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Christoph Geiss investigates the fate of arctic carbon

Pooja Shakja '12 (left) and Christoph Geiss boring holes in the northern Manitoba peatland.

The title of the Common Hour lecture was “Predicting the Fate of Arctic Carbon.” But after twice traveling to northern Manitoba, Canada, to study the Arctic tundra and the possible effects that climatic change could have, Christoph Geiss, associate professor of physics and environmental science, found that there are no easy answers.

Thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation, Geiss was able to visit the Manitoba tundra in 2008 and 2009, along with fellow scientists from Bowdoin College in Maine, St. Olaf College in Minnesota and the Science Museum of Minnesota. “Our main conclusion,” said Geiss, “is that peatland evolution is much more complicated” than scientists first envisioned.

Using spectacular photographs from the Manitoba landscape, Geiss explained to his Common Hour audience Thursday that his team is still analyzing its collected data. But one result of global warming that is apt to happen is that the forest will grow in a northerly direction and the tundra will change, perhaps reducing or even eliminating the peatlands.

Manitoba has approximately 17 percent of Canada’s peatlands, covering 19.2 hectares or almost one-third of the province. They’re concentrated in the Hudson Bay lowlands, areas to the north and east of Lake Winnipeg, the Saskatchewan River Delta, and the southeast corner of the province.

One of the reasons Geiss chose northern Manitoba is because the tundra is similar to the Arctic and the ground is permanently frozen, making it a suitable locale to conduct his research.

The peatlands, which are wetlands with a thick waterlogged organic soil layer (peat) made up of dead and decaying plant material, contain a significant amount of carbon mainly from the plants that have accumulated over thousands of years. Peatlands include moors, bogs, mires, peat swamp forests and permafrost tundra.

Geiss and his colleagues used aerial photography and borehole- and ground-penetrating radar data to estimate the extent and size of peat deposits in northern Manitoba, and a combination of paleo-climatic records to determine when the deposits formed and how they might change in the future.

It’s estimated that 18 to 19 gigatons of carbon is stored in Manitoba’s peatlands, an amount equivalent to almost a century of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions. Canada’s wetlands, including peatlands, have been identified as the import important carbon sink in the world.

One of the reasons that the future of peatlands is critical is that they have a long history of supporting human activities, such as for the gathering of medicinal plants, hunting, trapping for food and clothing, as well as gathering plants for ceremonial and spiritual purposes. Peatlands also contribute clean water and a habitat for many animals, birds and insects.

In studying the area, Geiss said the group tried to determine how the climate has changed since the retreat of the glaciers 8,000 years ago and how the landscape responded to the change. That is especially important, Geiss said, given that most scientists believe that it is going to get “much, much warmer over the next 50 years.” The team also studied the sediment in the lakes, which were carved out by the glaciers, to “figure out how the climate had changed.”

Some of the effects of global warming in the future could be the melting of ice, the drying of the peatlands, the export of dissolved carbon into the ocean and the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. All of those effects would obviously greatly affect the region’s ecosystem and contribute even more to climate change.

On the other hand, as the climate gets warmer, the peatlands could grow and counteract the harmful effects. A third option would be if the climate stabilizes, the landscape could stabilize, Geiss explained. That’s why more study and analysis is needed, he explained.

category: Lectures and Panels, Research + Scholarship
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Craig Schneider kicks off spring FRC Lecture Series

The Faculty Research Committee spring lecture series began Thursday, January 31, with a presentation by Charles A. Dana Professor of Biology Craig Schneider, who discussed the evolution of DNA sequencing and species recognition of marine macroalgae. Schneider’s game-changing work in this field has resulted in breakthroughs in the approach of molecular research on the taxonomy of algae, which came to the international forefront in November 2012 when major media outlets–including The Boston Globe, Reuters, and Maine Public Broadcasting Network–ran stories on a Asian red seaweed species that had invaded the New England coast. The seaweed was first discovered by Schneider in Atlantic North America back in 2009.

Listen to the full lecture.

In the 1990s, Schneider and some other taxonomists discovered that, while certain algal species resemble one another in overall appearance, they are not necessarily DNA relatives, and vice versa. These “cryptic species” were a crucial discovery that opened doors to new research, while simultaneously revealing that many research mistakes had been made over the years in the study of algal placement on the tree of life.  “Mine included,” said Schneider, adding that “eyes alone” can’t always help distinguish organisms; rather we need to look at their genes.

