In a particularly parched region of an extraordinary planet, rocks big and small glide across a mirror-flat landscape, leaving behind a tangle of trails. Some rocks travel in pairs, their two tracks so perfectly in synch along straight stretches and around curves that they seem to be made by a car. Others go freewheeling, wandering back and forth alone and sometimes traveling the length of several football fields. In many cases, the trails lead right to resting rocks, but in others, the joyriders have vanished.

This may sound like an alien world, but it’s actually Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, Calif. Since the 1940s, researchers have documented trails here and on several other playas in California and Nevada. Seventeen undergraduate and graduate students from the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Academy (LPSA) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., traveled to the Racetrack and nearby Bonnie Claire playas this summer to investigate how these rocks move across the nearly empty flats.

Some rocks are thought to have moved nearly as fast as a person walks. But nobody has actually seen a rock in motion, and scientists haven’t deduced exactly how it happens. The easy explanations””assistance from animals, gravity, or earthquakes””were quickly ruled out, leaving room for plenty of study and irresistible speculation over the years.

“When you see these amazing rocks and trails,” says Mindy Krzykowski, an intern from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, “you really get into coming up with your own ideas about what’s going on.”

Like being an explorer

After driving two hours from Beatty, Nev. (the nearest town with guest lodging), through the rugged mountains of the Amargosa and Panamint Ranges, the playa looks impossibly flat. This is the nature of a playa””a lake bed that is dry most of the time. A visitor can truly see for miles, because Racetrack rises only about an inch over its 4-1/2-mile length.

“Around you is hot white cracked clay in all directions (you’re spinning to take it in),” wrote intern Emma McKinney of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., in the blog for the LPSA trip. The mountains that hug both sides of the playa are so distant they look “like the backdrop to an old western [movie]”¦. No one speaks because they are a what-seems-to-be-a-million-miles-away-distance from you.”

Sporting sunhats and carrying lots of water, the students arrived around 7 a.m. for their day of data collecting. They broke into five teams, each led by a Goddard scientist, and took out their maps. Then they packed their equipment and headed in different directions in search of rocks and trails. Justin Wilde from the University of Wyoming in Laramie says, “It felt like a treasure hunt.”

For each rock and trail, the students recorded GPS coordinates and snapped photos. They dug up small sensors called Hygrochrons that had been buried (with the required permission of the National Park Service) three months earlier by Gunther Kletetschka, one of the trip leaders. The interns captured the electronically stored temperature and humidity data. They marked the trail boundaries by slipping colored pushpins into cracks in the clay and measured each track’s length, depth, and width. They confirmed earlier observations that some of the big rocks have moved farther than the small ones.

The interns also found small mounds at the ends of some trails. People speculate these were formed when the rocks ploughed into the clay and came to rest. Quite puzzling were the mounds at the ends of trails that had no rocks.

The students checked for unusual or changing magnetic fields. (Nope, no evidence of that.) One student conducted radiation measurements. (Nothing strange there, either.) They pulled out small levels to determine if the rocks might be moving along trails tilted ever-so-slightly downhill. Instead, “the general trend is that they move uphill,” as reported by Andrew Ryan of Slippery Rock University in Slippery Rock, Penn., in a talk that the LPSA group gave later at Goddard. “But the slope is so insignificant that we don’t think it would influence this movement.”

Two interns, Kynan Rilee from Princeton University in Princeton, N.J, and Gregory Romine, a graduate student at San Francisco State University, got the special assignment of photographing the playa’s skyline and correlating these pictures with GPS coordinates. Rilee later fed this information into a model that can be used to determine where on the playa a photo was taken even if no GPS coordinates were documented. Soon, any visitor to Racetrack Playa will be able to upload photos for analysis at www.racetrackplaya.org.

Rilee estimates that the two of them walked 10 miles total””just two guys and their gear, the isolation occasionally broken by their walkie-talkie or by returns to the base to get more water. “Being out there was almost like being an explorer,” he says.

Pondering the playa

The smorgasbord of data is needed because “what’s happening on Racetrack Playa is subtle and complicated. It’s not obvious right away which data is going to be important,” says Brian Jackson, one of the trip leaders. He and a colleague have been studying Racetrack Playa since 2006 and recently published a paper comparing the site to a dry lake bed on Saturn’s moon Titan.

For a while, speculation was that the Racetrack Playa rocks have properties that help them move. But the rocks are just dark dolomite boulders that tumbled down from the mountain highlands. (That’s not how the trails were made; those came after the rocks found a home on the playa.) “Dolomite is relatively common, and the rocks themselves are not unusual,” explains Jackson. “It’s where the rocks are located that makes them special.”

Some of the rocks that have moved weigh less than a pound, but many are 25″“30 pounds. One of the largest sliders, named Karen, has been estimated at 700 pounds. A powerful force is required to move rocks that big, and the obvious candidate is the fierce playa wind. “It’s surprising when you see how big some of these boulders are,” says Ryan. “You think, ‘How can something that big get blown around?'”

Wind speeds of 150 miles per hour or more would probably be necessary to move most of the rocks. The wind speeds that graze the playa’s surface are very fast, but not that fast, so the newer studies tend to ask how the friction between the rocks and the clay might be reduced.

The interns evaluated several hypotheses that have been offered over the years. “Within each group, we traded the data we collected and analyzed it together, though we also had our own ideas,” Romine says.

