Welcome to this Discovery Seminar. Soon we will be meeting intensively yet in the the relaxed atmosphere of late summer in Seattle. Classroom teaching is the normal activity in a university, but experiences in the lab and, when possible, out in the 'field', are essential to learning science. Our science in this course is that of the global environment, with a focus on the world's oceans. We need a 'toolbox' filled with ideas from physics, math and chemistry and (though not as central in this course) biology. You might think of physics as a basis for eventually understanding the ecosystems of Earth. Preserving the integrity of the systems of life on Earth is the highest goal of such work. Here's our class of 19 and our textbooks:

20 September Care advice for microcosms: this document comes from a commercial microcosm, the Ecosphere, involving shrimp and algae; ideas about light levels, etc. may be useful.

16 September The first microcosm to be launched: we will try to have them all sealed off, by Thursday.
Thursday 18 Sept final lab at 12.30 in OTB 206.
Quiz 2 will take place Wednesday at 9.30 in class. This will consist of 4 questions taken from a set handed out this morning.
Powerpoint figures from Course Summary given today.
Powerpoint figures Lec 6 - Estuaries given yesterday.




The army of microcosms awaits the blow-torch for their launch to eternity.

11 September The final reading assignment is to finish McKibben's book pp 139-217 (The Defiant Reflex, A Path of More Resistance) and read Kunzig's chapter 8, p131-163 (Life on a Volcano) by Tuesday.

Please get your Essay 2 in (posted on your Google Doc Journal) by late Thursday. There will indeed be class on the final day, Thurs (18 Sept. 08), which will be a lab...maybe not quite what you expect but it should be interesting. Let's make it a single session meeting at 12.30. Let me know if you have a conflict.

The final quiz will be Wednesday, 17 Sept. It will be similar in format to the 1st quiz, though expect some science calculations or questions on the labs, in addition to the more philosophical questions about the environment. The quiz will cover the entire course but emphasize the more recent material.

From this week's lab: Circulation on a rotating Earth driven by cooling near the Pole and heating in the 'tropics'. This is an overhead view of the circulation driven by a cold polar region (ice in a cylinder in the center). Colored dyes show the flow at different levels. Cold water sinks and flows 'south' away from the polar regions. The angular momentum effect causes it to spin more slowly about the pole, hence it turns into a 'westward' current (that is, clockwise). Fluid moving north at the surface to replace it, like the proverbial figure skater, spins faster, more like the Earth's spin, hence turns east and develops onto a jet stream winding counterclockwise round the tank. Looking closely you can see it winding continuosly round the 'weather' eddies. This is a good model of both the ocean circulation in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica or the atmospheric circulation. It is remarkable that both ocean and atmosphere have similar dynamics like this (only that the whirly eddies are 10 times wider in the atmosphere than the ocean).

10 September Thanks to Kristin Laidre for todays talk on Greenland, whales and bird populations. These cold regions have surprisingly intense ecosystems. After all the bowhead whales, consuming perhaps a ton of copepods per day, are big animals.

Profiles of potential temperature and salinty at 3 locations, representative of the subtropical North Atlantic (36N, 25W), the Southern Ocean near Antarctica (60S,25W)and the subpolar North Pacific (42N 160W). The second plot withthe green curves is potential temperature plotted against salinity, for all the depths. Salinity is expressed as kg of salt per kg of seawater solution, multiplied by 1000. The green curves are lines of constant potential density (think of it as just fluid density). The density is labeled as follows: 27.3 means density of 1027.3 kg/cubic meter, or simply 2.73 denser than fresh water. So it is like salinity in being a density (minus 1000) measured in parts per thousand. So you can see how warm/fresh waters (upper left green curves) have low density..are very buoyant, while cold/salty waters (lower right) have high density. But, the differences are slight, within 1% over most of the .

9 September Lecture 5 pdf archived here.

Julie's ocean plankton introduction here.

5 September
Essay 2 assignment: here, out late Friday 5 Sept; back: Thursday 11 Sept.

You can put drafts in your Google Doc and we might be able to comment on them before next Thursday.

4 September Thursday we meet for the afternoon lab: section 1 at 12.30-2.30 and group 2 at 2.30-4.30. Come directly to the lab, not the classroom. Room 206 Ocean Teaching Building is at the east end of Boat Street (which itself is at the bottom (south end) of 15th Ave NE, the west border of campus). As you walk downhill on the ring road on campus you might notice the greenhouses...that's where to find the bridge over NE Pacific St. A copy of the campus map can be very useful (see www.washington.edu/home/maps or click here).

Some time will be spent working toward establishing the microcosm experiments (with the hope of establishing them over the coming week and sealing them off during the final week of the course). Build your own ocean will involve the physical ocean circulation and 'thin layers' of different fluid density created by sources of heat and cold, fresh and salt.

