Duke - Jeffrey Pollack https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/author/jeffrey-pollack en Hot on the Trail of CO2 https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/hot-trail-co2 <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Pictorial tributes to the natural world and to crowning achievements in science, engineering, and medicine adorn the granite walls in the cavernous lobby of the National Academies Building in Washington. On the back wall, a giant salmon hovers, midstream, just to the right of Einstein's E=mc2. A much smaller fish, its design evocative of an Inuit totem, is inscribed in the middle of the salmon's body, perhaps as a tribute to native cultures or as a nod to the diminutive but central role of the human dimension in the natural world.</p><p>On a side wall, next to images of Darwin's famed Galapagos finches, is a model of carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules—the oxygen atoms protruding from each carbon atom like the prongs of a child's jacks. Below it, a graph traces the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere starting in 1958, when scientists began keeping detailed records. The curve of the graph looks like a saw blade, each tooth describing year-to-year variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide, but the upward trend in the graph is unmistakable and speaks to the reason for my visit.</p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="300" width="300" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://magazine-dev.oit.duke.edu/sites/default/files/earth%20imaging.jpg" /><p class="caption-text">Earth Imaging</p></div></div></div><p>Inside, I notice the names of Duke's Gabriele Hegerl and Susan Lozier printed on placards at the center tables where researchers and policy makers from top institutions around the country will soon consider the need for an early-warning system for abrupt climate change. I take a seat near the snack table where, within minutes, I've overheard the assembled experts discuss climate projections and offer play-by-play insights into Massachusetts v. the United States Environmental Protection Agency, a case before the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether CO2 should be federally regulated as a pollutant. (In April, the Court found that it should.)</p><p>Hegerl, a climate diagnostician working to understand the reasons behind climate change, is a member of the National Research Council's Climate Research Committee (CRC), which has convened the panel. Lozier, a physical oceanographer, has been invited as a featured speaker because, as she eloquently explains during her remarks, when it comes to climate, "the ocean is an equal partner with the atmosphere." When she showed me her invitation to speak during our interview a few weeks earlier, Lozier mused over "abrupt"—a word that means very different things to scientists and non-scientists. Lozier tells me that when talking about climate change, abrupt means decades.</p><p>Lozier's office at Duke had been the first stop on my personal quest for more than Al Gore's "inconvenient truth." In the handful of years since I earned my graduate degree in coastal environmental management at Duke, the global climate-change story has become the best show in town—Gore even won an Oscar for his version. Did I think about global warming this much while I was at Duke? Do I think about it enough now? After all, accelerated sea-level rise and intensifying storms, both with profound consequences for our coasts, are among the most dramatic of the changes we'll see as the planet continues to warm in coming decades. How could anyone with my professional bent and my personal penchant for salty, sandy places not think about global climate all the time? With the bliss of ignorance fading into distant memory, what is a card-carrying member of humanity to do? Searching for knowledge that would help me become more than just another contributor to the problem, I headed back to the Nicholas School to catch up on the latest in climate-change science.</p><p>In comparison with the other offices I visit that day, Lozier's is a sanctuary—serene and uncluttered. Warm light from a single desk lamp casts a halo on a tidy desk. A large, well-pruned, potted succulent occupies the window alcove inside one of the towers that distinguish the Old Chemistry Building.</p><p>Lozier is explaining that the disruption of the ocean conveyor, as ocean circulation is known, could "give the signal of rapid climate change" in the form of cooler temperatures in certain parts of the world, including Western Europe.</p><p>Warm water in the form of the Gulf Stream travels north from the equator along the western margin of the Atlantic Ocean. Once past Cape Hatteras, the Gulf Stream drifts to the northeast, and the surface waters transfer heat to Western Europe, becoming cooler in the process. When they reach the North Atlantic, the surface waters—now colder, saltier, and denser—sink and flow back toward the equator in the deep ocean, a 1,000-year journey that drives ocean circulation.</p><p>As the Earth's atmosphere warms from a combination of natural cycles and human factors, ice masses around the poles are melting at accelerated rates. The fresh water being released could reduce the salinity of nearby surface waters, changing their density enough so that they wouldn't sink and drive the cycle. Lozier cites data from 2002 that show "rapid freshening" of the North Atlantic since 1965; however, her own work has not yet revealed any recent changes in the ocean conveyor. Lozier uses high-tech floats—four-foot-long glass tubes housing delicate instruments—to study currents at specific depths in the North Atlantic. After the floats spend two years underwater measuring salinity and temperature and internally recording their own location, their ballasts rupture, and they pop to the surface. They beam all of their stored measurements to a satellite. Lozier and her colleagues retrieve the data and use them to map and characterize the particular currents that carried the floats.</p><p>If the ocean conveyor were disrupted, the rapid cooling of Western Europe would be only half of the bombshell. A recent report by a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealed that 40 percent of the CO2 released by human activities since 1800—the same CO2 that has been implicated as the key perpetrator in the warming of the Earth's atmosphere—has been carried by the dense, sinking waters of the North Atlantic into a reservoir in the deep sea. The disruption of ocean circulation would mean the loss of our single biggest repository, or sink, for atmospheric CO2.</p><p>"Ninety percent of the deep waters in the Atlantic were once surface waters," Lozier explains, so we're able to monitor the penetration of CO2 from human sources into the ocean's depths. "The time scale here is decades," she says. "We are now picking up Helium-3 and Tritium in the deep waters from the nuclear tests in the 1950s and early '60s."</p><p>In this way, the deep sea is a record, as well as a reservoir. We know from geologic evidence of deep-ocean warming that the ocean conveyor has slowed or stopped at different points in the Earth's history. We also know that at those times, the surface of the Earth looked very different from the way it does today.</p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="237" width="580" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://magazine-dev.oit.duke.edu/sites/default/files/sea%20sick.jpg" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Sea sick?: Disruption of the ocean conveyor, below, could signal rapid climate change, says Lozier, bottom, who monitors how increased carbon affects ocean health; Arctic polar bear seeks stable ground amid melting ice</div><p> </p><div class="media-h-credit">Aurora/Ty Milford</p></div></div></div></div><p>My decision to search for some perspective on climate predictions takes me only one floor up from Lozier's office in Old Chem; my footsteps clap off the aging concrete stairs, polished by seventy-five years of students in motion. To get to Thomas Crowley, I walk through two small lab rooms, past a finger painting tacked to the bulletin board, past teetering stacks of journals on the floor beneath an open file cabinet, and into an office covered from floor to ceiling in shelved journals. Piles of article reprints, two rows deep, conceal most of his two desks. (Later, in an e-mail message to a photographer who is attempting to lure him outdoors for a photo shoot, Crowley says, "I would much rather have a picture taken in my office—surrounded by the stacks of paper that are the fodder for my research.")</p><p>Crowley's professional identity is hard to nail down. A geologist by training, he has become a historian and modeler of past climates and is now dealing with contemporary climate issues and policy. He works with computer models that apply Newton's equations of motion and the laws of thermodynamics to a rotating sphere and are run on the biggest computers in the world.</p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="299" width="300" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://magazine-dev.oit.duke.edu/sites/default/files/disruption%20of%20the%20ocean.jpg" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Disruption of the ocean conveyor could signal rapid climate change</div><p> </p><div class="media-h-credit">University Corporation for Atmospheric Research</p></div></div></div></div><p>At this, the warmest point in human history, Crowley recognizes that we need a wholesale change in our energy supply—85 percent of which is carbon-based—to stabilize the climate. (Like other experts, Crowley points out that despite valid concerns over the contribution of automobiles to global warming, "most CO2 comes from smokestacks not tail pipes"—which explains why none of my interviews involves more than a passing discussion of automobile fuel efficiency and emissions.) Even so, he is open to the idea of continuing the use of fossil fuels and to expanding the infrastructure, like offshore drilling, that provides them—as long as there are "tithes paid and horse trades made," he says. These tithes and trades might include money given to support production of alternative fuels or educational programs and scholarships funded by energy companies in states where fossil-fuel infrastructure is built.</p><p>"It takes time to rewire the energy economy, and clean coal or methane creates jobs and U.S. energy security," Crowley explains. But he draws the line at on-site drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Area Refuge because the infrastructural footprint is just too big.</p><p>Crowley, who never eats lunch in his office because he prefers to eat with the students, invites me to join him. "Gabi doesn't like to sit up here," he tells me of his wife as he climbs to a table on the platform at the end of the gallery in the Union Building. Gabi is Gabriele Hegerl, the member of the Climate Research Committee I encountered at the National Academy. In line at the coffee counter after lunch, Crowley sifts through a handful of foreign coins, relics of Hegerl's service on advisory bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—considered the authoritative source for climate-change predictions—which takes her all over the globe.</p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 250px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="414" width="250" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://magazine-dev.oit.duke.edu/sites/default/files/hegerl.jpg" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">The oceans are assimilating up to 40 percent of the carbon byproducts of our daily lives, says oceanographer Susan Lozier.</div><p> </p><div class="media-h-credit">Photo courtesy of Susan Lozier</p></div></div></div></div><p>I wasn't able to interview Hegerl that day because she was in Hawaii as part of a panel about changes in climate extremes. Later, by phone, she tells me that she recognizes the irony of flying all over the globe to climate-change meetings in emissions-spewing, fossil-fuel-swilling jets. Hegerl was a lead author of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (2007), a comprehensive picture of the current state of knowledge about climate change—a four-volume report that was six years in the making and included the work of scientists from more than 130 countries. The report's take-home message is that the observed changes in climate over the past fifty years are "very likely" due to greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. "Very likely" is what Hegerl calls a statistical qualifier, because the scientific determination, as strong as it is, can't be considered 100 percent certain. (Remember, even evolution is referred to as theory, despite the fact that biologists see it as the foundation of the work they do.)</p><p>Hegerl says that her role as a scientist is to provide information to the public; it is up to the public to decide which consequences are acceptable. A self-described optimist by nature, she thinks that the public's will to act—regulation, legislation, changes in individual behavior—seems to be increasing.</p><p>Crowley, on the other hand, tells me, "I am never optimistic but veer between being hopeful and pessimistic." Walking back to Old Chem, coffee in hand, he explains that predictions about climate change have changed very little in the past twenty-five years. "We can predict a range of warming scenarios, depending on different population and emission scenarios, which is the sociological component of climate science," he says. "If we take the median value in that range of predictions, our climate will be warmer at the end of this century than it has been in between five and twenty million years."