“Teamwork is a key part of the program,” notes Cynthia Cheung, the LPSA principal investigator. “The students come at this challenging problem with different strengths and from different directions. That’s the way science is done.”

Investigators have thought for years that the friction is somewhat reduced when the playa’s surface gets wet and the top layer of clay transforms into a slick film of mud. Algae may lie dormant in the dry clay and bloom when the surface wets, further reducing the amount of friction. The students performed water-absorption experiments at Bonnie Claire Playa and found that the clay does get slippery. Even so, the students concluded that most rocks could not move without other help.

The aid probably comes in the form of ice””in this high desert, winter brings snow to the mountains. The meltwater washes downhill and collects in huge, shallow pools that spread across the playa and freeze at night. Decades ago, researchers proposed that big sheets of ice might envelop clusters of rocks, then catch the wind and drag the rocks around together. This might explain the cases in which two tracks run perfectly alongside each other.

When an experiment ruled out the possibility that this happens in all cases, the concept was refined. Now it’s thought that collars of ice can form around the lower parts of the stones, probably because the mass of a rock retains the cold. When more water moves in, the collar helps the rock partially float, so even a heavy rock might slide when the wind blows. The presence of ice collars could explain why some trails start narrow and get wider: the rock gradually sinks into the wet clay as its icy lifejacket melts away.

The interns found that the Hygrochron sensors buried about three-fourths of an inch deep registered freezing temperatures in March, and those buried a little more than 3 inches down registered wet conditions almost continuously in March and April. This is evidence that conditions are right to form ice collars, reported Clint Naquin of Louisiana State University in Shreveport and Devon Miller of West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, in a talk presented on behalf of all interns.

Kletetschka is coordinating a research paper by the group that will present Hygrochron and other data and will suggest a slightly different mechanism for the rock movement. The rocks are still thought to be collared by ice, but the group has identified a new parameter that is critical in explaining why it is so easy to move the rocks and create trails. The paper will give the details, but the finding means that the wind speed doesn’t have to be as great to move the rocks. “This idea would also explain the trails that don’t have rocks,” Kletetschka says. “The trails were made by rocks whose larger parts were made from ice.”

The students also held an online event, coordinated by Goddard’s Maggie McAdam, to talk about their NASA experiences with roughly 450 kids in Boys and Girls Clubs of America nationwide.

Problems still to solve

For some LPSA interns, the playa trip was their first exposure to scientific field work. “I learned that I prefer applied work,” says Emily Kopp of the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire. “I liked working with my hands, gathering my own data for my own research.”

Students who had participated in previous field work appreciated their very large roles this time in collecting and analyzing key experimental data. “An intern can get stuck doing something like a cross between going to class and doing busywork,” says Romine. “I feel like what I’m doing here is important.”

Ryan, who is an environmental science major, plans to keep working on the Racetrack Playa mystery. He devised a test bed packed with mud from Bonnie Claire Playa that can be used to probe whether ice collars can form and make rocks buoyant under controlled laboratory conditions. His one obstacle: finding a freezer big enough to hold the setup. But he is not deterred. “I can take this home with me to finish the work if I need to,” he says.

Leva McIntire from Seattle Pacific University, has another hypothesis to test. She postulated that the rocks are moving by regelation, a process usually associated with glaciers and mountains. Regelation is caused by a difference in pressure on the two sides of an object. Water on one side remains liquid and leaks around to the other side, trapping air bubbles on the second side, where ice forms. McIntire thinks this could happen on the playa. She notes that some students observed bubble-like formations in the clay next to certain rocks. “This theory might explain how the big rocks move,” she says, “because it does not require floatation of the rocks.”

In addition to the field work, LPSA interns worked closely with mentors on active research projects at Goddard, such as developing a “lunar dust buster” to remove sticky dust from astronauts’ spacesuits, running Monte Carlo simulations of the atmosphere of Mercury and testing neutron and gamma-ray equipment that is designed to gather subsurface information about a planet without sample collection. The interns’ results were presented in a campus-wide poster session.

“I came to the program liking engineering,” notes Wilde, a chemical engineering major who explored possible pathways for forming water on the moon. “But I found the planetary research very enjoyable because I had so much liberty in my work.”

“I’ve always been interested in the formation of stars and planets, and here, I’ve seen that there are still tremendous opportunities for research,” says Krzykowski. “Not all the problems in planetary science have been solved.”

By Elizabeth Zubritsky, NASA’s Earth Science News Team

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Image Caption: The rocks are famous because they move, leaving tell-tale trails in the clay, like this one. This happens at several playa in California and Nevada. There’s no record of anybody seeing one of the rocks move, and scientists aren’t quite sure how it happens. But they know that it’s not the work of animals, gravity, or earthquakes. Photo credit: NASA/GSFC/Cynthia Cheung

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On the Net:

• Trip blog and photos by the LPSA interns
• Read a profile of LPSA intern Kris Schwebler on the Geeked On Goddard blog
• NASA
• Flickr Image Gallery

Archaeologists from Cardiff University have made a major new discovery that will change the way we think about how Britain was conquered and occupied by the Roman army almost 2,000 years ago.

A complex of monumental buildings has been located outside the Roman fortress at Caerleon in South Wales, which is likely to lead to a complete rethink of one of the country’s most important Roman sites.