DNA sequencing was especially useful for the identification of Heterosiphonia japonica, the red seaweed that Schneider found on a Rhode Island beach coast in 2009.  Schneider was able to identify the species, originally described in Japan, through molecular research of the algae.  The invasive species, which reproduces a-sexually, grows quickly and aggressively and can survive in warm or cold waters. Only a few creatures, such as sea urchins, eat enough of it to limit its spread, and there simply aren’t enough sea urchins in the northeastern United States to keep up with this rapidly growing alga.

Schneider’s research has been largely enhanced by international resource databases, primarily GenBank.  This resource allows Schneider to analyze and compare DNA from various species of algae all over the world, and has, in turn, made his research data available to scientists worldwide.

Schneider’s findings have resulted in a major grant from the National Science Foundation, which the professor is coordinating with a former student, Christopher E. Lane ‘99, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rhode Island, who also received an NSF Grant to study algae in Bermuda.  The two have co-authored multiple papers and continue to focus their research on algae from Bermuda, research essential to the long-term environmental health of the islands.

 

category: In the News, Research + Scholarship
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Joan Hedrick to appear in PBS documentary

In 1982, a Trinity student wrote a senior research paper chock-full of quotes by Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist who fought to end slavery through her most famous novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The professor who read that paper was Joan Hedrick, Charles A. Dana Professor of History, and the paper would turn out to have more of a significant impact on her life than she realized at the time.

“I read the quotes and I thought, Who is this person? I need to read more,” Hedrick said about Stowe.

Hedrick did just that, and she was so struck by Stowe’s writing and bravery that she went on to dedicate the next several years of her life to researching one of the most influential figures in American history. Hedrick’s curiosity and research culminated in a biography of Stowe, appropriately titled Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. Hedrick was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the book in 1995, roughly 13 years after she first read Stowe’s work.

Hedrick said that one must be very fond of someone to spend as much time as she has with Stowe, and the latest outcome of her interest is an appearance on a new PBS “American Experience” film, “The Abolitionists.” The three-part docudrama—part documentary and part historical re-enactment that began airing on January 8—includes the story of the influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the resulting spotlight placed on the author, a Hartford native. Three Connecticut professors, including Hedrick, Yale Professor David W. Blight, and Wesleyan Professor Lois Brown, are among approximately a dozen historians and writers from around the country interviewed for the series.

In addition to the documentary, Hedrick participated in a panel discussion on January 7 that was sponsored by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, where Hedrick, now the world’s foremost authority on Stowe, has been a trustee for nearly 20 years. The panel discussion followed an advance screening of episode two of “The Abolitionists,” which airs on Tuesday, January 15 at 9:00 p.m. EST, and is the episode in which Hedrick is interviewed.

“I was very excited that they would be featuring Stowe in a PBS documentary,” Hedrick said when she was first approached by PBS, adding that Stowe deserves the recognition for “her writing and her passion for social justice.”

Hedrick  recently appeared in an article about “The Abolitionists” in The Hartford Courant, which you can read here. 

Read Hedrick’s blog post on The Huffington Post.

Learn more about PBS documentary here.

category: In the News, Research + Scholarship
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Sean Cocco examines historical accounts of Mt. Vesuvius

The 1631 eruption of Mt. Vesuvius—the famed volcano situated outside the city of Naples, Italy—altered more than just the natural landscape of the Italian coast; it left a cultural mark by becoming the first natural event in modern history to be scientifically documented by human observers, according to Associate Professor of History Sean Cocco.

In his new book, Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, December 2012), Cocco tells the story of Mt. Vesuvius through historical records of the volcano left by Renaissance-era scholars during what is considered to be the first period of modern scientific discovery.

Mt. Vesuvius had been dormant since the 12th century until 1631. Because of this long period of inactivity, said Cocco, the eruption was recognized first by scholars of history who were knowledgeable of ancient texts. “There was the famous eruption that destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and this would have been on the minds of Renaissance humanists,” he explained.

Cocco became interested in Vesuvius more than 12 years ago when he discovered a letter by a man in Naples written to his brother in Rome, days after the December 16, 1631 eruption of Vesuvius. “The man had woken, like thousands of others, to a volcano erupting less than six miles away, and he registered that what he was looking at was exactly what the ancient Romans had seen,” Cocco said. “He had a very historical understanding of nature, and he used this knowledge of the past to understand modern events.”