</p><p>There is no way, Crowley says, to explain twenty-first-century climate, with its Arctic sea ice retreat, summertime rivers on the Greenland Ice Sheet, and polar bears drowning for want of floating way stations, without factoring in the greenhouse gases that we've released into the atmosphere.</p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="223" width="580" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://magazine-dev.oit.duke.edu/sites/default/files/organic%20exchange.jpg" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Organic exchange: Bernhardt, at the Sandy Creek wetlands near West Campus, focuses on the impact of greenhouse gases released during the restoration process</div><p> </p><div class="media-h-credit">Jim Wallace</p></div></div></div></div><p>William Schlesinger's office is a sophisticated, airy space designed for receiving important people. A few months after our interview, I learned that Schlesinger would soon have new digs, as he announced that he would be leaving his post as dean of Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences this summer to lead the Institute for Ecosystem Studies, a world-renowned ecological research organization in Millbrook, New York.</p><p>I have come to Dean Schlesinger looking for the grown-up version of the mantra of every eighth-grade science teacher: Carbon is the building block of life. "There is no life on Earth that doesn't have carbon in it," Schlesinger says. Carbon—one of ninety-two natural elements on Earth and No. 6 on the Periodic Table of Elements—has a high valence, so atoms of other elements tend to stick to it and form more complex structures.</p><p>Wood, limestone, diamonds, and carbon dioxide, while bearing no outward physical similarity, all comprise carbon. I wonder aloud: How could it be that a principal building block of our planet is at the heart of our global climate crisis? Schlesinger chastises me for not taking his course on biogeochemistry and then begins to explain the movement of carbon between the Earth, atmosphere, and ocean—a subject that he knows as well as anyone on the planet.</p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="447" width="580" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://magazine-dev.oit.duke.edu/sites/default/files/carbon%20cycle.jpg" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Carbon cycle: The annual flux of CO<sub><font size="2">2</font></sub> in GigaTons (Gt) or billions of tons between each of the Earth's reservoirs. Each reservoir serves as both a source of and a sink for carbon, as indicated by opposing arrows. The carbon released by burning fossil fuels is an unbalanced contribution to the global carbon budget. The total contribution of carbon from the burning of fossil fuels has increased from 5.5 Gt to between 7 and 8 Gt since this diagram was published in 2003.</div><p> </p><div class="media-h-credit">NASA Earth Science Division</p></div></div></div></div><p>"With regard to mass, the Earth has been pretty constant for three billion years," he says. When the Earth was just a coalescing ball of gases and ice, it was endowed with a certain amount of carbon. In the early stages of the planet's development, all of that carbon was in the mantle, the thick bulk of our planet that is between its innermost core and its thin outer crust. A period of intense volcanic eruptions redistributed some of the carbon to the atmosphere, in the form of CO2; when the planet cooled enough for the oceans to form, some of that CO2 dissolved into the water.</p><p>Schlesinger walks over to a bookshelf and retrieves a copy of Biogeochemistry: An Analysis of Global Change, a textbook that he wrote, and flips to a diagram of the carbon cycle. Curved arrows of various sizes create a series of closed loops between the Earth, oceans, and atmosphere—each a natural reservoir for carbon that serves as both a source of and a sink for carbon from the other reservoirs. The size of each arrow reflects the amount of carbon transferred from each source to each sink; in most cases, the arrows coming in and going out are the same size, indicating a balanced transfer.</p><p>The diagram also depicts a source of carbon that is unbalanced by an opposing arrow. In the 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been making a one-way contribution of carbon to the atmosphere. Carbon—in the form of coal, shale, and oil—is naturally locked up in the Earth's crust, where it would stay for hundreds of millions of years if not removed and burned by humans.</p><p>Schlesinger explains that each year, around the world, we release around seven gigatons—seven billion metric tons—of carbon into the atmosphere, mainly by burning fossil fuels. That carbon in the form of gaseous CO2—along with water vapor, methane, and other greenhouse gases—traps infrared radiation from the sun that, in turn, reradiates from the Earth's surface and warms the planet.</p><p>In comparison with the 90 or so gigatons of carbon each that terrestrial ecosystems and the world's oceans contribute to the atmosphere each year, our paltry seven gigatons—roughly 1 percent of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere—are pennies in the global carbon budget. But unlike the natural sources, our contribution is not offset by a corresponding sink—at least not entirely. As Lozier explained, the oceans are, for the moment, doing more than their share by assimilating up to 40 percent of the carbon byproducts of our daily lives.</p><p>The IPCC projects that our annual contribution of carbon could be 15 gigatons per year or higher by 2050 if the world continues to consume fossil fuels at current rates.</p><p>Schlesinger's distillation of the issue is basic and pragmatic: "We can decrease our emissions or try to increase natural uptake, either by increasing plant growth or decreasing decomposition, which would produce a net storage of carbon on land." Because absorbing part of our seven gigatons of carbon into natural pathways between sources and sinks would mean a relatively small change to the system, scientists contemplate assorted schemes for enhancing carbon uptake by natural systems. No one knows for sure how much of the unbalanced carbon will be taken up by oceans and other natural carbon sinks before we see fundamental changes in those systems, although several Duke faculty members are working to find out. Pencil in hand, I thumb through the Nicholas School's Experts Guide, the "reporters' handbook" to the school's "faculty expertise," and plot my trip around the carbon cycle via waypoints in the school of the environment.</p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="236" width="580" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://magazine-dev.oit.duke.edu/sites/default/files/big%20picture.jpg" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Big picture: Barber, renowned for his expertise in the data-driven field of biological oceanography, at Duke's Marine Lab.</div><p> </p><div class="media-h-credit">Jeffery Pollack</p></div></div></div></div><p>Wetlands have long been recognized as carbon sinks. In fact, we owe our modern-day supply of fossil fuels to the wetlands that abounded in the Carboniferous Period.</p><p>"Wetlands accumulate muck," says Emily Bernhardt, assistant professor of biology. Under the anaerobic conditions that result from standing water and saturated sediment, there is little decomposition of that muck by microbes, which means that carbon-rich organic matter accumulates. This organic matter, when compressed over eons, becomes fossil fuels.</p><p>Bernhardt and her colleagues have just begun to track the restoration of Timberlake Farms, a 4,000-acre site in the coastal plain of North Carolina that includes wetlands that were drained. A quarter of the site was actively farmed until two years ago. Now that the pumps have been turned off, the site will slowly return to its natural state. As this massive restoration project progresses, Bernhardt and her team will measure the net flux of three greenhouse gases—methane, nitrous oxide, and CO2—out of the soil, to monitor the farmland's transition back into wetlands: How it happens and how long it takes, among other things. While Bernhardt expects the site to be a source of methane and nitrous oxide in the short term, it will become a carbon sink as the site returns to its natural state over the coming decades.</p><p>In addition to working at Timberlake Farms, Bernhardt is among a handful of Nicholas School researchers conducting experiments at the Free Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment (FACE) site in Duke Forest to determine how forest ecosystems will respond to elevated levels of atmospheric CO2. Robert Jackson, one of Bernhardt's colleagues in the Nicholas School and head of the school's Center on Global Change, is also an investigator in the FACE experiments.</p><p>The diversity of Jackson's work is captured in the titles of three of the books he's written: Methods in Ecosystem Science, a textbook; The Earth Remains Forever, a compelling case for environmental stewardship aimed at a broad audience; and Animal Mischief, an illustrated book of children's poems.</p><p>Jackson has a natural, easygoing manner; he is wearing a well-worn black T-shirt beneath a blue, short-sleeve linen shirt. An oversized spider hanging high above a corner of his office that is devoted to his three sons' artwork and a black wig on his desk hint at the playfulness that is part of Jackson's hopeful world view.</p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="268" width="580" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://magazine-dev.oit.duke.edu/sites/default/files/climate%20change.jpg" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">As average air and sea temperatures rise, ice masses such as these in Greenland melt, raising the sea level in the world's oceans</div><p> </p><div class="media-h-credit">© Paul Souders/Corbis</p></div></div></div></div><p>Conversation about climate change quickly broadens to other issues: air and water quality, balance of trade, national security, energy security. Jackson is quick to point out that the concept of "greenhouse gases" is not new: Joseph Fourie coined the term in the 1820s, and scientists knew as early as the 1890s that we would eventually warm the planet if we continued to burn wood, coal, and other sources of carbon.</p><p>Jackson thinks we could see an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 700 parts per million—nearly double the present concentration—by the end of this century if we continue with business as usual. Jackson and Schlesinger did some calculations to see whether planting forests could be the solution to our runaway emissions—when plants take up CO2 for photosynthesis, some of the carbon gets locked in their tissues.</p><p>"We would need 100 million acres of forest to offset 10 percent of our annual fossil-fuel emissions in this country alone," Jackson says. That amount of land is simply unavailable, and the water and fertilizer needed to support those forests would create a separate suite of environmental problems, he adds. What's more, forests provide only a short-term holding tank for CO2; it is released when the trees die and decompose or are burned.</p><p>At an experimental site in Duke Forest that is part of the FACE project, Duke scientists have set up eight experimental "rings" around sections of forest. Air containing an elevated concentration of CO2—575 parts per million, about 200 ppm more than the concentration in the surrounding forest—is blown into four of the rings; the remaining four serve as the controls in the experiment.</p><p>Gravel crunches under the tires of Jackson's hybrid Honda Civic as we park next to three massive blocks of silver metal coils, each over twenty feet tall. These heat-exchange coils convert liquid CO2—about one tanker truck full a day—to its gaseous form.</p><p>I follow Jackson onto the forest trail. Gusts of wind swirl red and orange fall leaves over a bed of brown pine needles. At Ring 4, a blower wails welcome from inside a red wooden shed. A black, corrugated plastic pipe carrying air laden with extra CO2 snakes out of the shed and forms the border of the experimental ring. Every twelve feet, white PVC pipes, with holes drilled on one side, jut skyward out of the black ring. A computer-controlled system measures wind direction and releases the gas on the side of the ring that will ensure optimal exposure for the trees inside. According to Jackson, the pipes have to be extended up about a foot a year to keep up with the growth of the twenty-five-year-old loblolly pines inside the ring.</p><p>Inside Ring 4, experimental equipment litters the ground and hangs from tree trunks—researchers measure just about everything imaginable relating to carbon, nitrogen, and water inside the rings. Jackson and the other Duke researchers collect fallen leaves and small branches in "litter traps"—framed screens of fine mesh that are suspended just off the forest floor—and estimate tree productivity by measuring biomass (weight), leaf area, and tissue chemistry. They measure tree growth just as their predecessors did in the early days of forestry science, with metal dendrometer bands that encircle the tree trunks and expand as they grow. They core into the ground to measure the chemical composition of the soil and tree roots.