The discovery was fortuitous – students from the School of History, Archaeology and Religion were learning how to use geophysical equipment in fields outside the fortress that were not thought to have been extensively occupied in the Roman period. 10 days later, the students and their tutors had revealed the outlines of a series of huge buildings squeezed into the ground between the amphitheatre and the River Usk.

Dr Peter Guest, Senior Lecturer in Roman Archaeology at the School said: “Caerleon is one of the best-known Roman sites in Britain, so it was a great surprise to realize that we had found something completely new and totally unexpected. We’ve discovered the remains of several very large buildings shown remarkably clearly on the geophysical surveys completed by our students.

“It is difficult to be certain about what we have been found because nothing like this has been discovered in Roman Britain before.  The buildings’ ground plans suggest that they were of some importance. We think that they could have included markets, administrative buildings like town halls, bath-houses, store buildings, or even possibly temples. The biggest is enormous and must be one of the largest buildings known from Roman Britain. We can only guess what it was for, but at the moment we’re working on the idea that it had something to do with a harbor on the river, although it does look uncannily like a residential villa building ““ if that’s the case it was built on a palatial scale.

“The layout and scale of the buildings look like they should be at the center of a town or city,” continued Dr Guest, “but here at Caerleon we seem to have the central public spaces without the surrounding city ““ where are the people who would have used these buildings? Perhaps they were intended for the legionaries of the Second Augustan, but it is also possible that this is the first evidence for Roman plans to develop the fortress at Caerleon into a major settlement in western Britain ““ plans that for some reason never came to fruition. That’s the great thing about an archaeological discovery like this ““ lots of new questions that we just don’t have definite answers to at the moment.”

Caerleon is one of only three permanent legionary fortresses in Britain. The other fortresses at Chester and York are much more difficult to excavate because their remains are mostly buried under cities. Caerleon provides the only opportunity to study the Roman legions in Britain.

The new discovery was made as part of the School’s ongoing excavations at the site. Over the last four years, staff and students have uncovered eight previously unknown barrack blocks, three large granaries, a monumental metal workshop and a very large store building. On occasions, members of the public have also helped with the excavations.

Between 9 August and 17 September 2010, the team of archaeologists, along with staff and students from University College London (UCL) will be at Caerleon for their final season of excavation. Taking place near the site of the new discovery, the team hopes to uncover yet more information about the fortress and its inhabitants.

“We will be spending six weeks in Caerleon this summer, excavating within the fortress walls with colleagues from UCL. We hope to reveal yet more information about the fortress and its legion and I am sure that our work will produce some really exciting results,” said Dr Guest. “The dig is open to the public and we’d be delighted to see people coming along with family and friends to find out more about the work we are doing.”

Guided tours of the Priory Field excavation will be available twice daily (11 am and 2.30 pm, except Mondays) and the excavation is open throughout the Summer Bank Holiday weekend (28th ““ 30th August 2010). As well as tours, there will be displays of the latest finds, a “Ëœmini-dig’, and the chance to talk to archaeologists about how they excavate ancient sites.

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Image Caption: Reconstruction of Caerleon in the Roman period, showing the newly discovered monumental suburb (© 7reasons)

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On the Net:

• Find out more about the discovery
• To follow the fortunes of the archaeologists on the excavations in Caerleon this year, log on to the Dig Blog at: http://www.britarch.ac.uk/caf/wikka.php?wakka=CaerleonLegionaryFortress
• Cardiff School of History, Archaeology and Religion

According to researchers at Edinburgh University, people may be disappointed when trying to get tan by soaking up sunrays this summer.

The researchers said that different parts of the body go brown at different speeds, so achieving that idealized image of beauty is not going to happen.

The findings explain why certain people find it difficult to get an even, consistent tan.  The main problem is people’s bottoms, which take a lot longer to go brown than other parts of their anatomy.

Ninety-eight volunteers were given six doses of ultraviolet radiation on their backs and their bottoms from a tanning light in order to determine the effect was the same in both places.  Once the researchers examined the participants a week later they found that their backs had turned significantly browner than their buttocks.

“The research shows that instead of thinking that you have got one skin, or one skin type, in fact each of us has lots of different skin regions, each of which responds differently to UV light and so take longer than others to go red and then tan,” said Jonathan Rees, a professor of dermatology, who led the study.

“If you shine sunshine on different parts of your body, the difference in how red they go varies by a factor of five for redness and two for tanning, depending on the body site.”

The bottom is not the only obstacle though.  Rees has confirmed previous research that showed that sun worshippers already knew that the upper back is much more likely to tan than the legs.

“What is burning for one body site is not for another. And the degree of UV protection that develops following ultraviolet radiation exposure may vary site by site,” Rees added.

The study also found that those who had no freckles on their skin tanned easier than those with freckles.

Rees and his team looked into why different types of skin cancer occur in different parts of the body.  Usually they develop on ears, faces and the backs of hands and on the top of the head, rather than on the limbs.  Rees said that women get Melanoma on their calves but men get it on their shoulders.

He said the findings show that most advice about how long it is safe to spend in the sun is worthless because different body parts are more sensitive to the sun’s damaging effects than others.

Genetic analysis of 24 spiny frogs supports minority theory of India’s collision with Asia

The evolution of a group of muscled frogs scattered throughout Asia is telling geologists about the sequence of events that led to the rise of the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau starting more than 55 million years ago.

