 51 cities to sites across the country.

A major source of pride for Dockery is the integrity of the data he has helped generate. He continues to marvel at the commitment of study participants to advancing science. “I’ve always been amazed at how cooperative people are at letting us into their homes and disrupting their lives to measure pollution, take blood samples, or monitor their lung and heart function,” he says. “Our studies wouldn’t be possible without their enthusiastic cooperation. Although political choices have to be made, ultimately my goal has been to provide sound, high-quality science that can be the basis for setting regulatory standards—and that can help improve people’s lives.” ­—Debra Ruder

Harvard curriculum for reasons which have to do with the disciplines themselves,” says Rothschild. “History and economics are good examples. The environment is not just a matter for policy studies, or just a matter for the Kennedy school, but it’s something that people across the University and across many disciplines are exploring.” For her part, Rothschild is hoping to start a major project involving people from different departments on the history of energy—including a focus on what she calls “the short and sad history of energy conservation.”

“I think that with [associate professor

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Emma Rothschild, Knowles professor of history.

of the social sciences] Alison Frank’s work, and the work of [history professor] Walter Johnson and—I hope—my own work, that we are developing new ways of thinking about the history of economic life which take seriously changes in the physical environment,” she says. “And that’s something of real interest to historians as well as to people interested in environmental policy.”

The Waste of Energy When Professor Alison Frank offered her first course on the environmental history of Europe earlier this year, ten students signed up—a lot, she says, for a graduate course. It was a diverse group: there was a student with a concentration in Asian languages; another was studying the history of science. Others were focused on German history, Soviet history, the history of capitalism—even the medieval history of Japan and China.

Frank understands the appeal to such a disparate range of students. “Historians are looking for ways to organize our study beyond nations,” she says. “Thinking about spaces in different ways is something that I think more people have the opportunity to do today.”

Frank’s search for new ways to organize history began in graduate school, where she discovered that the study of Eastern European history had reached a kind of intellectual dead end. Frank wanted to escape the old categories that limited historical 16

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studies by geography or community. “I thought about how different it would be to imagine the world divided into a category of analysis that made sense materially rather than on the basis of nationality,” says Frank. “And I wondered what Eastern Europe would look like divided up using those categories.”

While exploring the idea of material wealth, she stumbled upon the small region of Galicia, a region that was historically part of the Austrian empire.

Set in what was once one of the poorest parts of Europe, Galicia’s economy had been almost entirely agricultural and is perhaps best known in the United States as the source of a massive emigration of Jews looking to escape the horrible economic conditions.

When Frank found that, around a century ago, the discovery of Galician oil propelled Austria-Hungary in 1909 to third on the list of largest oil producers in the world, she was puzzled. How was it possible, she thought, to have an oil industry that was so significant without radically improving the standard of living?

Her surprising answer, detailed in her book, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia, is that it was in large part due to a lack of governance. Austria-Hungary at the time regulated the extraction of salt, mercury, copper and other minerals, but chose not to regulate the extraction of oil—in part, because oil had little value until the mid-1850s, and even then, only as a lamp lighting fuel. The discovery nonetheless set Galicians on a mad rush for the oil, literally racing their neighbors to pull more of it from the ground. A lack of ample storage, says Frank, led to natural

for Germany and Austria-Hungary, providing Germany with nearly two-thirds of its supply. And no longer was oil simply used to keep wagon wheels turning: thanks to the rapid adoption of the internal combustion engine, it was becoming an important military asset. Frank notes that at the war’s outset in 1914, the British Expeditionary Forces included just 827 automobiles and 15 motorcycles. When the war ended four years later, the British claimed some 56,000 trucks, 23,000 autos, and 34,000 motorcycles. Galicia’s oil collapse, Frank says, couldn’t have happened at a worse time. “There’s the famous quote from [British foreign secretary] Lord Curzon: ‘The Allies floated to victory on a wave of oil.’”

Her research on oil, Frank says, demonstrates the importance of institutions like the Center for the Environment, which has been working to lower the barriers for scholars from all areas—not just history or the humanities—by making it easier for them to talk to colleagues in the sciences.