</p><p>Jackson and his students have found significant increases in soil CO2, which has implications for soil chemistry, because the soil will become more acidic as the CO2 concentration increases. The roots of trees exposed to elevated levels of CO2 show a 30 percent increase in the biomass of their roots; the roots are a site of continuous respiration (the breakdown of sugar and oxygen to yield CO2, water, and energy) so more roots means more CO2 building up in the soil.</p><p>Plants have a fixed ratio of carbon to nitrogen in their tissues, which means that in order for plants to take up extra carbon, additional nitrogen must also be available. Jackson and his colleagues report that, in the absence of additional fertilizers, the trees in the FACE experiment exhibit only a modest increase in CO2 uptake. About two years ago, during year nine of the experiment, the researchers began fertilizing each of the experimental rings with ammonium nitrate in a concentration comparable to what a farmer might use.</p><p>At another research site in Texas, Jackson tests the response of native grasses to ancient climate conditions and has found that the increased CO2 uptake by green plants slows over time, even if the ambient CO2 concentration continues to rise. Some scientists think an atmospheric CO2 concentration of around 500 ppm—predicted by the IPCC by the middle of this century—may be an ecological tipping point based on the level of associated global warming. What's more, this projection assumes a massive assimilation of our CO2 burden by terrestrial systems. Jackson's work will help determine if we are overestimating the capacity of forests and grasslands to keep pace with our emissions.</p><p>I'm starting to realize that while planting trees (and cutting fewer of them) must be part of a holistic plan to stabilize the climate, carbon sequestration by forests—or wetlands, for that matter—will never be a silver-bullet solution. The trendy, conscience-salving practice of buying carbon offsets—in the form of trees planted in a far-off land, for example—for $20 a year over the Internet is not nearly enough to pay penance for miles driven in a Chevy Suburban.</p><p>One hundred ninety miles east-southeast of Duke Forest, at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, North Carolina, a Duke biologist of a different sort is exploring the sequestration capacity of our biggest natural sink for carbon. The blue star tattoo, primitive and fading, is one of the first things I notice when Dick Barber greets me. I remember pondering the mystery of that tattoo from a front-row seat in Barber's class years before. Not normally a front-row type of student, I made an exception because I didn't want to miss any of the profundities—often as easily missed as they were insightful—that Barber was bound to offer during each class.</p><p>"In our culture, people are either doers or thinkers," says Barber, early into our conversation. It's clear from the way he asks questions that he is a thinker and is eager to find out which of the two I am. Before even flirting with the subject of my visit, we talk for over two hours, in large part about my work as a coastal field biologist in Saudi Arabia, where I documented the impact of the oil spilled during the first Gulf War. My work in Saudi—counting species, making observations, and formulating hypotheses to explain what I saw—had been science of the purest sort. Barber laments contemporary scientists' emphasis on data and methods over pure observation—a surprising sentiment since biological oceanography, Barber's specialty, is among the most quantitative fields of marine science.</p><p>On climate change, Barber is not sure we have "the wit" to work some of the issues out, even though he is convinced that we have the technological capacity and fundamental understanding of the three key elements—science, politics, and economics. In his mind, political will is the missing ingredient.</p><p>Barber, like Jackson, Crowley, and nearly all of the other Duke professors I've spoken to about climate change, brings up nuclear power. Even energy experts disagree about the potential for nuclear power to supplant fossil fuels. But Barber describes the prevailing public sentiment against the use of nuclear power as "emotional and irrational," based on fear rather than on a real understanding of risk. I get the sense that Barber would rather see us build well-designed, secure nuclear power plants, for example, than coal-fired ones. (As Jackson told me, energy from burning coal contributes to at least 10,000 deaths a year in this country.) But he acknowledges his own hang-ups, among them addressing the real cost of waste storage in places like Yucca Mountain. He points out that while his reactions may be strong—"violent," he says—they are rational, and he recognizes that we have the capacity to address them. "Yucca Mountain is such a small risk relative to other risks. The real issue is whether the world is going to be a livable place, and Yucca Mountain is not even in the same ballpark as the danger we face from Iran."</p><p>Even though we need a wholesale energy alternative to stabilize our climate, Barber says, he's convinced that the use of nuclear power will never be a part of the discussion. He recalls a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science fifteen years ago, when Chinese delegates asked for help developing nuclear power instead of coal, which they knew was environmentally detrimental. All but one of the U.S. panelists pushed for coal.</p><p>"It is a complex crisis," Barber says. "Nuclear power and global warming are the two things 'environmentalists' hate, and the evidence is that they think nuclear [power] is the real threat, because that is what they demonstrate against."</p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="244" width="580" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://magazine-dev.oit.duke.edu/sites/default/files/Morr.jpg" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Weiner: making the case for using market-based strategies to address climate change</div><p> </p><div class="media-h-credit">Megan Morr</p></div></div></div></div><p>Barber is someone with whom I could talk about politics and social issues all day long, but this day is quickly slipping by, so I push the conversation toward the subject of his work as a scientist. In 1993 and 1995, Barber was a principal investigator on research cruises to the Equatorial Pacific to test the idea that fertilizing patches of the ocean with iron would stimulate the growth of microscopic plants called phytoplankton. Scientists know that 18,000 years ago, before the last ice age, our atmosphere was around fifty times dustier than it is today. John Martin, a close friend and colleague of Barber who died right before the 1993 cruise, had hypothesized that the settling of iron-rich dust would have stimulated phytoplankton growth in parts of the ocean where other requisite nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and silicate—were abundant, but iron was in short supply. Photosynthesis by this phytoplankton, Martin speculated, would have pulled enough CO2 out of the atmosphere to minimize the greenhouse effect, keeping our planet cool.</p><p>During both of the "Iron-X" experiments, and during a third experiment in the Southern Ocean in 2002, Barber and the other researchers spread a half ton of iron dust over 86 square mile sections of ocean. It worked. The ensuing phytoplankton bloom drew a measurable amount of CO2 out of the air at the sea surface. What's more, Barber and his team found that about half of the carbon pulled out as CO2 was transported by the sinking phytoplankton to depths where it would essentially be out of play for 500 to 1,000 years—the length of time, as Lozier had told me, that it takes the ocean conveyor to deliver it back to the ocean's surface in another part of the globe.</p><p>Barber says he doesn't feel that there has been any rational discussion of ocean fertilization because there are so many ethical objections to any large-scale manipulation of ocean ecosystems. He recalls that John Martin once said that the no-action scenario is much more destructive than any of the solutions on the table. Martin argued that those objecting to ocean fertilization on moral grounds were passively advocating for harm under the status quo.</p><p>The issue of iron fertilization has reached a critical stage because of two U.S.-based corporations, Planktos Inc. and its competitor, Green Sea Venture Inc. Both are staffed with world-class oceanographers, and Planktos is rumored to have approached the World Bank for a $1 billion loan to support ocean fertilization. Barber and two of his former graduate students from Duke have worked with Green Sea Venture to provide plans for a test fertilization.</p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="288" width="580" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://magazine-dev.oit.duke.edu/sites/default/files/reuters.jpg" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Going, going, gone: Warming ocean temperatures have led to coral bleaching and threatened ecosystems in places like Belize's 200 miles of coral reef</div><p> </p><div class="media-h-credit">REUTERS/STR</p></div></div></div></div><p>Barber—the big picture always in focus—envisions commercial-scale iron fertilization, with tankers carrying 1,000 tons of iron dust in a single trip, as a way for even the smallest nations to share in the market opportunity created by engineering carbon sequestration. Barber has no feel for whether ocean fertilization will be in or out of climate-change discussions in twenty-five years, but he's certain that there will be more experiments to test it because, as he puts it, "it's so goddamned cheap."</p><p>Barber corroborates the conclusion I reached after talking to Robert Jackson: The potential of enhanced carbon sequestration by natural systems—forests, wetlands, and now oceans—is only a small part of a balanced strategy for stabilizing the climate. He emphasizes the role of financial markets and global politics and brings up the work of Duke law professor Jonathan Wiener. Barber even suggests, after hours of conversation about science, that these subjects might make for a more interesting story than the details of his own work. I am amused by the suggestion—I could never ignore his role in some of the most exciting oceanography experiments of this century—but I am not surprised by Barber's humility about his own contributions. Then again, when someone as brilliant as Dick Barber makes a suggestion, someone like me takes it to heart. I make plans for a visit to Duke Law School.</p><p>In his office at the very end of a very long hall, Jonathan Wiener builds a courtroom-caliber case for using market-based strategies to address climate change. He begins by echoing Schlesinger in advocating for consideration of both sources and sinks for greenhouse gases. On the shelf, book titles like Risk! and Collapse! suggest that I pay extra attention.</p><p>Wiener first proposed a comprehensive trading system for greenhouse gases while working for the Environmental Division of the Justice Department in 1989. Our current "command and control" system of regulations, largely unchanged since that time, prescribes specific means to reduce pollution to target levels. The narrow regulations of this type of system, Wiener explains, encourage the substitution of one unsustainable activity for another, such as the switch from coal to natural gas or fossil fuels to ethanol.</p><p>He proposes a "cap-and-trade" system, under which the EPA would allocate a certain number of units of carbon emissions to a company for a set period of time; the initial allocation would probably be based on the company's history of pollution. Companies that didn't use all of their units could sell them to companies that exceeded their own caps. That system would give all parties involved the freedom to select their own approach for reducing emissions and allow them to use the marketplace to fine-tune their individual pollution limits. At the end of each trading period, the established monitoring and enforcement entity would compare allowances and emissions and fine any participants whose emissions exceeded their allocation. This trading system would involve brokers and would even create the opportunity for environmental interests to purchase and retire pollution units.</p><p>I question the practicality of developing reliable monitoring methods based on good science for a multi-gas trading system, but Wiener points out that monitoring and enforcement are part of any pollution-reduction system; a trading system just adds the need for a mechanism for allocating and tracking emission rights.</p><p>Because there are no hotspots—specific places where emissions cause environmental damage—for CO2 and other greenhouse gases, the net reduction in emissions, not where those reductions occur, is what's important. A system of tradable emissions credits spurs dynamic innovation because players compete to offer the cheapest reduction strategy so that they can trade their surplus capacity. This, Wiener says, is a win-win for the economy and the environment.</p><p>Critics of pollution trading, of whom there are fewer today than even a few years ago, thanks to the success of the U.S. cap-and-trade system for acid rain, cite moral grounds for their opposition to the notion of granting the right to pollute. Yet it is our current regulatory system, according to Wiener, that gives a free right to pollute below the set limit. A trading system makes polluters pay for all units of pollution, because what Wiener refers to as the opportunity cost of holding onto pollution rights—the price that those emissions credits would draw in the marketplace—makes even unused pollution rights worth something.