Scientists from Kunming, China, and the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a genetic analysis of 24 species of spiny frogs from the tribe Paini that shows how these Asian frogs evolved along with the mountains’ uplift, developing hard, nubby spines and Popeye-like arms to hold onto their mates in the swift-running streams roaring down from the highest mountains in the world.

The sequence of evolutionary changes, in turn, tells geologists the sequence in which mountain ranges and river systems arose and isolated frog populations as a result of the Indian tectonic plate pushing northward into Asia.

“Geologists know a lot about that area, but what they haven’t been able to do is give a sequence to the timing of the rise of particular mountain masses and particular ridges and pieces,” said co-author David Wake, a herpetologist and evolutionary biologist and professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “We use these frogs as a surrogate for a time machine.”

“What we have here,” he explained, “is a group of very old frogs that are so fixed to their habitats that they just stuck there, sitting on that mountain mass when it got raised up. They were separated by these uplifts and by the rivers between the mountains into different units, and these give us a fix on the timing of geological events.”

Wake and his colleagues, including first author Jing Che of the Kunming Institute of Zoology, who performed some of the genetic analyses while a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley from 2008-2009, published their research in this week’s print edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A photo of the spiny frog Quasipaa boulengeri from the mountains of Sichuan, China, graces the issue’s cover.

According to An Yin, a professor of geology at UCLA who was not part of the analysis team, the sequence of spiny frog evolution supports a minority view of how the India/Asia collision played out between about 55 million years ago and 15-20 million years ago. Rather than merely pushing the Himalayas upward, as some geologists believe, others have argued that the indenting Indian plate also pushed Southeast Asia and China aside towards the Pacific ocean, a process referred to as extrusion or escape tectonics.

“David and colleagues very cleverly used the frogs and their habitats “¦ and came up with very interesting evolutionary stages that are correlated with what this model predicts,” Yin said. “It really is proving important support for a model proposed and based on completely different principles and reasoning and different observations.”

That theory, originally proposed by Paul Tapponnier of the University of Paris and Peter Molnar of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and subsequently championed by Tapponnier, says that the Indian plate’s push into Asia was not continuous, but occurred in a series of northward jumps, first pushing land aside to form Southeast Asia, then pushing South China to the east, and then pushing Central China northeastward.

“If India keeps moving,” Yin said, “then North China will move out of the way. So, you have stages that have very important implications for paleogeographic evolution in this area.”

Spiny frogs of the tribe Paini (a grouping within the family Dicroglossidae) are often called stone frogs in China because they cling to moss-covered rocks near rapidly flowing streams. When male frogs mate with females, they typically grab the female from behind in a strong grip known as amplexus. Though not all Paini have muscular forearms combined with keratinous spines, like coarse sandpaper, on their chests and forearms, those who live in fast-flowing streams do, evidently to prevent the slimy female from being whisked away during the sometimes hours-long amplexus required for the female to ovulate.

Using frogs collected by Che and others, including frogs collected 20 years ago in Tibet and the Himalayas by Theodore Papenfuss, a herpetologist in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, the researchers analyzed four genes from the nucleus in 29 individuals from 24 species of spiny frog. The analysis showed the Paini is composed of two major groups and five distinct lineages, which was a surprise, Wake said.

“The study has revealed at least five unnamed frogs in Indochina and adjacent Yunnan Province in China,” Papenfuss said.

According to the researchers’ genetic reconstruction, the tribe Paini arose in what is now Indochina and spread into Western China about 27 million years ago, diverging into two groups: Nanorana, now consisting primarily of high-elevation species up to 4,700 meters, in Western China; and Quasipaa, consisting of mostly low-elevation species in Indochina and South China.

As the Tibetan plateau was pushed higher, it became separated from the Himalayas, isolating populations in these regions some 19 million years ago. Those restricted to the Himalayas are now considered the Paa subgenus. The Nanorana subgenus isolated in Tibet began to diversify again about 9 million years ago, consistent with the period during which the Tibetan plateau rose above 3,000 meters. These new Nanorana species became well adapted to the cold, arid, low-oxygen conditions of Tibet, and as a result, some organs degenerated, Papenfuss said. For example, some frogs today have no or reduced structures in the ear, including the external tympanum, which transmits sound to the inner ear, and the columella in the middle ear.

The researchers found that in Indochina and South China, on the other hand, the Quasipaa frogs were split by the uplift of the Truong Son Mountain Range on the Laos-Vietnam border, along what is called the Ailao Shan-Red River shear zone. This uplift and the opening of the South China Sea probably occurred as the Indian landmass pushed Indochina southeastward, isolating the frogs of Indochina (now subgenus Eripaa) from those of South China (Quasipaa).

“Our study suggests that the geologically hypothesized uplift (thickening) and strike-slip extrusion must have occurred simultaneously to generate the observed biotic distribution pattern” some 23-24 million years ago, the authors wrote in their paper.

The movement of large land masses must also have been accompanied by climate change, the authors noted, which suggests that the forests of Central Vietnam may have served as a refuge for Paini frogs during climate oscillations. Today, Vietnam is a conservation hotspot.

“Basically, the frogs were rafting on top of the continents,” Yin said “The tectonics control morphological evolution by transporting originally very closely related frogs so far apart they all diverge and develop very differently.”