Although modern volcanologists largely dismiss the scientific merit of these documents, Cocco argues the opposite, citing the complexity and thoroughness of the historical accounts highlighted in Watching Vesuvius. “The eruption was not met with superstition—people from Europe had been exploring Central America during this time and had encountered volcanoes there. Natural philosophers—the scientists of the day—also theorized that earthquakes and eruptions operated something like weather in the system of nature. These accounts show that educated people during the 17th century had a complex understanding of natural causation. They had a sophisticated sensibility of landscapes and nature and the ways that human beings relate to them. In many ways, the observations that these people made were admirably precise.”

Cocco was interviewed about Watching Vesuvius for the spring 2012 issue of the Trinity Reporter. Read the full interview here.

category: Publications, Research + Scholarship
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Mark Setterfield delivers Maloney economics lecture

Mark Setterfield, Maloney Family Distinguished Professor of Economics at Trinity, delivered his inaugural lecture, “Growth and Crisis: A Multi-Agent System Approach,” on December 3 at McCook Auditorium. The presentation centered around an ongoing research project on which Setterfield collaborated with Bill Gibson, John Converse Professor of Economics at the University of Vermont.

Setterfield began his lecture with an overview of previous literature on growth and crisis–subjects that he described as well-established themes in economic theory with obvious contemporary relevance. Traditionally, models for studying economic systems are articulated in diagrams and equations. Since the early 1990s, however, the multi-agent systems (MAS), or agent-based modeling approach, has provided an alternative framework for studying economies.

The use of computer programs for modeling opens up limitless opportunities for study in this field. However, the more complicated the model, Setterfield noted, the more difficult it can be to interpret the output.

As a demonstration, Setterfield’s presented a MAS model of real and financial sector interaction. The model illustrated that heterogeneous firms depend on the financial sector for the intermediation and money creation necessary to facilitate investment spending. In turn, investment spending drives growth and profitability in the real sector, which affects the sentiment of heterogeneous “traders” in the financial sector and hence their willingness to finance investment and buy financial assets.

Setterfield ran the computer model, projecting constantly flashing lights of economic activity on a large screen, to show the model tracking the creation of demand, productive capacity, and financial wealth in the economy.

The MAS model and related research developed by Setterfield and Gibson–with the assistance of Trinity students–will allow researchers to study the effects of different financial network structures and monetary regimes on the performance and resilience of the economy, including the capacity for growth and the propensity to encounter crisis.

The important research question involved is how real and financial forces combine to affect performance and resilience. The ultimate conclusion, said Setterfield, is that troubled economies “can emerge, but not necessarily from the size and connectedness of financial firms. Firm conduct, not financial market structure, undermines economic performance and this should be the focus for policy makers.”

A key takeaway, Setterfield noted, was that stand-alone models of the real or financial sectors can be misleading. It is important to integrate both sectors to successfully study growth and crises.

Setterfield, who joined the Trinity faculty in 1992, is chair of the College’s Department of Economics. In addition, he is an associate member of the Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy at Cambridge University (UK), a senior research associate at the International Economic Policy Institute, Laurentian University (Canada), and a member of the Centre d’Économie de l’Université Paris Nord (CEPN) at l’Université Paris XIII (France).

His main research interests are macrodynamics (with a particular focus on the development and application of concepts of path dependence) and Post-Keynesian economics. He is co-editor of the newly released After the Great Recession: The Struggle for Economic Recovery and Growth (Cambridge University Press, 2013), author of Rapid Growth and Relative Decline: Modelling Macroeconomic Dynamics with Hysteresis (Macmillan, 1997), editor or co-editor of six other volumes of essays, and has published in numerous journals including the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, European Economic Review, and The Manchester School.

Read the full story here. 

category: Lectures and Panels, Research + Scholarship
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Sonia Cardenas delivers Common Hour lecture on national human rights institutions

In a Common Hour event on Thursday, November 29, Sonia Cardenas, Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Human Rights Program, spoke about the global rise of national human rights institutions, the subject of her upcoming book, Chains of Justice: The Global Rise of National Human Rights Institutions.

Cardenas, who has traveled widely in researching this book and two previously published books, noted that today there are 115 National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs), which are administrative bodies responsible for promoting and protecting human rights domestically. Only 15 countries, including the United States, have not expressed any interest in creating an NHRI.