“These places pull together people with specialties that are quite diverse,” Frank says, “and get us thinking about questions that motivate all of us.” As a historian working on Austrian oil history, Frank notes that working with, for example, a historian who focuses on oil in Mexico would allow her to draw parallels and distinctions between the two histories, offering a framework for research. “That kind of interaction helps me understand what I need to explain when I’m looking at the local structures and what I want to think about in terms of say, capitalism or the relationship between economic development and labor relations.”

“I would compare the natural world and the environment to gender as a category so important that all historians need to consider it.” catastrophe: huge fires, oil seeping into the rivers, and lakes of spilled oil a kilometer in diameter. None of the profits were reinvested in education or infrastructure, so after the oil industry collapsed, the region was left even more thoroughly impoverished than before.

The collapse had massive political implications as well. Oil production in Galicia began to fall off just a few years before World War I broke out. At the time, Galician oil was the lone immediate oil source

Looking outside the “area studies bubble,” Frank is able to connect and collaborate with historians and researchers whose interests range widely. “The Center for the Environment—as well as the Center for History and Economics—are places I turn to meet people who are interested in the big, theoretical questions.”

Going Global No nation on Earth will have a greater impact on the environment, regionally

Undergraduate Summer Research

2009 Summer Research Assistants:

• Rupak Chakraborty ‘10, Erica Lin ’10, and

Students report on the richness of their summer research experiences

E

ach summer HUCE sponsors about two dozen undergraduates to gain incomparable environmental research experience either by assisting Harvard faculty as part-time research assistants, or through self-directed projects of study. This year, sponsored assistantships ran the gamut from an economic analysis of wind power to an examination of climate change impacts on North American songbirds. Individual grants were awarded

Tim Treuer ’10, worked in far-flung locations around the globe; others, like Aryeh GoldParker ’12 and Erica Lin ’10, stayed closer to home. Whether collecting specimens in the field or doing computations in a lab, however, all students acquired new insights and invaluable exposure to the breadth of possibilities in their chosen fields. For more information about the Undergraduate Summer Research Fund, including how to apply, visit

In Their Own Words…

Katharine Walter ’10: “My research this summer involved creating species distribution models to predict past distributions of North American songbirds. As birds are one of the most powerful ecological indicators, understanding their responses to historic climate change will help predict how avian species will respond to future climate change and inform targeted conservation efforts.

The tools which this experience provided me will be useful not only for my continued interest in the biological consequences of climate change, but also for the spatial analysis of global health and disease modeling.”

Benjamin Miller ’10: “Over ten weeks, I studied several key organic bromine compounds: bromoform (CHBr3), dibromomethane (CH2Br2), and methyl bromide (CH3Br). These three compounds are long-lived enough to significantly enhance the concentrations of brominated compounds, such as bromine monoxide (BrO), in the upper troposphere and stratosphere, where they can cause significant environmental damage.

With further research this semester, I hope to better catalog and inventory the known sources of these organic bromine compounds to better understand—and, more importantly, control—their emission into the atmosphere, and subsequent conversion into harmful compounds such as BrO.” Tim Treuer ’10: “My project this summer involved exploring the impacts of human land use (selective logging and plantation agriculture) on fruit-feeding butterfly diversity and community composition, in a long monitored system in Sulawesi, Indonesia. These butterflies have a complicated relationship to human disturbances, the implications of which are important for conservation planning.

I learned many incredibly valuable lessons from this project—some expected, some unexpected: how to best utilize the expertise and knowledge of local assistants, how to robustly sample the environmental health and biodiversity of a locality, and finally, how to avoid being stymied by a dense bureaucracy.” for a diverse array of projects such as photographic exploration of the glacial history of Boston, a study of tropical insect biodiversity in Southeast Asia, frequency analysis of climate sensitivity, among others. Some students, like Hannah Lyons-Galante ’12 and

http://environment.harvard.edu/studentresources/undergraduate-summer-researchfund. Grants and sponsored assistantships are made possible by the generous support of Bertram Cohn ’47, and Barbara “B.” Wu Ph.D. ’81 and Eric Larson ’77.

Aryeh Gold-Parker ’12, assisted Alán AspuruGuzik (Chemistry and Chemical Biology) with “Renewable Energy Materials Research.”

• Laura Dale ’10 and Mark Piana ’11, assisted Peter Rogers (SEAS) on “Sustainable Cities: New Approaches to Water Management.”