Wake, whose interest is homoplasy ““ the independent origin of similar shapes and structures ““ noted that the study shows “that spines and hypertrophied forelimbs have evolved independently four different times as they coped with the ever steeper rising mountains and adapted to these increasingly rapidly flowing streams.”

Other authors of the PNAS paper are Ya-Ping Zhang, director of the State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution (SKLGRE) at the Kunming Institute of Zoology and of the Laboratory for Conservation and Utilization of Bioresources at Yunnan University in Kunming; and Wei-Wei Zhou, Jian-Sheng Hu and Fang Yan, also of SKLGRE.

The work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) and the U.S. National Science Foundation AmphibiaTree of Life program.

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Image Caption: Spiny frogs from the tribe Paini are a curious group characterized by spines and powerful forelimbs in males.

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On the Net:

• University of California, Berkeley
• Kunming Institute of Zoology
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

International team of climate researchers drill through a mile and half of the Greenland ice sheet in search of climate change insights

After years of concentrated effort, scientists from the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project hit bedrock more than 8,300 feet below the surface of the Greenland ice sheet last week. The project has yielded ice core samples that may offer valuable insights into how the world can change during periods of abrupt warming.

Led by Denmark and the United States, and comprised of scientists from 14 countries, the NEEM team has been working to get at the ice near bedrock level because that ice dates back to the Eemian interglacial period, about 115,000 to 130,000 years ago, when temperatures on Earth were warmer by as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit than they are today. The Eemian period ice cores should yield a host of information about conditions on Earth during that time of abrupt climate change, giving climate scientists valuable data about future conditions as our own climate changes.

“Scientists from 14 countries have come together in a common effort to provide the science our leaders and policy makers need to plan for our collective future,” said Jim White, director of University of Colorado at Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and an internationally known ice core expert. White was the lead U.S. investigator on the project, and his work there was supported primarily by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs. Other U.S. institutions collaborating on the NEEM effort include Oregon State University, Penn State, the University of California, San Diego, and Dartmouth College.

Greenland is covered by an ice sheet thousands of feet thick that built up over millennia as layers of snow and ice formed. The layers contain information about atmospheric conditions that existed when they were originally formed, including how warm and moist the air was, and the concentrations of various greenhouse gases. While three previous Greenland ice cores drilled in the past 20 years covered the last ice age and the period of warming to the present, the deeper ice layers, representing the warm Eemian and the period of transition to the ice age were compressed and folded, making them difficult to interpret, said White.

After radar measurements taken through the ice sheet from above indicated that the Eemian ice layers below the NEEM site were thicker, more intact and likely contained more accurate and specific information, researchers began setting up an extensive state-of-the-art research facility there. Despite being located in one of the most remote and harsh places on Earth, the NEEM team constructed a large dome, the drilling rig for extracting three-inch-diameter ice cores, drilling trenches, laboratories and living quarters, and officially started drilling in June 2009.

According to Simon Stephenson, Director of the Arctic Sciences Division at NSF, the accomplishment at NEEM “is important because the ability to measure gases and dust trapped in the ice at high resolution is likely to provide new insight into how the global climate changes naturally, and will help us constrain climate models used to predict the future.” Stephenson added that the NEEM ice cores will allow scientists to measure conditions in the past with more specificity–down to single years.

“We are delighted that the NEEM project has completed the drilling through the ice-sheet,” Stephenson said.  “This has been a very successful international collaboration, and NSF is pleased to have supported the U.S. component.”

Accurate climate models based in part on the data collected at NEEM could play an important role in helping human civilization adapt to a changing climate. During the Eemian period, for example, the Greenland ice sheet was much smaller, and global sea levels were about 15 feet higher than they are today, a height that would swamp many major cities around the world.

Now that drilling is complete, scientists will continue to study the core samples and analyze other data they have collected. For his part, White hopes the NEEM project establishes a blueprint for future scientific collaborations.

“I hope that NEEM is a foretaste of the kind of cooperation we need for the future,” White said, “because we all share the world.”

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Image 1: The team at NEEM celebrates the final core sample collected at bedrock level, or over 8,300 feet beneath the Greenland ice sheet. The multi-year drilling project was a collaboration of scientists from 14 different countries and sought to gather ice core samples from the Eemian period, about 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. The Eemian period ice cores should yield a host of information about conditions on Earth during that time of abrupt climate change, giving climate scientists valuable data about future conditions as our own climate changes. Credit: NEEM Project Office

Image 2: The very last ice core sample collected from the NEEM project. The layers of black contain bits of rock that were trapped in the ice over 100,000 years ago. Credit: NEEM Project Office

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On the Net:

• National Science Foundation
• NEEM

Research suggests that the amount of phytoplankton found in the top layers of the ocean has declined markedly over the last century.

Scientists wrote in the journal Nature that the decline appears to be linked to rising water temperatures.

The researchers looked at records of the transparency of sea water, which is affected by the plants.
 
The decline could be ecologically significant as plankton sit at the base of marine food chains.

This is the first study that has attempted a comprehensive global look a plankton changes over such a long time scale.

“What we think is happening is that the oceans are becoming more stratified as the water warms,” said research leader Daniel Boyce from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

“The plants need sunlight from above and nutrients from below; and as it becomes more stratified, that limits the availability of nutrients,” he told BBC News.