</p><p>The Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act, originally introduced by Senators Joseph Lieberman and John McCain, is one of three major climate-change bills currently on the floor in Congress. It includes a cap-and-trade system for the six major classes of greenhouse gases in the U.S. and has an entire section dedicated to the details of monitoring and recording. Tim Profeta M.E.M. '97, J.D. '97, director of Duke's burgeoning Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, served as counsel for the environment for Senator Lieberman and was one of the architects of the bill in its original form.</p><p>"Everyone in Washington thinks it's most cost effective to deal with all six greenhouse gases at once," Profeta tells me when I call him for details. "The biggest bang for the buck comes from reductions in non-CO2 gases, like methane and the CFC [chlorofluorocarbon] alternatives."</p><p>Profeta's grasp of climate policy extends beyond U.S. borders, and he believes that the U.S. must show political and economic leadership to inspire international participation in the next round of Kyoto Protocol discussions in 2009.</p><p>"CO2 has a lifespan of 100 years in the atmosphere. What's up there now is ours. What's going up there now is ours and India's and China's."</p><p>International treaties like Kyoto hinge on voluntary participation ("the bedrock principle of environmental treaty law," according to Wiener), which makes it critical that would-be participants perceive the benefits of participating. "The Stern Review," a seminal 700-page report released in late 2006 by the British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, cites emissions trading as a key element of any international effort to stabilize the climate. By Stern's analysis, developing nations like China and India stand to gain 5 percent or more of their GDP by participating in an international trading system for greenhouse gases. The path to an international climate treaty is imperiled by geopolitical issues, Wiener notes. "But those issues may also represent opportunities." In the case of China, so eager to be viewed as a great power, he is optimistic that the promise of a seat at the table might inspire participation.</p><p>Leaving Wiener's office, walking back down that long hallway, and stepping into the sunlight, I'm struck by the gravity of what I've learned. I returned to Duke in search of the finer points—the high-resolution view—of climate-change science. In several days of conversations with experts whose combined knowledge of all things climate would be hard to find under the roof of any other single institution, I have traversed the boundaries between academic disciplines, between political parties, between land and sea and sky. I have come to understand how much we tend to make of these boundaries and, ultimately, how little they matter. And now, with the proverbial forest back in focus, what have I learned from remapping my route through the trees? When we zoom out to the big-picture view, the Google Earth vantage, those boundaries disappear, and we face a single question: What makes this a livable planet?</p><p>The "issue" of climate change, if this all-encompassing phenomenon can be described as such, is a pure illustration—perhaps one of the purest in human history—that we are at once a natural part of the global ecology and in desperate need of means of reducing our global ecological footprint. What is a card-carrying member of humanity to do? Tread lightly.</p><p>Pollack M.E.M. '02 is a freelance writer in Corpus Christi, Texas, and heads In Translation, a consulting entity specializing in bringing coastal environmental science to decision makers.</p><p><em>Editor's note: Thomas Crowley and Gabriele Hegerl recently accepted academic appointments at the University of Edinburgh.</em></p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2007-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Wednesday, August 1, 2007</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/sea_sick.jpg" width="649" height="265" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/jeffrey-pollack" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeffrey Pollack</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jul-aug-2007" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jul - Aug 2007</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">An alumnus with a degree in coastal environmental management and a &quot;penchant for salty, sandy places&quot; returns to the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences to learn about the latest research and thinking on global climate change.</div></div></section> Wed, 01 Aug 2007 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18499922 at https://alumni.duke.edu Coastal Modeling https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/coastal-modeling <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="510" width="300" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://magazine-dev.oit.duke.edu/sites/default/files/coastal%20modeling.jpg" /><p class="caption-text"><div class="media-h-caption">Inland retreat: Coastal erosion forced the National Park Service to move the Cape Hatteras lighthouse away from the advancing edge of the ocean</div><p> </p><div class="media-h-credit">© Karen Kasmauski/Corbis</p></div></div></div></div><p>Sea-level rise is one of the most dramatic consequences of a warming climate. Carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases trap solar radiation that re-radiates from the Earth's surface, warming the atmosphere. As average air and sea temperatures rise, ice masses melt, raising the sea level in the world's oceans. Sea-level rise and intensifying storm activity—another demonstrable, but less predictable, result of global warming—will have a profound effect on the shape of coastlines around the world.</p><p>Sea level has been on the rise since the end of the last ice age, around 18,000 years ago. The rate of that sea-level rise, which had been highly variable for much of this interglacial period, slowed markedly about 6,000 years ago and stayed that way until the coming of industrialization. According to Brad Murray, associate professor of geomorphology and coastal processes, the current rate of sea-level rise is about double what it was a century ago, and we can expect it to double again by the end of this century.</p><p>Murray is a geologist and a modeler who specializes in coastal processes—erosion, accretion, and other causes of changes in shorelines. He leads a five-person team that is developing a model of "large-scale coastal behavior" (changes on scales greater than kilometers or years) on the Carolina coasts.</p><p>The larger model integrates natural physical processes and human behavior. One important component is a dynamic economic model of the way in which decisions about coastal management are made, which is where Duke resource economist Marty Smith and marine policy specialist Michael Orbach come in. Joseph Ramus, a coastal ecologist at Duke, and Thomas Crowley, a modeler of past climates, round out the interdisciplinary powerhouse.</p><p>Coastal communities have tried all sorts of things to stabilize shorelines. In the face of rising sea level and intensifying storm activity, efforts to fortify our coasts are sure to increase. Murray's models of sandy shorelines like those found along the coasts of North and South Carolina suggest that human activities do as much to shape the shoreline as natural drivers like storms and sea-level change.</p><p>"Heavily developed coastlines are a new kind of system in that they're driven by both natural and human [factors]," says Murray. Seawalls, the most drastic means of armoring a shoreline, have been prohibited on North Carolina beaches since the late 1970s, thanks largely to the work of iconic Duke geologist Orrin Pilkey. Beach renourishment—the expensive process of bringing in sand from remote sources like offshore bars or inland pits—is the principal form of shoreline manipulation here.</p><p>Beach renourishment has become such a fundamental part of shoreline management in the Carolinas that Murray and his colleagues treat it as an intrinsic part of the model. "Actual physical changes affect decisions to nourish, and nourishment projects affect the physical coastline," says Murray. "This coupling creates the possibility for nonlinear feedback loops that involve both human and natural dimensions."</p><p>The team's preliminary work suggests direct interactions between widely separated parts of the coast: As repeated renourishment changes the shoreline orientation in one location, adjacent stretches of coastline are affected. Changes in these adjacent shorelines in turn influence the shape of regions further removed from the original project. Murray and his colleagues hope that by broadening the scales over which coastal-management decisions are considered, their work will help policy makers avoid surprises.</p> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2007-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">Wednesday, August 1, 2007</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/jeffrey-pollack" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeffrey Pollack</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Wed, 01 Aug 2007 08:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18499921 at https://alumni.duke.edu Deep Discoveries https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/deep-discoveries <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><p class="articletitle">It is 7:53 a.m., and Peter Etnoyer '88, M.E.M '01 is just moments away from his first dive in the deep-sea submersible Alvin. The sun--long up but only partially piercing the thin morning fog--promises another brilliant day on the Gulf of Alaska. With only a light breeze and little swell, it is a peaceful morning. Sleepy scientists mill around the deck of the R/V Atlantis, talking in small groups over muted clanks as the Alvin team adds steel weight stacks to the base of the sub.</p><p>Near the starboard railing, Etnoyer is doing his Elvis impersonation, popping onto his toes and flashing a bright-eyed, dimpled smile. His dance routine is meant to show off the strength of the shiny white, steel-toed, Wrangler tennis shoes that gleam below his rolled-up, gray jeans. Steel-toed shoes are the only kind of footwear allowed on the fantail (rear work deck) of the Atlantis during Alvin operations. By the afternoon, Etnoyer's shoes would be scribbled over in brightly colored permanent marker, part of his initiation as a first-time diver that also involved buckets of icy water and assorted food products.</p><p>"Here we go, down to zee bot-tem. We are in search of zee beeg bamboo coh-ral," Etnoyer says in his best Pep? Le Pew imitation, brandishing a piece of bamboo coral skeleton that he is carrying for luck.</p><p>The ship's horn sounds--the cue for the divers to enter the Alvin. Etnoyer follows the pilot up the narrow metal staircase on the side of the massive hydraulic A-frame that will hoist the Alvin off the deck of the Atlantis. On the platform at the top of the stairs, Etnoyer removes his dancing shoes (socks only in the Alvin). He turns just before entering the sub, flashes his Hollywood smile at the collection of scientists and crew on the deck below, and intones in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, "We'll be back!"</p><p>Etnoyer is one of four main scientists--principal investigators (P.I.'s)--awarded grants by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Ocean Exploration that enabled them to participate in a twenty-five-day research expedition aboard the research vessel Atlantis last summer. (Created in 2001, the Office of Ocean Exploration is the hub of NOAA's activities to explore and map the farthest reaches of the world's oceans.)</p><p>The Atlantis, the 274-foot floating home of the DSV Alvin (deep submergence vehicle)--best known for its role in the exploration of Titanic--is one of the premier vessels operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Etnoyer and the other scientists aboard the Atlantis are using the Alvin to study five unexplored seamounts--underwater volcanoes that are part of the Kodiak-Bowie Chain. This seamount chain stretches across a 400-mile section of the Northeast Pacific, from the Aleutian Trench off Kodiak Island to an area just west of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Some of the scientists on this mission are studying the origin and age of the seamounts while others, like Etnoyer, are concentrating on the deep-sea corals and other marine life that are found on the seamounts. I am aboard as the expedition's Web coordinator, documenting the mission through daily science logs, photographs, and video posted on the Web.</p><p>The largest seamounts in the Gulf of Alaska rise over 3,000 meters--almost two miles--above the sea floor and act as islands for marine life in an otherwise barren deep-sea desert. Despite freezing temperatures, a total lack of light, and low levels of dissolved oxygen in the water around them, many seamounts support veritable forests of deep-sea corals and sponges. Each of the coral colonies--the individual trees in the coral forests--are in turn home to an entire community of invertebrates, such as shrimp, sea stars, polychaete worms, and crabs. Today, diving to 450 meters on Dickins Seamount, Etnoyer hopes to find an abundance of bamboo corals.