• Lee Dietterich ’10, assisted Michele Holbrook (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology) with “Calcium Deficiency and Whole Plant Water Relations in Sugar Maple Marsh.”

• Hannah Lyons-Galante ’12, assisted Jonathan Losos (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology) with “Field Research on Lizard Biology in Florida.”

• Lilli Margolin ’11, assisted Ariel Pakes (Economics) on the “Wind Power Project.”

• Ben Miller ’10 and Nivedita Sarnath ’12, assisted Daniel Jacob (SEAS, Earth and Planetary Sciences) with “Environmental Modeling.”

• Kathryn Sierks ’12, assisted Daniel Schrag (Earth and Planetary Sciences, SEAS) with study of the limitations on methane production and release from terrestrial wetlands.

•Katharine Walter ’10, assisted Susan Cameron and Scott Edwards (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology) with “Modeling Climate Change Impacts on North American Birds.”

• Daniel Werb ’10, assisted John Spengler (HSPH) with preparing written and visual material concerning environmental case studies.

2009 Individual Grant Recipients

• Max Brondfield ’11, for “Statistical Analysis of North American Non-CO2 Greenhouse Gas Emissions” • Liya Eijvertinya ’09, for examining “Motivations for Participating in the Voluntary Carbon Market” • Daniel Koll ’10, for studying “Atmospheres of Equable Climates” • Rachel Mak ’10, for “Examining the Scientific and Legislative Potential to Increase Renewable Energy Use in the U.S.” • Karen McKinnon ’10, for “Assessing Climate Sensitivity through Frequency Analysis” • Caitlin Rotman ’10, for the “Influence of Glacial History on the Development of Boston: A Photographic Exploration” • Jennie Peterson ’10, for considering “Drought Policy Hawaii” • Cassandra Snow ’10, for exploring “The Future of Holistic Resource Management in the U.S.” • Tim Treuer ’10, for investigating “Land Use Impacts on Tropical Insect Biodiversity”

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Alison Frank, Loeb associate professor of the social sciences.

and globally, than China, with its population of 1.3 billion and a rapidly improving standard of living. And while the environmental history of the United States, the world’s second-largest carbon polluter, has already generated an established canon of literature, the study of China’s past relationship with nature is just beginning.

At Harvard, Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Peter Bol has encouraged students to pursue topics in Chinese environmental history and has even set up an East Asian environmental reading group to help them along. The expert on early China has come across only

one major conference volume on the nascent discipline. But Bol recognizes the value of the work. “It is really a field we need to be paying attention to.”

One of the reading group’s attendees is Ling Zhang, a post-doctoral researcher and the Ziff Environment Fellow at the Center for the Environment. The Center has in the past four years brought in 22 young scholars from across all disciplines to study at Harvard; five of these fellows have been historians interested in the environment. Zhang developed her interest in environmental topics during research for her master’s thesis. While examining the economic history of nomadic Chinese peoples, Zhang found that, during the medieval era, heavy rainfall in northeast China had severely harmed the hunting lifestyle on which these nomads depended. Firsthand accounts matched up with official government documents, which also showed an increase in natural disasters, including floods. (“Part of it is detective work,” notes Bol. “You have historical sources, but you have people describing things without necessarily understanding what they are seeing, and then you have to figure out what was going on.”) While preparing her dissertation, she decided to combine her focus on the natural world with her research on the economics of the era.

Zhang is preparing a book on her work, centered on the transformation of the Yellow River and its lasting effects on the landscape of northeastern China. The fellowship allows her to encompass more intellectual territory within her research. “Now [my work] is not just focused on Chinese history or East Asian civilization,” she says. “[The environ-

mental perspective] offers lots of opportunity and a real diversity.”

David Biggs, another post-doctoral researcher examining the environmental history of Southeast Asia, feels that an influx of fellow academics studying East Asian environmental history will be part of a natural progression as the academic focus leaves the American West and goes global.

During the past decade, “environmental history has begun to attract people from outside of the United States and Western Europe,” says Biggs, whose research focuses on water landscapes in the Mekong Delta and the environmental effects of military bases in Vietnam. For years, Biggs says, environmental history conferences and papers were fixated only on what lies west of the Mississippi River. Only recently have scholars broadened their view of the field’s geographical boundaries, recognizing the interconnectedness of environmental problems on a planetary scale.