Phytoplankton are eaten by zooplankton, which are prey for small fish and other animals.

The first reliable system for measuring the transparency of sea water was developed by astronomer and Jesuit priest Pietro Angelo Secchi.

Secchi was asked by the Pope in 1865 to measure the clarity of water in the Mediterranean Sea for the Papal navy.  He then developed the “Secchi disk,” which is lowered into the sea until its white color disappears from view.

A variety of substances in the water affects it transparency, but one of the main ones is the concentration of chlorophyll, which is the green pigment that is key to photosynthesis in plants at sea and on land.

Secchi disk measurements around the world have been augmented by shipboard analysis of water samples, and more recently by satellite measurements of ocean color.

The final tally included 445,237 data points from the Secchi disk spanning the period 1899-2008.

“This study took three years, and we spent lots of time going through the data checking that there wasn’t any ‘garbage’ in there,” Boyce told BBC.

“The data is good in the northern hemisphere and it gets better in recent times, but it’s more patchy in the southern hemisphere – the Southern Ocean, the southern Indian Ocean, and so on.”

The researchers have used higher quality data to calculate that since 1950, the world has seen a phytoplankton decline of about 40 percent.

The decline has been seen throughout most of the world, except the Indian Ocean.  There are also phytoplankton increases in coastal zones where fertilizer run-off from agricultural land is increasing nutrient supplies.

However the pattern is far from steady.  There are strong variations spanning a few years or a few decades.
 
Many of these variations are correlated with natural cycles of temperature seen in the oceans, such as the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Arctic Oscillation.

The warmer ends of these cycles coincide with a reduction in plankton growth, while abidance in the colder phase is higher.

Carl-Gustaf Lundin, head of the marine program at the International Union for the Conservation of nature (IUCN), said that there could be other factors involved, such as the huge expansion in open-ocean fishing that has taken place over the century.

“Logically you would expect that as fishing has gone up, the amount of zooplankton would have risen – and that should have led to a decline in phytoplankton,” he told BBC News.

“So there’s something about fishing that hasn’t been factored into this analysis.”

He said the method of dividing oceans into grids like the Dalhousie researchers used did not permit scrutiny of areas where this might be particularly important, like the upwelling in the Eastern Pacific that supports the Peruvian anchovy fishers.

The team said that if the trend is real, it could also accelerate warming.

Photosynthesis by phytoplankton removes carbon dioxide from the air and produces oxygen.

Scientists have already said that the waters appear to be absorbing less CO2 in several parts of the world, notably in the Southern Ocean.  However, this is principally thought to be due to changes in wind patterns.

“Phytoplankton… produce half of the oxygen we breathe, draw down surface CO2, and ultimately support all of our fisheries,” said Boris Worm, another member of the Dalhousie team.

“An ocean with less phytoplankton will function differently.”

The overall decline in phytoplankton might be expected to continue if the planet continues to warm in line with projections of computer models of climate.

However, Daniel Boyce said that it was not certain.

“It’s tempting to say there will be further declines, but on the other hand there could be other drivers of change, so I don’t think that saying ‘temperature rise brings a phytoplankton decline’ is the end of the picture,” he said.

Lundin told BBC that the implications could be significant.

“If in fact productivity is going down so much, the implication would be that less carbon capture and storage is happening in the open ocean,” he said.

“So that’s a service that humanity is getting for free that it will lose; and there would also be an impact on fish, with less fish in the oceans over time.”

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Image Caption: Phytoplankton are the foundation of the oceanic food chain. Credit: NOAA MESA Project

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On the Net:

• Nature Abstract
• Dalhousie University Press Release

Shade-grown coffee farms support native bees that help maintain the health of some of the world’s most biodiverse tropical regions, according to a study by a University of Michigan biologist and a colleague at the University of California, Berkeley.

The study suggests that by pollinating native trees on shade-coffee farms and adjacent patches of forest, the bees help preserve the genetic diversity of remnant native-tree populations. The study was published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“A concern in tropical agriculture areas is that increasingly fragmented landscapes isolate native plant populations, eventually leading to lower genetic diversity,” said Christopher Dick, a U-M assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “But this study shows that specialized native bees help enhance the fecundity and the genetic diversity of remnant native trees, which could serve as reservoirs for future forest regeneration.”

An estimated 32.1 million acres of tropical forest are destroyed each year by the expansion of cropland, pasture and logging. Often grown adjacent to remnant forest patches, coffee crops cover more than 27 million acres of land in many of the world’s most biodiverse regions.

Over the last three decades, many Latin American coffee farmers have abandoned traditional shade-growing techniques, in which plants are grown beneath a diverse canopy of trees. In an effort to increase production, much of the acreage has been converted to “sun coffee,” which involves thinning or removing the canopy.

Previous studies have demonstrated that shade-grown farms boost biodiversity by providing a haven for migratory birds, nonmigratory bats and other beneficial creatures. Shade-coffee farms also require far less synthetic fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides than sun-coffee plantations.

In the latest study, U-M’s Dick and UC-Berkeley’s Shalene Jha investigated the role of native bees that pollinate native trees in and around shade-grown coffee farms in the highlands of southern Chiapas, Mexico. In their study area, tropical forest now represents less than 10 percent of the land cover.