2 September Lecture 3 on global ocean circulation driven by heat and salt, archived here.

Reading assignment: by end of this week read McKibben 92-138 A Promise Broken and Kunzig 200-234 on plankton, primary productivity. So far in this course we have assigned McKibben 1-138 and Kunzig 1-85, 200-234, 268-319: that is, Preface, chapters 1-5,11,13,14

Comments on your Essay-1 (A Favorite Place) have been posted on Google Documents.

On Tuesday 2 September at 11.00 am we will visit the teaching lab in School of Oceanography to develop our microcosms, led by Eric and Julie.

Julie and Eric's primer on the sealed microcosm here.

Microcosm philosophy, John Todd's brief introduction to the book Gaia's Garden here.

Short Quiz on Wednesday 3 Sept.
Here is a copy of the quiz. For this review the lecture notes, reading and in-class exercises we have done. We will ask you to write paragraph-long answers to questions like "McKibben's discussion of our perception of time presents us with a challenge in rescuing our global and local environments: describe this difficulty and how we might counteract it."

On Wednesday 3 Sept we will meet with the head of the Oceanography library, Louise Richards, for a discussion about web-searching for environmental science. We will walk from the class to the Suzzallo Instruction Lab (Room 102A) which is behind the Exhibition Room, which is located on the left when you enter Suzzallo Library's Red Square entrance.

On Thursday afternoon 4 Sept we have our first full lab session in room 206, Ocean Teaching Building. A map will appear here later. We will divide into two groups for this work.

Putting a value on the biosphere: New York City's water supply here.

Video of the biological activity (phytoplankton growth) at the sea surface, from the SeaWiFS satellite of NASA, here (10 Mbytes). Note this is a .wmv video which plays only on Windows computers. The color in the video is exaggerated, with greens and reds meaning high chlorophyll and blues indicating very little chlorophyll. You can browse these images, from the launch of the satellite in 1997 to near real-time (present). By choosing the 7-day or1-month average pictures you will elimate more of the clouds that are in the way: normally you can browse images at oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov or ftp them from SeaWiFS surface ocean color images. SeaWiFS also shows remarkably high resolution color images of many other things, from hurricanes to forest fires.

28 August Excursion to UW wetlands

Thanks to Prof. Kern Ewing (back row, center) of UW Botantical Gardens!
Some photos here.

27 August, class 3 The lecture slides from Julie's Lec. 2 are here.

Reading assignment: by end of this week read
McKibben 47-91 The End of Nature and
Kunzig 293-319 chapter 14 The Climate Switch, plus
43-85 chapter 3, The Rift in the Atlantic/The Seafloor at Birth.

See you at the WAC Thursday at 12.30 for the Wetlands visit. Aerial photo below. Bring rain jacket, old joggers, water

Essay Assignment #1. A Favorite Place. Assigned: 27 Aug 08. Due back: by Friday afternoon 29 Aug 08.

Write the equivalent of one page single-spaced handwriting describing a wild, natural place that you remember visiting, one that made a strong impression on you. It could be a mountain meadow, a forest, ocean beach. It should be far enough from civilization that it was 'natural' if not untouched by humans. Write of your qualitative feelings, emotions that arose during this time. Then, on the other side of the paper, write a page about the functions of the plants, insects, animals, sky, sea in that landscape; that is, how did they inter-relate? What was the life of this place, and how was it shaped and structured to be as it was? What was the role of humans in shaping this place? What was your relationship with it (on both sides of the paper: artistic, emotional and then functional, objective, rational, scientific)? You can draft this in your journals (paper or electronic) and put it in the GoogleDoc. When you do so, mark it as either 'Draft' or 'Final'. Thanks Here is a .doc version of the assignment.


The UW wetlands and Arboretum.

Cuttlefish, octopi: the Youtube video from the TED lecture series showing shallow-ocean creatures that camoflage themselves and deep-ocean luminescent creatures here.
A bit more about this here. In a similar vein, the Youtube video of dolphins blowing underwater bubble rings is here. (Or, google "dolphin bubble rings").

26 August, class 2 The lecture slides from Peter R. today (Lec. 2) are here.
Julie's lecture 1. on photosynthesis and respiration is here.

25 August., class 1 The lecture slides from today (Lec. 1 plus some material we didn't yet get to) are here as a .pdf file (7 Mbytes). If you have trouble reading it let us know and we will do a work-around.

Reading assignment: McKibban first chapter (1-46), Kunzig chapters 1 and 13 (pp 1-27, 268-292). Carry this out over the coming 2 days (think of a sort of 48 hour window in which you do reading and make some entries about it in your GoogleDoc).

Office hours: a good time to speak with us is after class. Julie Wright has reserved the Library in the Honors Program Office (2d floor Mary Gates Hall) for 12.00 to 3.00 pm; she will give you definite hours but that's pretty close. Peter is available in Oceanography (room 319 Ocean Sciences) but phone or email first so that I will be in. 12. to 2. after class would be a good time. Generally email us with questions. In stressful situations call Peter at 360-643-0740 (cell).