“Even if you’re looking at the environment in some county in rural Washington or Massachusetts, you have global things going on—whether it is the economy, the shutdown of the steel mill, or climate change and the changing composition of the woodland forest,” says Biggs. “So environmental historians began to say, ‘Why don’t we look at what is going on in East Asia or Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union?’ There’s the whole rest of the world to cover.”

“The global approach to this history,” says Ian Miller, the Japanese historian, is “one of the things that we really are working to address here at Harvard—and one of the things that sets us apart. Our faculty is able to…look at these questions in diverse settings.” Miller’s own work in Japan, for example, or assistant professor of history Rachel St. John’s work on the history of the US-Mexico border, and Alison Frank’s work on the European oil industry, allows e nv i r o n m e n t . h a r v a r d . e d u Harvard “to address Same Address; New Look these questions in a way that recognizes he HUCE website now has improved search their transnational capability, more detailed information about the and comparative research interests of our faculty and fellows, exdimensions—we see panded news and events sections, and more. Visit things in a global perwww.environment.harvard.edu to see what’s new. spective.”

T

Stay tuned for the re-launch of ‘The Future of Energy at Harvard’ website, at www.energy.harvard.edu.

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Connecting the Plots In 2003, professor of medieval history

Michael McCormick was looking to go big. He had just won a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, and with it, $1.5 million to spend during three years. His goals were ambitious.

“I wanted to look for places in which the natural sciences were capable of producing a quantum leap in historical research,” says McCormick. He organized a series of meetings, assembling a veritable Noah’s Ark of academic specialists to explore whether such a jump could be made. The second meeting McCormick arranged was a trio focused on climate change in the first millennium, attended by climate scientists Michael McElroy, Butler professor of environmental studies, and Paul Mayewski of the University of Maine, famous for his study of Greenland’s ice sheets. The meeting sought to answer a single question: Can the natural scientific evidence of past climate change be brought to bear on the history and archeology of the first millennium of our era?

“My plan was to bring in the climate scientists and exploit them,” says McCormick. “I was astounded when I realized they wanted to exploit us [historians and archaeologists].” The climate scientists, it seemed, had long considered the first millennium a sort of Dark Age of data, and had therefore concentrated their efforts on finding proxy data in the last thousand years. They were amazed, McCormick says, when they saw how they could match their ancient climatological data with the historian’s ancient lake varves and the studies from Israeli archeologists working on Dead Sea levels. As a result of the meeting, McCormick published a paper with his collaborators that found eight of the nine most severe winters in the written record of Western Europe between 750 and 950 corresponded with big events in Mayewski’s ice core data.

KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL

Peter Birmann’s View of the Rhine from the Istein Cliffs Upriver (1859). David Blackbourn cites Germany’s nineteenth-century “taming” of the river as a consummate example of the “intersection of cultural meaning and physical change.”

“It was just a really good beginning,” says McCormick of the meetings. “Both for showing the possibilities and for making people realize that historians and archeologists have a lot to offer.” Specifically, they can offer remarkable corollary information. “In the end, we historians and archaeologists have the ultimate proxy data: We have someone who was there and who observed and recorded what happened,” McCormick notes. “To be able to compare that with the scientific data for high-resolution climate events is really very exciting.”

This kind of matching is playing out in research that McCormick is currently working on with a German colleague, which aims to link 15th century tree ring data from Metz, France, to the diary of a local man. Evidently interested in the wine harvest, his diary includes meticulous records of precipitation as well as thoughts on temperature and blooms—all useful

for climatologists.

“The written and archaeological record for post-Roman Europe is incredibly rich and incredibly deep and it stretches for a thousand years across most of Western Eurasia,” McCormick says. “The potential for climate scientists is very great if they can get historians and archaeologists to guide them.”

Of course, there is always that extra bonus of saving the world. “For me, intellectually, climate science is inherently interesting, so I’ll do it regardless,” says McCormick.

“But since the fate of the planet is also involved, I’m happy to contribute to it.”

Environment @ Harvard A sampling of fall semester events.