Jha and Dick wanted to determine the degree to which native bees, which forage for pollen and nectar and pollinate trees in the process, facilitate gene flow between the remnant forest and adjacent shade-coffee farms.

They focused on Miconia affinis, a small, native understory tree that many farmers allow to invade shade-coffee farms because the trees help control soil erosion.

M. affinis, commonly known as the saquiyac tree, is pollinated by an unusual method known as buzz pollination. In order to release pollen from the tree’s flowers, bees grab hold and vibrate their flight muscles, shaking the pollen free. Non-native Africanized honeybees don’t perform buzz pollination, but many native bees do.

“Our focus on a buzz-pollinated tree allowed us to exclude Africanized honeybees and highlight the role of native bees as both pollinators and vectors of gene flow in the shade-coffee landscape mosaic,” said Jha, a postdoctoral fellow at UC-Berkeley who conducted the research while earning her doctorate at U-M.

Jha and Dick combined field observations with seed-parentage genetic analysis of Miconia affinis. They found that trees growing on shade-coffee farms received bee-delivered pollen from twice as many donor trees as M. affinis trees growing in the adjacent remnant forest. The higher number of pollen donors translates into greater genetic diversity among the offspring of the shade-farm trees.

Seed parentage analysis revealed that pollen from forest trees sired 65.1 percent of the seeds sampled from M. affinis trees growing in a shade-coffee habitat. That finding demonstrates that native bees are promoting gene flow between the remnant forest and the coffee farms””bridging the two habitat types””and that the shade-farm trees serve as a repository of local M. affinis genetic diversity, according to the authors.

In addition, Jha and Dick found that native bees carried pollen twice as far in a shade-coffee habitat than they did in the forest. They documented shade-farm pollination trips of nearly a mile, which are among the longest precisely recorded pollination trips by native tropical bees.

Jha and Dick said their results likely apply to other buzz-pollinated plants, which represent about 8 percent of the world’s flowering plant species, as well as to other native plants whose limited pollen and nectar rewards don’t attract honeybees.

The enhanced genetic diversity of the shade-farm trees could provide a reservoir for future forest regeneration, as the coffee farms typically fall out of production in less than a century. Given that potential, along with the shade farm’s previously identified roles in connecting habitat patches and sheltering native wildlife, it is important to encourage this traditional style of agriculture, Jha and Dick said.

The project was supported by the Helen Olson Brower Fellowship at the University of Michigan and by the National Science Foundation.

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Image Caption: Shade coffee vista in Chiapas, Mexico, with coffee bloom in foreground. Credit: Shalene Jha, University of California, Berkeley

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On the Net:

• University of Michigan
• University of California, Berkeley
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Christopher Dick

First-ever global research integrity code to be finalized at the conference

Research plays a crucial role in economies that value knowledge creation and innovation. As more countries develop their research and development (R&D) capabilities and embark on research initiatives and partnerships at the international level, research integrity becomes all the more important. Increasing globalisation and international collaborations also highlight the importance of promoting integrity in cross-border research.

Some 350 senior education and research policymakers, leaders of research-funding agencies, university leaders and faculty, researchers, and academic publishers from 58 countries are meeting in Singapore to discuss the key issues of research misconduct policy, responsible conduct of research, education and the promotion of professional responsibility in research.

The World Conference on Research Integrity 2010 is hosted by Singapore’s leading research-performing organisations, namely NTU, NUS, SMU and A*STAR, with support from Singapore’s Ministry of Education and the Singapore Tourism Board. The theme for conference, held at Pan Pacific Singapore from 21 to 24 July 2010, is ‘Leadership Challenges and Responses’.

During the conference, participants will exchange views and work together to develop a set of guidelines and recommendations for promoting integrity in research on a global scale. At the end of the conference, they hope to affirm the ‘Singapore Statement on Research Integrity’, which will serve as a benchmark statement for research integrity and a guide for professionally responsible research practices throughout the world.

The guest-of-honour, Singapore’s Minister for Education, Dr Ng Eng Hen, officiated at the opening of the conference on 22 July.

In his opening speech, Dr Ng highlighted the important of research integrity as public trust. “High standards of integrity and ethics in research are crucial in Singapore’s quest to be a R&D node in this global network,” he said. “Knowledge without integrity can harm. The 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity is therefore timely and will assist us in reviewing our systems and procedures for our universities and research institutes.”

“To this end, I am glad that this conference has already set itself a discrete deliverable. It aims to crystallise one of the main recommendations from the 1st World Conference on Research Integrity, which is the need for consistent institutional and national policies. It will work towards developing a set of fundamental and basic principles to be agreed by consensus at this meeting, and which will be known collectively as the Singapore Statement.”

“It is my hope that this Statement will serve as a basic document for a global code of conduct and protocols, from which individual countries can adapt and use for their own institutions to address the issues pertaining to research integrity and good research practices,” said Dr Ng, who is also Singapore’s Second Minister for Defence.

Among those present at this morning’s conference opening were Mr Lim Chuan Poh, Chairman of Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR); Dr Su Guaning, President of Nanyang Technological University (NTU); Professor Howard Hunter, President of Singapore Management University (SMU); Professor Bertil Andersson, Provost of NTU; and Professor Seeram Ramakrishna, Vice President (Research Strategy) of National University of Singapore (NUS).

