The ocean shimmers to the curved rim of the Earth. Pressing her face against the jetliner window, Dawn Wright scans the azure expanse for a glimpse of her destination, a tiny volcanic archipelago that is barely a blip in the vast South Pacific. At 5,000 miles from Wright’s office at Oregon State University, American Samoa is closer to New Zealand than to Hawaii.
The next time you sip a glass of spring water, consider this: Before it got to your lips, that water was soaking through soil, creeping along basalt crevices or flowing through porous volcanic rock.
Air flowing through mountain valleys carries clues about forest health. New monitoring and analytical methods may also improve understanding of the global carbon cycle.
In his 32 years as a crab fisherman off the central Oregon coast, Al Pazar has pulled up a lot of strange things in his pots: wolf eels, skates, huge starfish, fossilized rocks, octopi, fish that rarely stray south of Alaska, and others that prefer the warm subtropical waters off Mexico. But until July 2002, he had never yanked up a pot full of dead Dungeness crabs.
Ocean conditions play a key role in the health of Northwest salmon runs, and scientists at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center are trying to pinpoint why. Clearly there are more salmon during cold-water regimes, when strong and persistent upwelling fertilizes the marine food web.
OSU graduate student Carrie Newell has discovered that the difference may stem from the relative abundance of tiny shrimp-like zooplankton called mysids, a gray whale delicacy.