</p><p>In the lab later that afternoon, after he has recovered from his icy initiation and changed out of his sopping clothes, and after the scientists' excitement over the day's samples has subsided, Etnoyer and his assistant Aur?lie Shapiro M.E.M. '01 struggle to move a bamboo coral that is more than two-feet wide and dripping clear mucous. In her life as a landlubber, Shapiro works for NOAA in the Special Projects Office of the National Ocean Service, where she specializes in satellite mapping of shallow-water coral reefs and other marine habitats.</p><p>"Okay, grab your toothbrushes and start scrubbing!" Etnoyer is much more excited about the task at hand than Shapiro and Shinobu Okano, a NOAA student intern who is working with Shapiro as Etnoyer's second assistant. These two will have the pleasure of scrubbing the fleshy tissue and mucous (nicknamed ectoplasm after the goo in Ghostbusters, which had been screened in the Atlantis' movie lounge the night before) from the bamboo coral's calcareous skeleton.</p><p>When I join Shapiro and Okano outside on the deck twenty minutes later to document their work, both have abandoned their meager tools and are up to their elbows in brown coral goo. I watch from a safe distance as their efforts reveal the beautiful ivory skeletal structure of the coral. Bony calcareous segments, each a few inches long, are connected by dark, gorgonin disks--similar in composition to deer hooves--to create what appear to be the branches of an eerie skeleton tree. This specimen, Isadella n.sp, is the most ubiquitous genera of bamboo coral at shallow depths in the Gulf of Alaska.</p><p>Deep-sea bamboo corals are from the subclass Octocorallia, a collection of soft corals, sea fans, and other similar colonial animals that are distinguished by the eight feather-like (pinnate), nonretractile tentacles that surround the mouth of each polyp. Each individual coral colony (tree) comprises thousands of individual coral polyps; these polyps form the fleshy, living sheath that covers the bony coral skeleton.</p><p>Elongated polyps up to several inches long form a hula skirt around the base (trunk) of each bamboo coral colony. Underwater video from Alvin shows these "sweeper tentacles" billowing in the currents. Etnoyer says he suspects that these polyps may be packed with harpoon-like stinging cells called nematocysts, similar to those found in jelly fish.</p><p>Once Shapiro and Okano have cleaned the Isadella skeleton, it will be dried, photographed, and scrutinized in the lab. After the cruise, this and other prime specimens from the expedition will be shipped to the Smithsonian Institution, where Etnoyer has been studying deep-sea corals for the last two years.</p><p>At breakfast time, the Atlantis' mess is an intersection of smells: freshly baked muffins and eggs from the kitchen, sweat and grease from the engineers just coming off their shifts, the clean smell of Irish Spring from those who have started their day with the bars of soap that are standard issue in each cabin of the ship.</p><p>From my over-the-pancake vantage on one of our first mornings out of Seattle, Etnoyer and Shapiro strike me as poster children for a new school of applied marine science. Bright, creative, and keeping the rest of us at the table in stitches, this dynamic duo turns the old stereotype of nerdy, introverted scientists on its head. Etnoyer is a master of comical accents and facial expressions and has a charisma that he can turn on like a light. Fueled by fresh fruit, pancakes, and the excitement of a new adventure, he is in rare form this morning.</p><p>"Dohh... I just keep thinking of more things that I forgot. Tick, tick, tick," says Etnoyer, extending a finger for each forgotten item.</p><p>"Like what?" Shapiro asks, with a mouthful of eggs. She's already in the habit of late nights at the computer and last-minute breakfast appearances. This morning, she displays a prominent set of bed lines on her left cheek.</p><p>"Shampoo, for one. I guess it's Irrrish Sprrring for me," Etnoyer trills. His hair looks like he might have washed it with Irish Spring this morning, or not at all. The blond ponytail that I remember from our time together in graduate school is long gone; in its place is a mussy, almost spiky bed head. But it fits--with his black, polyester, Adidas warm-up pants, and his square, brown GQ glasses, it's easy to imagine Etnoyer as comfortable at some trendy caf? near his home in L.A. as he is on this ship. (He lost his glasses two days later over the starboard side of the ship. His comment: "Oh well, now I have eyes at the bottom of the sea.")</p><table width="28%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 300px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/010205/images/lg_peter6.jpg" alt="Coral close-up; Etnoyer examines coral samples in the cold room." width="300" height="399" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"> Coral close-up: Etnoyer examines coral samples in the cold room. <span class="photocredit">Photo:Jeffrey Pollack</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="center"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p>The name "cold room" is misleading--it is absolutely freezing in here! The small metal room looks like a meat locker. It is empty, save for a large, white laboratory table and a few buckets of seawater, and there's a strange salty-sweet smell that I can't quite place. Etnoyer doesn't seem to notice the cold, even though he is wearing far fewer layers than I am. Before him on the table are a dissecting microscope and a half-dozen petri dishes with coral clippings of various shapes and colors. He cycles through the samples, placing one on the lighted platform under the scope just long enough to glance through the eyepieces and mutter something that is inaudible over the noisy refrigerator fan.</p><p>"Jeffrey Polyp," he sings out suddenly in a Yiddish accent, stepping back from the scope. "I can't get these things in focus." He is using a digital camera to photograph the magnified coral polyps and sclerites. Sclerites are spindly, crystal-like calcareous bones that are found inside the coral polyps and in the fleshy tissue (coenenchyme) between polyps. Sclerites of different shapes are given names like rods, clubs, needles, and thorn-stars, and while each species of deep-sea coral has a dozen or more different shapes of sclerites, all of the species within a given genus exhibit similar sclerites. Sclerite morphology--categorizing sclerite shape and size--is one of the key modes of description used to identify different coral species.</p><p>Traditional taxonomic classification of deep-sea corals is based on a combination of branching morphology (the branching pattern of the tree-like coral colony), polyp retractability, and sclerite morphology. Traditional taxonomy is now augmented by genetic analysis, but contemporary genetic advances have yet to eclipse the traditional methods.</p><p>"Back in the day, all of the scientists on a cruise like this would have amazing illustrators," Etnoyer tells me. "Art--sketching--was part of old biology curricula. Some of the best old-timers at the Smithsonian are the guys whose drawings our coral taxonomy is based on. That's why these pictures are so important." He readjusts the mini-halogen under the backlit petri dish.</p><p>"All those guys ever saw was dead, dried-up coral."</p><p>Scientific illustration may be a dying art, but there are new digital photography and videography techniques that, judging from Etnoyer's almost imperceptible adjustments of the microscope-mounted camera, require their own artistry. Many of the photographs that he has taken on this cruise are the first-ever photo documentation of live polyps for certain deep-sea coral species.</p><p>"For every coral sample that we send to the Smithsonian, we want to be able to send video taken from the Alvin's on-board cameras of that species alive, in situ," he says. "The museum exhibits of the future will be multi-media."</p><p>That's where Etnoyer's background--an unusual blend of arts and science--comes in. He majored in English as a Duke undergraduate. At the same time, he was one of the first participants in a certificate program in film and video. This early exposure was the beginning of a decade-long stint in the film industry. After five years doing camera work on feature films in California, he moved back to the Northeast, where he spent another five years directing commercials and music videos in Philadelphia and New York. As his success in the film industry grew, so did the disposable income that allowed him to go scuba diving. And the more Etnoyer went diving, the more his boyhood fascination with marine science was revived.</p><p>Etnoyer says he knew he wanted to integrate two very different disciplines, marine biology and physical oceanography, even before he enrolled in the Coastal Environmental Management program at the Nicholas School. "I started working on my master's project, studying larval dispersal in the Philippines and ocean circulation patterns in the Caribbean, the day I walked through the door."</p><p>During his first year at Duke, he worked with the U.S. Navy on its Layered Ocean Model, three-dimensional computer simulations of oceanic circulation. This was the first in a serendipitous string of experiences that would help him carve out a professional niche developing methods to visualize the ocean and the distribution of marine life within it. Etnoyer recently created a consulting firm, Aquanautix, in part to meet the demand for oceanic visualization products.</p><p>Etnoyer's adviser in the Nicholas School, Larry Crowder, helped steer him into a position with the Marine Conservation Biology Institute (MCBI). At MCBI, Etnoyer went to work on the "Baja to Bering" project, a product of the NAFTA Commission for Environmental Cooperation. Etnoyer and partners compiled vast amounts of marine-science data--including records of the distribution of deep-sea corals--to identify biodiversity hotspots that could be part of a chain of marine protected areas (think oceanic national parks) in the northeast Pacific Ocean.</p><p>In the summer of 2002, fellow Nicholas School alumnus Jeremy Potter M.E.M. '03, who had heard about his work with deep-sea corals, called Etnoyer from the Office of Ocean Exploration to offer him a berth on a research expedition to study seamounts and deep-sea corals. It was this first Gulf of Alaska expedition that allowed Etnoyer to capitalize on his Duke background in spatial analysis and his familiarity with video editing to create fly-throughs--animated, three-dimensional maps that take the viewer on a virtual roller-coaster ride through the terrain of the seamounts being studied.</p><p>After participating in the 2002 Gulf of Alaska expedition, Etnoyer received a series of subsequent grants from the Office of Ocean Exploration, including one to develop protocols for deep-sea coral collection and one that landed him a spot as a P.I. on this 2004 Gulf of Alaska exploration.</p><p>In planning for this mission, Etnoyer wanted someone with the skills to help him make fly-throughs and other visualization products accessible to the household viewers who would be tracking the expedition on the Web--part of his commitment to taking science out of the lab and using it to enrich the everyday lives of nonscientists. He had Shapiro in mind from the beginning.</p><p>Etnoyer leans on the lab table to Shapiro's right and squints at the computer screen in front of her. "That satellite data isn't bad, huh?"</p><p>Shapiro bobs her head to the drumbeat thumping from her computer speakers. "Dude, no one should be dissin' satellite data. When I use Landsat imagery like this to map coral reefs, it's accurate within fifty meters. When we overlay that satellite imagery with nautical charts from the northwest Hawaiian Islands, the satellite imagery gives us better shallow-water detail than the nautical charts."</p><p>Etnoyer seems impressed. I learn later that Landsat 7 is a U.S. satellite used to capture images of Earth's land and coastal regions.</p><p>Aurlie Shapiro exudes style, from the silver stud in her left nostril to her hand-knit, mustard-color winter hat. She is almost always wearing one of her funky home-made necklaces, which sell faster than she can make them in boutiques around Washington, and on her website, aurelgrooves.com (a word play on the feeding apparatus--called the oral groove--of a single-celled organism called a paramecium). Whenever her shipboard tasks necessitate a work vest and hardhat, she always color-coordinates--even when she's working in the middle of the night.</p><p>Shapiro could have opted for a career in music (she's a classically trained cellist who now plays in a hip-hop band), but instead she went to the Nicholas School, where she and Etnoyer were classmates, to study landscape ecology--the study of the distribution patterns of ecosystems and communities and the processes that affect those patterns over time.