Mr Lim, Chairman of A*STAR, said: “Arriving at a common set of norms and standards for research integrity has assumed even greater importance, as stakes get higher in an increasingly competitive global R&D landscape, and as R&D pursuits increasingly cut across scientific fields, national borders and organisational cultures, and take on global dimensions with impact on areas such as climate change or managing pandemics. The conversations that will take place among the key stakeholders from academia, public research agencies, policymakers as well as the media, coming from 58 countries at the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, are meaningful steps for us to achieve a common set of global standards.”

“As an organisation with a vibrant community of 2,300 research scientists and engineers, and with extensive collaborations with other international organisations and the industry, A*STAR is fully committed to upholding the highest standards of research integrity. To this end, the A*STAR Code of Practice and Procedure relating to Integrity in Research, which was developed based on international best practices, serves as a guide for A*STAR researchers,” said Mr Lim.

“NTU is proud to have been appointed the lead organiser and host for this event, bringing together renowned experts in their respective fields to address the vital issue of research integrity,” said NTU President Dr Su in his welcome speech at the opening of the conference. “Cutting across all disciplines, research integrity has become increasingly important today, given that innovation and R&D are key drivers of economic growth worldwide.”

“The Singapore Statement shall serve as a fundamental and landmark document containing basic principles that can be used as a standard for research integrity throughout the world. Such a standard will be especially important for educators and educational institutions like NTU, growing rapidly as major research universities,” Dr Su said. “At NTU, we have taken steps to introduce a clear policy, based of course, with due acknowledgement, on the model provided by the US Office of Research Integrity. We have a zero-tolerance policy for anyone, whatever their status, who breaches the university’s research integrity norms.”

NTU Provost, Professor Andersson, who was instrumental in the launch of inaugural World Conference on Research Integrity held in September 2007 in Lisbon, Portugal, when he was the Chief Executive Officer of the European Science Foundation, and who successfully promoted the bid for Singapore to host the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, said: “The importance of research integrity in a world that is increasingly globalised and where research is becoming more multidisciplinary cannot be over emphasised. That the conference is being held in Singapore reflects the increasing importance of the Asia Pacific region as a hub for R&D, and of Singapore as key node in this hub.”

SMU President, Professor Hunter, said: “The issue of research integrity is closely entwined with the SMU culture and the SMU approach to education. Integrity is one of the fundamental values of the university and it is infused into what we teach, how we teach and what students are exposed to. I look forward to the discussions during the conference and most importantly, the meaningful impact these will have on the sphere of research and beyond.”

NUS Vice President (Research Strategy), Professor Ramakrishna, said: “Nearly one-third of the world’s R&D spending comes from public funds, and naturally, there is greater expectation on the research community to deliver scientific breakthroughs. Hence, the emphasis on research integrity cannot be understated. NUS, which has an international community of faculty and students from over 100 countries, strongly values research integrity and actively promotes high standards in our research practices. We will continue to review our practices to ensure that they remain relevant to the evolving research landscape.”

Conference co-chair, Professor Nicholas Steneck of the University of Michigan, said: “Singapore has provided the ideal venue for the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity and we appreciate the support which we have received for Singapore’s major research organisations.”

Agreeing, the other conference co-chair, Mr Tony Mayer, NTU’s Europe Representative, who is also acting for the European Science Foundation, added: “With an international conference planning committee to assist us, we hope that we have created a stimulating programme which will, through the Singapore Statement, become a landmark event in good research practice throughout the world.”

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On the Net:

• Nanyang Technological University

Fostering research integrity in Europe

A new European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity will be presented by the European Science Foundation at the World Conference on Research Integrity. The code addresses good practice and bad conduct in science, offering a basis for trust and integrity across national borders.

This Europe-wide code offers a reference point for all researchers, complementing existing codes of ethics and complying with national and European legislative frameworks. It is not intended to replace existing national or academic guidelines, but represents agreement across 30 countries on a set of principles and priorities for self-regulation of the research community. It provides a possible model for a global code of conduct for all research.

“Science is an international enterprise with researchers continually working with colleagues in other countries. The scientists involved need to understand that they share a common set of standards. There can be no first-class research without integrity,” said Marja Makarow, Chief Executive of the European Science Foundation. “Researchers build on each other’s results so they must be honest with themselves, and with each other, and share the same standards of fairness, which makes the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity a vital document.”

The code describes the proper conduct and principled practice of systematic research in the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Research misconduct is quite rare, but just one extraordinary case can endanger the reputation of a university, a research community or even the reputation of science itself. One well-publicised allegation of research dishonesty or malpractice can call to question the efforts of thousands of scientists and decades of research effort. Europe has experienced several well publicised cases recently at, for example, the University of East Anglia in the UK, and at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.

The term ‘research misconduct’ embraces many things, including insufficient care for the people, animals or objects that are the subject of or participants in research; breaches of confidentiality, violation of protocols, carelessness of the kind that leads to gross error and improprieties of publication involving conflict of interest or appropriation of ideas. Many of these unacceptable research practices are addressed in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity.

The code was developed from meetings and workshops involving the European Science Foundation (ESF) Member Organisations who are 79 national funding bodies, research-performing agencies, academies and learned societies from 30 countries. They worked with the All European Academies (ALLEA). The next steps in implementing the code will be discussed in the autumn by ESF Member Organisations.

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On the Net:

• European Science Foundation