Conferences and Workshops Workshop on Large-Scale Circulations in Moist Convecting Atmospheres October 16-17, 2009

Organized by Zhiming Kuang (SEAS, Earth and Planetary Sciences), the workshop created a small, focused forum to improve scientific understanding of circulation in the tropics by addressing the interaction between cumulus convection and large-scale tropical circulation. Participants included researchers from the Royal Meteorological Society (UK), the University of Split (Croatia), MIT, the University of Washington, and NOAA, among other institutions.

Expertise for the Future: Histories of Predicting Environmental Change November 16-17, 2009

Organized by Knowles Professor of His-

tory Emma Rothschild, this conference examined the history of environmental prediction and its implications for future modeling from the sixteenth century to the present. The conference brought together perspectives from the history of science, sociological and communication studies, and environmental history. Harvard faculty were joined by participants from universities and research institutes in Sweden, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Carbon Offsets Workshop December 7, 2009

Over the course of this daylong workshop, participants discussed a wide variety of questions related to the scientific and technological issues associated with carbon offsets, focusing specifically on biological

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carbon sinks that may be used as carbon offsets under a cap-and-trade regime. Such questions included: What carbon sinks can be measured, reported, and verified? How permanent are these sinks? How can such sinks (or reduced sources) be effectively quantified and monitored and on what time scales? How likely is the risk of carbon release from different types of carbon sinks, and can this be addressed in some way? The goal was not to debate specific regulatory or economic policy, but rather to identify a set of scientific principles that might allow regulators and policy makers to make good decisions regarding the administering of carbon offsets within both national and global climate mitigation agreements. Among the participants were John Holdren, assistant to the president for science and technology; President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) members Rosina Bierbaum, Eric Lander, Mario Molina, Maxine Savitz, Barbara Schall, Dan Schrag, and Harold Varmus; and other leading scholars and policymakers in the field of climate science.

Ongoing Series The Future of Energy

The Future of Energy is an ongoing lecture series focused on finding secure, safe, and reliable sources of energy to power world economic growth. The first speaker of the fall series was David Keith, director of the Energy and Environmental Systems Group at the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment, and Economy at the University of Calgary. Keith urged policymakers to Harvard University Center for the Environment 24 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 www.environment.harvard.edu

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examine geoengineering, a controversial strategy that would involve manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere, as a viable solution to climate change. The Center also hosted Michael Skelly, CEO of Clean Line Energy Partners and former head of development for Horizon Wind Energy. Skelly’s talk focused on the domestic promise of renewable energy to create jobs and long-term, sustainable infrastructure, to reduce emissions, and to bring economic prosperity to rural America. Maxine Savitz delivered the final lecture of the semester on the challenges and opportunities of America’s energy future. Savitz, who is the vice president of the National Academy of Engineering and a member of PCAST, urged reduced consumption as a central strategy for U.S. energy policy. The Future of Energy lecture series is made possible with generous support from Bank of America. Lectures can be viewed online anytime at http://www. environment.harvard.edu/events/video.

Biodiversity, Ecology, and Global Change

The Fall 2009 Biodiversity lecture was given by Mark McPeek, professor of biology at Dartmouth College. McPeek spoke about “Climate Change and How We Got the Fauna We Have Today.” For video of this talk, as well as past lectures from this series, see http://www.environment.harvard.edu/events/video. Biodiversity, Ecology and Global Change is also supported

by Bank of America.

Green Conversations

In advance of the December climate

conference in Copenhagen, the Center hosted Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Executive Director Peter Lehner in a conversation about the scientific and political implications of climate change.

Lehner was joined by panelists HUCE Director Dan Schrag and Joel Schwartz, professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. Video from this event, and past Green Conversations, can be viewed online at http://www. environment.harvard.edu/events/video.

Special Event Climate Change: A Perspective from the Arctic November 9, 2009

The Center hosted this unique half-day symposium in conjunction with a meeting of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission.

Following the opening remarks by Commission Chair Mead Treadwell and HUCE Director Dan Schrag, the symposium featured presentations by Harvard faculty James McCarthy, Peter Huybers, and James Anderson; Konrad Hugen and Sarah Das of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Richard Alley of Penn State University.

Co m m e n t s Do you have a comment you’d like to share? Send your thoughts to the Center for the Environment at huce@environment.harvard.edu, and let us know if you’d like to continue receiving this newsletter.