</p><p>On this cruise, in addition to dominating at the Ping-Pong table (she attributes her prowess to a summer spent at a table-tennis camp near her grandmother's house in southern France), Shapiro's main focus is a high-resolution, sonar-based mapping technology called Multibeam. Sonar systems measure the time it takes for signals emitted from a transducer in the hull of the ship to reflect off features on the sea floor and bounce back to the ship. Traditional sonar devices generate a narrow line of soundings; Multibeam provides a swath of coverage by sending out multiple sonar beams in a fan-shaped pattern that is oriented perpendicular to the ship's track. With this technology, scientists aboard the Atlantis can map an entire seamount in less than a day of surveying.</p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="10" cellpadding="1" align="center"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 580px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/010205/images/lg_ajeffs.jpg" alt="Prep work:Pollack shoots Shapiro with sea star. " width="580" height="268" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"> Prep work: Pollack shoots Shapiro with sea star. <span class="photocredit">Photo: George Schmahl</span></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td class="tenpxtextblk" align="center"> </td></tr></tbody></table><p>After making the post-dive exit from Alvin for the fourth and final time during the cruise, Etnoyer skirts the splash zone around his dive-partner's initiation rites and joins the other scientists who are waiting for the 35,000-pound sub to crawl along the twenty yards of metal tracks back to its hangar. Once the Alvin team has secured the sub, the scientists swarm the collection boxes on the front of the sub to retrieve the samples. Cameras flash, latex hands are everywhere; within minutes, the scientists and their assistants have looted all of the artifacts from the deep and have raced back to their workstations.</p><p>"Caught red-handed!" Etnoyer says, reaching into one of the white Plexiglas bioboxes, all of which are covered with dings and scratches that hint of a history of tight navigation on the seafloor and rough recoveries on the sea surface. He pulls out a puffy, butterscotch-colored, five-armed sea star and flips it over to reveal rows of squirming suction cups--tube feet--that are still clinging to two skinny stalks of bright white bamboo coral. I lean in for a closer look and notice that there are a few shards of pinkish tissue still clinging to the coral skeleton.</p><p>In the lab later that evening, I loom over Shapiro's shoulder as she positions the sea star on its back in a shallow plastic petri dish. The last inch of each of its five arms dangles over the side of the dish and doubles back, allowing its tube feet to attach loosely to the tabletop. I'm reminded of an old-time Western in which a dusty, oversized cowboy squeezes into a metal wash tub, his booted feet hanging over one end.</p><p>Shapiro uses a syringe to squirt fresh water into the sea star's oral disc, the round, toothed mouth in the middle of its underside. She is flushing the contents of its stomach into the dish. Etnoyer hopes that examination of the sample under the dissecting scope will reveal sclerites that match those isolated from what little coral tissue could be recovered from the sea star's suspected snack. "When we were here in 2002," Etnoyer tells me later, "we saw dead bamboo corals, and now we can confirm at least one reason why: predation by sea stars like the one we grabbed today."</p><p>I leave Shapiro to her work and move to an adjacent table to join two other scientists peering over the lip of the clear plastic cylinder at what looks to be an overgrown tadpole. The fish's appearance--a translucent body, dark, almost black, eyes and a big, cartoon mouth--seems to mock its own significance.</p><p>Etnoyer walks over and jostles for position around the fish. "Talk about a needle in a haystack! We got pictures of one of these guys on a bamboo coral on Warwick Seamount when we were here in 2002, but this is the first-ever collection of a Liparid from this region." Not surprisingly, the collection of the Liparid has created a buzz among those scientists trying to compare the animal communities on different seamounts.</p><p>"Finding two of those guys on the same species of coral in the same depth of water on two different seamounts really frames the issues of continuity between seamount communities," Etnoyer explains. Defining the creatures that make up seamount communities is the first step toward defining impacts to those communities from destructive activities, which is a priority for agencies like NOAA's Office of Habitat Conservation.</p><p>Liparids, commonly known as snail fish, are demersal, which means they hang out on or near the sea floor--a life strategy that is confirmed by their flat bellies. Over the ages, snail fish have evolved a modified pectoral fin that functions as a sucker to keep them anchored to whatever substrate they are resting or feeding upon. It works pretty well, too.</p><p>"You shoulda seen it. This thing was hanging on like you wouldn't believe. I didn't think our vacuum was going to be enough!" Etnoyer pantomimes the action of the sub's slurp gun, leaning back with feigned effort as he struggles to hold an imaginary slurp gun with two hands. The slurp gun is one of several collection apparatuses on the Alvin, including two, multi-jointed titanium arms that the pilot manipulates, like a puppeteer, from inside the sub.</p><p>After a few minutes, the scientists return to their tasks around the lab, and I follow Etnoyer back to his bamboo samples.</p><p>Seven hours spent sharing a six-foot by six-foot sphere with two other men has done nothing to dampen Etnoyer's enthusiasm about the day's dive, or about this mission as a whole.</p><p>"Did I tell you about the bioluminescence?</p><p>"We turned off the lights in the sub and shook one of the Isadella samples, and it glowed. Spooky green light running up and down the axis. It was unbelievable." It turns out the deep-sea light show he's describing was the first documentation of bioluminescence in this genus of bamboo coral.</p><p>His excitement grows. "Last expedition, we saw what we thought were isolated colonies of bamboo corals, but, based on the evenly spaced colonies we saw today, we're starting to think that those colonies actually make up big monotypic fields of coral--some bigger than a kilometer and a half!" The light field around the sub is only about thirty feet; if the corals are twenty-five feet apart or more, looking at a field of coral through the sub's four-inch portholes would be a lot like trying to explore a forest in the dark, one tree at a time, using only a flashlight.</p><p>"And take a look at this." He's in overdrive now. "It's a biomaterials dream come true! This calcareous holdfast isn't going anywhere." He rubs his finger across a flat white disc about the size of a silver dollar, where the bony, white aragonite of the bamboo coral seems to have melted down onto a rock.</p><p>"Completely dried out and still hanging tough." Etnoyer beams like a proud father.</p><p>"I'm going to send this to Germany. I know a guy at the Max Bergman Center of Biomaterials at the Technical University of Dresden who is gonna freak out! We're going to learn how to recreate this in the lab."</p><p>Aside from his all-around fascination with marine science, Etnoyer's passion springs from the realization that time is of the essence when it comes to studying deep-sea corals. In several regions of the world, destructive fishing practices level seamount coral habitats before scientists ever have a chance to study them, flattening--sometimes in a matter of months--entire coral communities that may take hundreds of years to recover. Etnoyer knows that no single scientist can do it all, and he takes every opportunity to build collaborations with other researchers. As we talk, he subdivides each bamboo coral specimen into a half-dozen samples that are destined for different labs around the globe.</p><p>The post-cruise party at the Portway Bar in Astoria, Oregon, was a rowdy affair. The P.I.'s were footing the tab, and the karaoke machine--normally reserved for Thursday and Friday nights--was humming. Etnoyer and I were next to each other at the bar, yelling over a Hank Williams Jr. sing-along. I had long since confessed my karaoke-phobia to Etnoyer when the DJ called Aur?lie, Jeff, and Peter to the front for an all-Duke performance. I clutched the bar and shook my head, making it clear that this night would not be the start of a burgeoning karaoke career. Etnoyer just flashed me his million-dollar smile, turned, and grooved his way toward the front of the crowd.</p><p class="byline"><em>Pollack M.E.M. '02 works for a National Estuarine Research Reserve, where he helps bring coastal science information to local decision makers.</em></p></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2005-01-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, January 31, 2005</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/lg_dscn0328.jpg" width="620" height="278" alt="Welcome aboard: Alvin is hoisted onto the R/V Atlantis after a deep sea exploration. Photo: Jeffrey Pollack" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/jeffrey-pollack" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeffrey Pollack</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/jan-feb-2005" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jan - Feb 2005</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">With Atlantis and Alvin, a scientist explores underwater frontiers, encountering marine life never before seen, sampled, or studied. </div></div></section> Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502383 at https://alumni.duke.edu Assessing Damage to Natural Resources https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/assessing-damage-natural-resources <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td valign="top"><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_img_0393.jpg" alt="Soil check: examining porosity of sediment" width="325" height="244" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Soil check: examining porosity of sediment</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="articletitle">The next stage of shoreline survey on the Saudi Gulf coast will be a Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA), the process of assigning a dollar value to the estimated ecological losses. The aim of the NRDA process is two-fold: to restore natural habitats to the condition they were in before the incident occurred, and to compensate the appropriate party for the lost use of their resources and ecological "services"--valuable functions that a natural system or habitat provides for humanity. For example, wetlands provide flood protection; dunes and coral reefs buffer coastal areas from storms.</p><p>Part of my job as a team biologist was to document the size and location of any large areas of dead salt marsh. Salt marshes are among the most productive of coastal habitats, providing nutrients and nurseries for commercially important species of fish and shellfish. The destruction of salt-marsh habitats likely results in a decline in fisheries production, making salt-marsh habitats particularly important to the NRDA process.</p><p>According to legal precedent, a natural-resource trustee, who represents the interests of the affected party, is responsible for assessing damages, obtaining compensation from the responsible party, and developing a plan for restoration. The designation of a natural-resource trustee is rooted in the Public Trust Doctrine--a principle of governance that can be traced to ancient Rome.</p><p>In the U.S., the Oil Pollution Act, passed by Congress in 1990 in response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, is the piece of legislation that most directly addresses the issue of liability in cases of oil damage to natural resources. National governmental agencies, such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the Saudi Presidency of Meteorology and the Environment, usually serve as the environmental trustee in cases of public claims.</p></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/jeffrey-pollack" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeffrey Pollack</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502165 at https://alumni.duke.edu Oil Spill-After the Deluge https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/oil-spill-after-deluge <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td><p class="articletitle"><em>During the last Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's troops released more than 400 million gallons of crude oil--forty times what was spilled by the Exxon Valdez--from Kuwaiti wells into the Arabian Gulf, coating the Saudi coast and creating the largest oil spill in history. Eleven years later, on the eve of another conflict with Iraq, a team of scientists from South Carolina conducted a massive ecological assessment as part of the international response to the Gulf War spill. From October 2002 to February 2003, I walked the oiled shores of Saudi Arabia as a field biologist on that assessment team.</em></p><p class="articletitle"><em><br /></em></p><p class="articletitle">Okay, Grandma, I will. I love you, too." I hang up the payphone in Terminal C of the Houston Airport and round the corner, looking up just in time to avoid a collision with a seven-foot-tall, bronze statue of the first President George Bush. The engraved message at his feet reads, "Winds of Change."</p><p>Thirty hours later, I am standing on a sunny street corner in Bahrain. My jet-lagged neurons cannot comprehend why my attire--cargo shorts and a collared shirt--has prevented me from entering the Saudi embassy. Elie reappears.</p><p>" Elie, I'm so sorry. I just...."