The highest concentration is in Europe, but they can also be found in the Americas, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. Cardenas said there was “explosive growth” in the creation of NHRIs in the 1990s, concurrent with the end of the Cold War, the drive toward democracy and an increased interest in the need to foster human rights.

Some of the NHRIs have “exceeded expectations,” such as the one in Uganda, while others have disappointed, for example those in Fiji and Honduras. Cardenas said, in many cases, it’s hard to assess whether the NHRIs have made a difference. “Ultimately, protecting and promoting human rights must be aimed at improving peoples’ lives.”

Cardenas’s lecture was presented just days before the start of Human Rights Week at Trinity College, December 3 – 7, 2012, which this year will focus on disability rights.

category: Lectures and Panels, Research + Scholarship
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Trinity/UConn collaborative mapping project featured in Atlantic Cities

The Atlantic Cities recently profiled Associate Professor of Educational Studies Jack Dougherty and his colleagues at the University of Connecticut, who have created a series of unique interactive historical maps of the state of Connecticut. The maps were stitched together from thousands of photographs taken in 1934 of the state, which was the first in the country to complete a comprehensive aerial survey of its territory.

As the article points out, these interactive maps allow users to study not only the economic development of the state, but also changes in resident demographics as well as schooling and housing boundaries from the depression era to present day.

The project is the result of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities that supports collaborative work between individual scholars and digital humanities centers. The fellowship was awarded in 2010 to Trinity College and the Map and Geographic Information Center (MAGIC) at the UConn campus for the purpose of collaboratively creating historical research and developing web-based interactive maps.

The maps are an integral part of another of Dougherty’s projects: a continuously updated, Web-based book titled On the Line: How Schooling, Housing and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and its Suburbs. The project builds on historical and contemporary research that Dougherty has completed with students, faculty, and community partners through the Cities, Suburbs, and Schools Project at Trinity.

An example of this on-going research is a study that was conducted in 2011 by Dougherty, Candace Simpson ’12, and Katie Campbell ’11 who, in partnership with MAGIC, created interactive maps of changes in racial demographics and housing prices in the Hartford region between 1900 and 2010. Students in the seminar conducted qualitative surveys of city and suburban Hartford residents, first showing participants the maps and then asking questions like: “Some people look at these maps and see a story of racial or economic barriers that still persist, while others see a story of civil rights progress that our society has made over time. What do you see?” After collecting and analyzing the responses, results indicated that Hartford city residents perceived more barriers to progress while suburban residents perceived greater civil rights progress. The full study can be viewed at http://ontheline.trincoll.edu/preview-chapter/part-5/.

In addition to garnering media attention, Dougherty says that the publically available maps are being noticed and utilized in other, more unexpected ways. Individuals have contacted him about using the maps to track their family history, and the maps have even been adopted as by area high school teachers. “As the maps were being created we put drafts up on the Web, and a couple of teachers heard about what we were doing,” Dougherty says. “One ended up making an activity for his Hartford 9th grade social studies class about neighborhood changes in the city, and my student and I came to watch, learn, and speak with them about improving our interactive maps .”

Once the lesson plan was completed, Dougherty added it to On the Line. The teaching resources can be found at http://ontheline.trincoll.edu/teaching-and-learning/

category: In the News, Research + Scholarship
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New book by Zayde Antrim uncovers the “Power of Place”

As a complement to popular scholarship on globalization, a new book by Associate Professor of History and International Studies Zayde Antrim explores the historical significance of identities formed through attachments to geographic locations.

Published in September, Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World (2012, Oxford University Press) examines early texts produced by Muslims during the ninth through eleventh centuries, paying specific attention to how the authors conveyed attachment to the lands in which they lived. This attachment created what Antrim describes as “widely resonant categories of belonging.”

“Representing plots of land as homes, cities, and regions in texts…was a powerful way to claim loyalty, authority, and belonging in the early Islamic world,” said Antrim, who teaches courses on Islamic civilizations, Middle Eastern history, nationalism, and geography. “I have always been interested in geography and the ways in which the geographical imagination shapes the way we see and act in the world.”

The information contained in these millennium-old texts may help us better interpret current events in the Arab region. Antrim points out that Western analysis of these events de-emphasizes individual and cultural ties to physical locations and instead promotes a characterization of Arabs and Muslims as motivated by kinship and larger religious affiliations.