22 August. Both books have now arrived at the UW Bookstore (there is a special section for the Early Start courses, so you can see what others will be reading this month). The course meets in room 074 of Mary Gates Hall, a very pleasant and central setting. You will see that all the Discovery Seminars, some 640 students, will be meeting close by.

On Monday we will start at 9.30 with an introductory lecture, and get right down to work. As the week progresses we will be spending time starting off a course-long lab experiment, and on Thursday visit the wetlands on Lake Washington at the edge of UW campus...by canoe and on foot. To see the setting visit http://depts.washington.edu/urbhort/

One thing you might do right away is check out your computer capability; we hope you will have good access to a laptop or desktop computer, using the UW wireless network or hard-wired ethernet.

During the four weeks you will all keep journals...notebooks for lecture notes, working through problems, keeping notes on your reading, drafting essays. We will experiment with using Google Documents to augment this paper journal. So, you might want to register with Google Documents as soon as possible: go to http://docs.google.com (or simply Google "google documents"). There you can register, and please 'Share' your document (hit the button labeled Share) with us: rhines@ocean.washington.edu, jjoolzz@gmail.com, lindahl@u.washington.edu, bob.koon@gmail.com If you already are registered with Gmail, you will see a 'documents' link at the top and can simply go from there to start off. Name your journal as follows: Yourlastname-journal. What this all does is give us a way of quickly and efficiently writing and sharing your journal entries. The normal rhythm of submitting homework and getting feedback in the usual 10 week course cannot work in 4 weeks! Thanks!

One more thing, we wrestled with the choice of books for you to buy; for a longer course we would use an oceanography text, an excellent example being Introduction to Ocean Sciences by Douglas Segar (W.W.Norton Co, 2007). Two others are mentioned below. But, this would be rather like the chemisty course you may have taken, where the book was 700 pages long and full of very challenging ideas, with a sticker price up towards $100, and the course possibly lasted a whole year. If you do more in this subject you will want the full kit, but we will do very well with our more modest books plus the lectures (we will post on this website much lecture material as the course develops).

13 August. The two books below, McKibben and Kunzig, will be our official texts; they are on order at UW Bookstore and should be in soon. They also exist in the UW libraries and Amazon. These books do not consider the physical ocean and climate system and we will do these with lecture notes, handouts and web resources. You can learn more about McKibben's recent activities at Wikipedia and other web sites.

A very good introductory text covering most of oceanography is An Introduction to the World's Oceans by Sverdrup and Armbrust. It can be found in the UW libraries, is on reserve at the Oceanography Library in Ocean Teaching Building, and can be ordered/found at UW Bookstore.

5 August 2008. We will build this website over time, before and during the 4-week course. The texts for the course will be determined and posted in the next few days. For some mid-summer reading, two non-technical paperbacks are of interest: The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben and Mapping the Deep by Robert Kunzig. We will likely use these two books in the course. A very interesting and broad-ranging website for the oceans is Ocean World by Prof. Robert Stewart at Texas A&M University. He lists a wide range of non-technical books as well as a new online introductory textbook, Our Ocean Planet The following essays may also be of interest: Coffee-shop thoughts for future oceanographers, and What is Oceanography?, a shortened form being on the Oceans website: What is Oceanography-lite?, from the UW Oceanography homepage (and web links therein). There are many websites displaying the remarkable technology of remote sensing for studying the oceans and climate. For example, NASA's global climate change site. Look at weather video loops at UW's Atmospheric Sciences Department.

The Earth environment is rapidly changing, and the ‘end of Nature’ has been announced. How much of this can we understand from the basic laws of physics? In this course students intending to be science majors will be introduced to the environment from ‘below’: through the oceans. The world’s oceans dominate the global storage of water, heat and carbon and its plants provide roughly one-half the global production of oxygen. We will consider the way the circulating oceans and atmosphere interact to produce our changing climate. Beyond global warming lie many vital properties of our fluid environment: drought, flooding, storminess are all expected to change, and with them the habitability of major regions of Earth.

In passing we introduce the methods of science -- observation, experiment and theory -- through working examples. Students will have a 2.5 hour lab each week in which they build experiments illuminating the science of the environment, from basic physics of light and energy to the inner structure of a hurricane. This uses the resources and lab instructors from the School of Oceanography's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics laboratory.

There will be other excursions using the facilities of the School. Students will do group project work to develop skills of inference: taking an observation and seeing how simple calculations can address a vital question (for example, how are drought and floods changing in intensity as the sea surface warms). We emphasize physics and some chemistry yet in the end, the goal is to preserve the integrity of the global biosphere. Modern technology is providing sensory tools for researching both physics and biology of oceans and climate, and these will be demonstrated in class visits to the School of Oceanography's Seaglider research facility. Finally, the course will address the interaction (in both directions) between the oceans and human activity, discussing ways in which human population and ecosystem patterns may change as the Earth warms.