</p><p>" Sign this." He hands me a Saudi work visa application. "And don't worry about it. How were you to know? Besides, the embassy changes its policies twice a week. Today they tell me that I must pay in Bahraini dinar instead of Saudi riyal. What kind of embassy does not take its own currency?" His Lebanese accent is strong, but his English is clear and perfect. Elie Malko is the liaison between my employer, Research Planning, Inc. (RPI), and its Saudi partner.</p><p>The King Fahad Causeway, which links several Bahraini islands to the Saudi mainland, reminds me of the low bridge that connects the islands of the Florida Keys. Twenty-five minutes into the drive, we come to a series of tollbooth-like checkpoints that mark the border between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. We show our passports and collect customs forms. Below the usual questions about valuable goods is a "Religion" blank. I write "Christian," even though I'm not. After a cursory inspection of our vehicle, we are back on the highway and across the border.I meet Elie in the hotel lobby at three o'clock. He tells me that when he returned to the Saudi embassy to pick up the completed paperwork, it took the embassy officials an hour and a half to locate my passport. I definitely shouldn't have worn shorts. As I walk toward the car with my duffel over my shoulder, an atonal drone fills the street. It is the mid-afternoon call to prayer reaching me from a nearby mosque.</p><p>Through the Saudi province of Damam, dusty yellow school buses, construction equipment, and piles of metal parts litter the right side of the highway. I see a swastika and a few Arabic words scrawled in black spray paint on a cinderblock wall. A mile down the road from the scrap yard, perfectly conical sand dunes rise inside a double row of barbed wire fence. As we drive beyond them, I realize that they are airplane hangars, camouflaged to blend with the desert sand.</p><p>A Brady Bunch-style station wagon eases up alongside in the right lane. The driver stares. I stare back, a cultural faux pas akin to wearing shorts to a government office. The driver is wearing the traditional thobe, a long white shirt, but no <em>guthra</em>, the characteristic red-and-white checked head cover. An <em>egal</em>, the ring that holds the <em>guthra</em> in place, hangs from his rearview mirror. Expressionless, he speeds away.</p><p>Pipelines, covered in a thin layer of dirt, weave over the undeveloped stretches of landscape like gophers' burrows. The blue sky around me has a thick, gauzy quality, as if the desert dust is permanently unsettled. The edges of the sun are blurred even though there are no clouds. The increasing frequency of power-line clusters and monster metal towers, their transformer coils dangling like thickly muscled arms, hints of our approach to Al Jubail. This industrial city, located midway down the Gulf coast, is the base of RPI operations. We pull into town just before five o'clock. Two quick lefts bring us to the Gulf Mahmal compound.</p><p>The Gulf Mahmal is a three-story, rectangular, stucco structure with barred windows and a single, gated entrance. There is a room with no outer wall to the right of the gate in which a skinny, bearded man in Western clothes sits cross-legged on a woven rug. He is smoking a cigarette and acknowledges us only with his eyes; I will find this "guard" in the same position for the next two months.</p><p>A young Indian man is waiting for us in the parking area with the key to my room. Upstairs in Room 2309, I drop my duffel on the white tile floor. I kneel across the cartoon rabbit--a Bugs-Bunny knockoff--pictured on my bedspread to peer though the bars at the orange desert sprawl. The evening call to worship rises from an unseen loudspeaker on the street below. To my right, King Faisel Street is lined with restaurants, parked cars, and trash. To my left, the chalk road continues to an oil refinery that sits on the horizon, shrouded in a cloud of its own emissions. I can just make out an exhaust flame, mimicking the setting sun.</p><p>Because our shoreline survey focuses on the intertidal zone--the part of the shore that is exposed at low tide and inundated at high tide--our work schedule is dictated by the tidal cycle. I have arrived in Saudi Arabia during the part of the month when the high tide occurs at midday. Since the field teams are able to survey the coast only during low tide, midday high tides are days of rest, and my first day on the job is my first day off.</p><p class="articletitle">The twenty-something generation of Saudis loves country music. It's 5:42 a.m. on my second day in Saudi, and Saad Al Rasheed, the Saudi member of my four-man field team, is drumming the steering wheel in time to a Randy Travis song. Without warning, he swings our SUV to the right, fishtailing onto a dirt road and plastering me against the left side of the backseat. With four other four-wheel-drive vehicles in tow, we race across the <em>sabka</em> toward the morning sun. <em>Sabkas</em> are giant sand flats that stretch between the inland desert and the coastal zone. Walking on the crusty, uneven top layer of the sabka is like walking on stale sugar cookies.</p><p>The geologists, three of the four members of each field team, begin at a site by probing for signs of oil contamination farthest from the shore. They lay a transect line--in our case, a twenty-meter rope with knots every couple of meters--perpendicular to the shoreline. The team works seaward along the line, digging holes up to a meter deep at varying intervals. The oil geomorphologist, affectionately called the OG, characterizes the sediment layers in each hole and looks for oiled crab burrows and other hints of oil infiltration. The Global Positioning System technician (G-tech) pinpoints the exact location of the hole. He enters codes that describe what the OG finds in the hole--light, medium, or heavy oil residue and, sometimes, even pockets of liquid oil--into a handheld computer. The data from each hole sampled are automatically linked to a point on a digital map. All told, the teams will run transect lines every 250 meters along the entire gulf coast, a distance of about 800 kilometers.</p><p>The sediment technician, one of the geologists, usually a Saudi, collects sediment for chemical analysis. The 30,000-plus sediment samples collected during the project will be analyzed for concentrations of petroleum hydrocarbons--the molecules that constitute oil. Because oils from different sources exhibit unique hydrocarbon "fingerprints," it is possible to identify the source of oil contamination. The results of this chemical analysis will be used as evidence in an international court.</p><p>After the Gulf War, the United Nations Security Council froze Saddam Hussein's international assets and used the money to create the United Nations Compensation Commission. The UNCC, charged with processing claims associated with Iraq's occupation of Kuwait, allocated a fraction of the seized funds to the Saudi government's environmental agency to pay for a survey of the oil-soaked Gulf coast. Saddam is fighting a legal battle to get his money back. The Saudi government, eager to collect damages, is racing to document just how much of its coast has been contaminated by the oil released from Kuwaiti wells.</p><p>The fourth member of each team is a biologist, like me. I zoom around the habitat between transect lines, doing a timed count of all species of flora and fauna and looking for evidence of oil damage. I am armed with a mini-shovel, walkie-talkie, binoculars, gloves, compass, pocket PC, sunscreen, plenty of food and water, and bags for holding samples of invertebrates. I carry a clipboard with data sheets and wear a digital camera on my belt like a holstered gun. I scrape algae, dig in the dirt, look under rocks, and chase crabs down their burrows. I identify plants and snails and worms. I am an ecological detective. I am a twelve-year-old at the beach.</p><p>I learn quickly that the life of a field biologist in a former war zone is not without its hazards. Chewing my peanut butter on pita, reflecting on my first five hours in the field, I notice a frosted piece of glass sticking out of the sand. I am about to dig it up when Scott Zengel, our head biologist, says, "You know, it's probably good policy not to mess with anything that you can't positively identify."</p><p>I raise an eyebrow.</p><p>" Yeah, there are rumors that the British land-mined certain parts of the coast when they thought the Iraqis were going to invade. Plus, you get ship mines and depth charges washing ashore. You know, that sort of thing."</p><p>Access to most of the Saudi coastline is through military or coast-guard installations. As in the U.S., these bases contain some of the wildest areas in the country. The expanses of land that buffer firing ranges and tactical training grounds become <em>de facto</em> ecological preserves. As our caravan speeds across the sabka one morning on the way to a field site, Norm Dodson, Team 3's G-tech, points out cement artillery platforms on the dune ridge ahead and the reinforced walls of the rifle range to our left. Norm is ex-Army Special Forces; a drive through a firing range with him is like a guided tour through a museum. While most of our survey team wears old running shoes or hiking boots into the field, Norm wears combat boots.</p><p>At 3:15 in the afternoon, a military jeep stops at our sampling station. Two haggard-looking men dressed in fatigues converse with our Saudi team member, Muhammad Nasser Al-Qhatani, and then drive away. "Time to go," he says. "Time for Navy shooting practice."</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_20.jpg" alt="Zengel and Fathi Al-Abazaid count inveterbrate species in tidal flat sample" width="325" height="218" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Water works: Zengel and Fathi Al-Abazaid, count inveterbrate species in tidal flat sample.</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_21.jpg" alt="biologist Stowe Beam investigates salt-marsh plants" width="325" height="217" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Biologist Stowe Beam investigates salt-marsh plants.</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_saltmarshalgalmat.jpg" alt="the folds of an algal mat from a dead salt marsh" width="325" height="244" /><p class="caption-text"><p>The folds of an algal mat, below, from a dead salt marsh.</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>I am stumped. I am standing in a field of mini-moguls, a sprawl of hummocks and rivulets that is the telltale sign of a Saudi salt marsh. In a healthy salt marsh, the earth around the halophytes (salt-loving plants) is riddled with <em>Nasima dotilliformis</em> burrows. When this species of crab burrows into the salt-marsh sediment, it creates a donut of dirt around the opening of its burrow; the compounded mud-moving effect of thousands of burrowing crabs shapes the salt marsh.</p><p>When the high tides carried oil into marshes like this one during the Gulf War spill, <em>Nasima</em> burrows served as chutes for the oil, allowing it to infiltrate to depths of sixty centimeters or more. Oil seeped into the sediment around the burrows, filling the space between grains of sand or mud and making the ground too toxic to support life.</p><p>Looking at the area around my feet, I expect to see oiled burrows and the remnants of oiled plant stems, but I see neither. A slick, grayish-green algal mat covers the mounded ground and stretches for hundreds of meters in all directions. Algal mats are common in the dead marsh areas along the Saudi coast, but this one is remarkable in its pervasiveness and impenetrability.</p><p>On a whim, I use my trowel to slice a two-meter by two-meter square in the algal mat. I peel it back to reveal the terrain beneath, and find <em>Nasima</em> burrows and oiled <em>halophyte</em> stems, frozen in time. Because little air or water has penetrated the dense algal mat, there has been very little weathering of the oil. I am essentially looking at a snapshot of what the marsh looked like just before the algae took over. Faisel Bukhari, the last biologist to join our ranks, arrives in late October. An ichthyologist from the Saudi Office of Fisheries, he is more familiar with the fish in the Arabian Gulf than the plants and invertebrates that inhabit its shores, so he is spending a few days with each of the other project biologists to get acclimated. I am his first host.</p><p>" This is <em>Nodilittorina arabica</em>," I say, bending down to pick up a fingernail-size snail. "It's usually a rocky-shore species, but we've been finding it like this, on hard algal mats with no rock in sight." I return the snails to the algal mat and we resume our walk.</p><p>" I wish that breeze would come back," I mumble, swatting a fly on the brim of my hat.</p><p>" Would you like some water? I brought two bottles." Faisel begins to unzip his pack. "I'm okay, thanks anyway."</p><p>" No, no, please. Water is life in the desert. It is a sacred gift and is to be shared."</p><p>Fathi Al-Abazaid is another of my Saudi team members. He is twenty-four. He sings while he works. He teaches me Arabic and I teach him English. <em>Samakha lawsia</em>. Sting ray. Every day, Fathi collects a bag of shells for his soon-to-be bride.</p><p>I feel a camaraderie with Fathi that I don't share with any of the other Saudis. One afternoon in the field, when Fathi is particularly rambunctious, he tells me that he and his fiancÈe are shopping for wedding rings during our upcoming, two-day break.