“Political rhetoric about the global dimensions of the ‘War on Terror’ is dominated by the threatening figure of the ‘Muslim terrorist,’ loyal only to a worldwide network of like-minded Muslims committed to otherworldly and utopian (or dystopian) goals rather than local, national, or geopolitical agendas,” Antrim says. “These assumptions have distracted from the modes in which territories, imagined in new ways and deployed in new forms of discourse, have retained wide relevance in the geographical imagination as well as on the ground in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries–not just among Muslims or in the Middle East, but everywhere.”

Antrim was interviewed about Routes and Realms for the spring 2012 issue of The Trinity Reporter. Read the full interview here. 

category: Publications, Research + Scholarship
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Stefanie Chambers examines voter turnout during panel at Old State House

With the presidential election less than a month away, a panel of three experts tackled the thorny issues of low voter turnout, obstacles to voter participation, efforts to target and disenfranchise ethnic and racial groups, and other election-related topics.

The panel discussion, “The Fight to Vote, The Right to Vote,” took place on Wednesday, October 10 at the Old State House in downtown Hartford and featured Stefanie Chambers, associate professor of political science at Trinity; Secretary of the State Denise Merrill; and Cheri Quickmire, executive director of Common Cause, Connecticut. The moderator was Elizabeth McGuire of the Connecticut Network (CT-N), which recorded the discussion and will broadcast it over the coming week.

For a listing of airtimes, please visit: www.ct-n.com.

McGuire opened the discussion by noting that the number of people who turn out to vote could very well be a deciding factor in both the presidential election pitting Democrat Barack Obama against Republican Mitt Romney and Connecticut’s U.S. Senate race between Democrat Chris Murphy and Republican Linda McMahon. However, McGuire continued, “we know that a huge number of people in this country just sit it out.”

The nation’s dismal voter participation rate – especially when compared to other democracies – dominated the hour-long conversation. Panelists discussed barriers to voter participation in the United States compared to other democracies, some of which do not require citizens to first register and some have elections on weekends or turn election day into a national holiday. The barrage of negative ads on American TV is also a big turn-off, as are the barriers that keep racial and ethnic minority groups from the polls.

Furthermore, the lack of participation occurs despite decades of inequality that women and minorities endured with regard to voting rights. Chambers, who teaches a course at Trinity on women and politics, gave an overview of the struggle by women for the right to vote, a fight that wasn’t won until the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1920, more than a century after women had begun clamoring for enfranchisement. The framers of the Constitution did not specify which groups were entitled to vote, resulting in various constituencies having to fight “to get a place at the table.”

These historical struggles seem forgotten by many, as in the past few decades less than half of the eligible adults in this country have voted in presidential elections, and even fewer in off-year elections. Merrill, whose job it is to oversee state elections, emphasized the historical context provided by Chambers by describing the voter participation rate as “a crisis in this country. [Voting] is a right that people have fought and died for.”

Read the full story here. 

category: Lectures and Panels, Research + Scholarship
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Lucy Ferriss delves into life in Peshawar, Pakistan

Fresh off the success of her most recent novel, The Lost Daughter, Trinity’s Writer-in-Residence, Lucy Ferriss, earlier this year spent a month in Peshawar, Pakistan, conducting research for her next book, tentatively titled Honor.

Her experience in the Pakistani city of 2 million was the subject of a Common Hour Talk on Thursday, September 27, one in which she said some of her assumptions about that country’s culture – its rituals, taboos, and customs – were affirmed and some of which were debunked, but all of which will shape the writing of her book.

Her talk gave her audience insights into how a successful novelist goes about researching and writing a book, testing theories and hypotheses to see which ones have merit and which should be jettisoned. And her lecture also provided an insider’s look at a society that is largely enigmatic to most Americans.

Squash is what led Ferriss to Pakistan. “Trinity’s had that effect on me. I wanted, first, to write a story about a female jock, a coach, who possesses the particular confidence of coaches,” said Ferriss. “I wanted to challenge her in an unexpected way and see what would happen. Because I teach at Trinity, squash became my coach’s sport. And because squash can draw, as we all know, a veritable U.N. of players to a small college, the challenge lay somewhere in a clash of cultures.”

Read more about Ferriss’s Common Hour talk and new book  here. 

category: Research + Scholarship, Uncategorized
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