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| The lectures in the Mini-School will meet from 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. on Wednesdays from September 6 through October 4, 2006
in Building 1 at 12420 Warwick Boulevard in Newport News (click
here for map).
Lectures are scheduled for 45 minutes and will be followed by a question and answer period. A guided tour of VIMS on Friday, October 6th will round out the program.
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Links
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Ocean Alchemy: Can Iron Make an Ice Age?
(September 13, 2006) Sprinkling iron onto the ocean surface has been touted as one way to help curb global warming—based on the idea that this iron "fetilizer" can boost the rate at which marine plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Join Dr. Walker Smith's graduate student Amy Shields as she examines whether this idea would work, and how the marine food web might respond. Smith was a key member of the Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX), one of the largest oceanographic experiments ever mounted. This two-year collaborative effort brought 3 ships, 45 tons of equipment and supplies, and 17 leading U.S. oceanographic institutions to study the effects of iron enrichment in the waters around Antarctica. |
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Sink or Swim: Animal Drifters and the Carbon Cycle
(September 20, 2006) Join us as Dr. Deborah Steinberg investigates how organic matter gets from the ocean's surface to its depths. The fate of this material is important because it represents a potentially huge sink for carbon dioxide—the main greenhouse gas implicated in global warming. Atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolves into seawater, where tiny marine plants take up the carbon during photosynthesis. When these phytoplankton die or are eaten by zooplankton, their carbon-rich tissues begin to sink to the depths. Carbon that reaches the deep sea contributes nothing to global warming and can remain there for thousands of years. But marine organisms and chemical reactions continually transform this "marine snow" as it sinks. If these transformations are rapid and sinking is slow, the materials may never reach the deep sea, instead being recycled back into the surface ocean and atmosphere. |
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Virtual Reality: Computers Models, Global Change, and You(September 27, 2006) Policy makers rely on predictions from computer models to inform climate treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol. Global climate models generally agree that Earth's climate is warming, although they differ in their predictions of the warming's magnitude and regional variations. In this lecture VIMS graduate student Paul Bradley will explore how climate models work, review predicted changes in surface temperature and sea level, and address the political debate surrounding the issue of "global warming." |
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VIMS LABORATORY TOUR (October 6, 2006) Join Dr. Walker Smith at 11 am for a 1-hour guided tour of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point, including a tour of a research laboratory. |
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