</p><p>" No kidding! Is she going to pick you up at the compound tonight? Will I get to meet her?" I ask.</p><p>" You crazy man! You in Saudi now, women cannot drive!"</p><p class="articletitle">At 4:55, Muhammad picks up the CB radio and calls Saad, who is driving the truck behind us. Without using a turn signal, as is the Saudi way, Muhammad skips across the highway divider and into the parking lot of a truck stop, the only commercial structure within miles. This truck stop, like most Saudi filling stations, has a miniature mosque on the premises. A loudspeaker atop the minaret crackles to life with the evening prayer call as we glide into a parking space. The sound of chanted Arabic resonating off the eighteen-wheelers in the lot provides a surreal soundtrack for the fiery pink and orange sunset.</p><p>Because of our circumstances--more than an hour from home and our waiting dinner--our Saudi team members have decided to break their Ramadan fast on this, the second day of the month-long holiday, at this roadside establishment. The rest of us wait in the trucks as Muhammad, Saad, and Faisel melt into the crowd of white thobes that has formed in front of the restaurant counter.</p><p>Just as I am beginning to wonder how long the traditional break-fast lasts, our colleagues push out of the glass doors with bags of food in each hand. They summon us out of the trucks and unwrap packages of <em>sambusas</em> (pastry triangles filled with meat, vegetables, or cheese), plain yogurt, and dates. Fresh dates, <em>rutub</em>, are the traditional break-fast food. The seven of us huddle around a rusty oil drum, our makeshift table, and break the fast together as the last tinges of pink disappear on the horizon.</p><p class="articletitle">I am sitting at the only table in the only Baskin-Robbins in Jubail, finishing a double scoop in celebration of Patrick Hannah's birthday when two children, a boy and a girl, appear at our table, begging for money. With blank faces they ramble in Arabic, each thrusting a single finger toward the sky. All four of us at the table shake our heads and softly mumble "sorry," but the kids don't leave. The boy, maybe nine years old, keeps saying, "One, one. Okay, two, two." Now he is leaning on Patrick's chair. A few moments of awkward silence envelop the circular table as we search for unoccupied space with our eyes.</p><p>" No!" I say, when it is clear that the man behind the counter has no intention of intervening. The kids step toward the door. The boy pauses long enough to scream an English obscenity and grab his crotch before ducking out after his sister.</p><p>Two weeks later, I'm stopped at a red light on Jedda Street when a child appears next to my window. I recognize him as the same boy who begged in the Baskin-Robbins, only a few blocks away. I don't roll the window down, simply stare at his stone eyes as his fingers play across the glass. I watch as he uses one hand to simulate an object flying into his other hand, held vertically but toppling at the impact. In spinning disbelief I whisper to my companions, "Guys, guys! Watch!" They turn toward my window just in time to see another mimed recreation of the World Trade Center attack. The light turns. I pull away.</p><p>Three of the sheep's legs are bound together, but it does not struggle. It arches its neck so that its eyes are looking in my direction, but I just stare. We connect with a calm resignation, both of us aware that it is going to die. The sheep does not struggle when the two Bedouins pick it up by the legs and carry it to the slaughtering block, nor does it react when its throat is cut.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="right"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_jap15.jpg" alt="sharing a feast of roasted sheep and rice" width="325" height="244" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Saudi scenes: sharing a feast of roasted sheep and rice.</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_22.jpg" alt="remains of a boat on the Jubail waterfront" width="325" height="217" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Remains of a boat on the Jubail waterfront.</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_mara_23.jpg" alt="an unusual sandstone outcropping discovered during a downtime day trip" width="325" height="218" /><p class="caption-text"><p>An unusual sandstone outcropping discovered during a downtime day trip</p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>We sit on Persian rugs on the sand floor of the tent tea room, the Bedouin way. I watch as Fahlah Al-Hajri, our host, roasts green coffee beans over the wood fire in a small skillet. He grinds the beans with a mortar and pestle and then pours the grounds into an elaborate metal kettle, which he places on coals at the edge of the fire.</p><p>During the meal of sheep and rice, eaten with our fingers from communal trays, Fahlah's son points to my curls and laughs out a few Arabic words. When I ask Elie for a translation, he smiles and says, "Ibrahim says you have more hair than a camel. He thinks you have spaghetti on your head." I make an exaggerated face at the child, and he ducks from the tent, still laughing.</p><p class="articletitle">As I click the "Send" icon at the top of my inbox, I can hear my colleagues in the adjoining room making bets about when the first American bomb will fall in Iraq. It is the night before our move to a trailer park compound in Tanajib, a northern Saudi province. The new compound, run by the global petroleum powerhouse Saudi Aramco, will afford easy access to the coastline just below the Kuwaiti border. Communication is just one of several uncertainties associated with the new compound--we will be living within sight of the Aramco refinery, arguably the most obvious target in the country--and so I am getting one final e-mail message off to my family.</p><p>On our first morning in Tanajib, it takes twenty-five minutes for Muhammad and Jon Whitlock, an OG, to persuade the guards at the Aramco main gate to admit our two vehicles, and even then only under escort. As we pass through the gate, Jon nods to a huge wooden sign with the words "No Photos" in English and Arabic. "They made us promise to obey that sign," he says.</p><p>At the start of our final transect, I sneak a picture of the gi-gantic cylindrical containers and the tangle of metal pipes that are inside the barbed-wire fence. Seconds after I've returned the camera to the case on my belt, a security jeep drives over the dune and pulls up beside our truck. Jon frowns at me and walks over to talk to the guard. He returns to the transect line a few moments later.</p><p>" Jeff, seriously, <em>no pictures</em>!"</p><p>At the science meeting that evening, Muhammad asks to present our team's findings, even though it is Jon who is scheduled to report on the day's work. When his turn comes, Muhammad stands and says, "I am very happy this day because it is the first time that I have found a clean transect."</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 112px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_dsc00066.jpg" alt="Jeffrey Pollack" width="112" height="244" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"><p>Jeffrey Pollack. <span style="text-align: -webkit-right;">Stowe Beam.</span></p></p></div></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Muhammad has been with the project since its inception in mid-September. This, his first entirely clean transect in four months of work, is located on the grounds of a massive oil refinery.</p><p>" Oh, yeah, one more thing," Miles Hayes, the project leader, says, wrapping up the meeting. "I need all of the Americans to stick around for a few minutes. Payroll issues. The rest of you can take off." Miles sits back down, closes his eyes, and rubs his temples with his thumbs. He looks tired, deflated by logistical battles and nagging financial worries. When the room has settled, he leans forward in his chair and addresses those of us remaining at the white Plexiglas table.</p><p>" This isn't about payroll. We got an e-mail from the American Consulate. They've issued a new travel warning for Saudi Arabia, advising all American citizens to rigorously evaluate the security of their situations. I leave the decision to you."</p><p>After a sleepless, emotional forty-eight hours, ten of us--more than half of the American staff--decide that it is time to leave Saudi Arabia, even though nothing around us seems to have changed.</p><p>Sitting on a plane fourteen hours later, I realize that Scott may have captured it best when he said that things felt fine, even at the end, and they probably would have continued to feel fine, right up until the second that something really wasn't fine.</p><p align="right"><em>Pollack M.E.M. '02, is a writer and a coastal ecologist for Research Planning, Inc., an environmental consulting company based in Columbia, South Carolina.</em></p><div><em><br /></em></div></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/lg_mara_19.jpg" width="620" height="331" alt="Clam digger: biologist Scott Zengel gathers possibly polluted samples for testing." /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/jeffrey-pollack" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeffrey Pollack</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-issue field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Issue:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/issue/mar-apr-2003" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Mar - Apr 2003</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue<section class="field field-name-field-sub-header field-type-text-long field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Sub-header:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Documenting Life in the Wake of Desert Storm</div></div></section> Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502161 at https://alumni.duke.edu Tidal Cycles in the Arabian Gulf https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/tidal-cycles-arabian-gulf <div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-rss"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <table width="98%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"><tbody><tr><td height="71"> </td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><p class="articletitle">All aspects of my life in Saudi Arabia--my work schedule, daily departure time, selection of field sites, even my choice of leisure activities, like snorkeling--were influenced by the tides.</p><table width="22%" border="0" cellspacing="6" cellpadding="1" align="left"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><p><div class="caption caption-center"><div class="caption-width-container" style="width: 325px;"><div class="caption-inner"><img src="/issues/030403/images/lg_img_0955.jpg" alt="Low tide: team drags a boat across sand flat" width="325" height="244" border="1" /><p class="caption-text"></p><p>Low tide: team drags a boat across sand flat.</p></div></div></div></p></td></tr></tbody></table><p>The tidal cycle on the Saudi Gulf coast is one of the most erratic on the planet. Tides, the rise and fall of the surface level of the sea, are created by two tractive forces: the interacting gravitational pulls from the moon and sun, and the centrifugal force of the revolving Earth. The independent gravitational pulls of the moon and sun act upon all water on the Earth's surface, causing it to move along the surface of the Earth in the directions of the moon and sun, respectively. This bulging action results in high tides in the directions of attraction and low tides in the troughs between the bulges where water has been displaced.</p><p>In this simplified model--simplified because it doesn't take into account things like irregularities in the ocean floor--the tidal bulges stay aligned with the moon and sun, and the rotation of the Earth on its axis creates alternating high and low tides at any fixed point on the Earth's surface. Put another way, the Earth moves beneath the tidal bulges, causing the bulges to appear to move across the surface of the ocean.</p><p>In the Arabian Gulf, there are two places, called amphidromic points (amphi = around + dromas = running), at which tidal fluctuation is zero. The tides in the Gulf rotate around these points like water sloshing around a wash basin. The Saudi Gulf coast experiences both diurnal tides (one high and one low per day) and semidiurnal tides (two high and two low per day), depending on the time of year.</p></td></tr></tbody></table> </div></div></div> <h3 class="field-label"> Published </h3> <span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2003-03-31T00:00:00-05:00">Monday, March 31, 2003</span><section class="field field-name-field-main-image field-type-image field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Main image:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-none" src="https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/default_images/dukmag-horizontal-placeholder.jpg" width="238" height="140" alt="" /></figure></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-rss"><h2 class="field-label">Writer:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/magazine/author/jeffrey-pollack" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeffrey Pollack</a></li></ul></section> <h3 class="field-label"> Featured article </h3> No <h3 class="field-label"> Background color </h3> blue Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:00:00 +0000 Joseph Sorensen, JOSEPH E. 18502158 at https://alumni.duke.edu