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***SPECIAL HOLIDAY ISSUE***
December 11, 1998
For more information on these science news and feature story tips, please
contact the public information officer at the end of each item at (703)
292-8070. Editor: Cheryl Dybas
Contents of this News Tip:
Thanks to an early holiday gift from scientists at the South Pole,
the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) will allow students
from around the world to join in the excitement of a six-week field study
at the South Pole's new Clean Air Facility.
Scientist Lee Maudin, from NCAR headquarters in Boulder, Colorado,
is one of four staff members stationed at the Pole through mid-December
for the Investigation of Sulfur Chemistry in the Antarctic Troposphere
(ISCAT) project. ISCAT is supported by the National Science Foundation
(NSF), NCAR's primary sponsor.
While at the Pole, Maudin is maintaining a world wide web site
(http://www.acd.ucar.edu/spole) to
include frequent updates in "student-friendly" language explaining the science,
geography and
logistics behind a South Pole expedition.
The "virtual holiday field trip" site includes digital-camera photos
and a link to Maudin's electronic mailbox. "We hope to get input from
schools and answer students' questions by e-mail," he said.
At the Pole, there are few human influences on atmospheric chemistry
and no local sources of dimethyl sulfide or sulfur dioxide, the two primary
sources of airborne sulfur, a key component of acid rain and other airborne
pollutants.
This year's field work is the first of two rounds scheduled for the
four-year ISCAT program. The second field phase will take place in the
fall of 2000 and will be keyed to answering questions that arise from
this year's sampling. [Lee Herring]
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Santa Clause isn't always a man -- at least when it comes to keeping
reindeer, it seems. In the remote mountains of northwest Finland, well
within the Arctic Circle, reindeer herding is still the key to survival
among the Saami people -- and women play a key role in
herding reindeer.
To learn more about gender dynamics in polar societies, NSF's office
of polar programs is funding anthropologists Robert Jarvenpa and Hetty
Jo Brumbach and colleagues from the State University of New York (SUNY)
at Albany, to study women's roles among the Saami people
of Kultima, Finland.
Reindeer management is the dominant subsistence and economic activity
for the Saami (also known as Lapps). The Saami community of the Kultima
region consists of only a few families, which maintain reindeer herds
for food and trade. Individual reindeer owners mark the ears of their
reindeer to denote ownership, similar to the practice of branding cattle.
Since the women of this society own many of the reindeer, they figure
greatly into the economy of raising reindeer. [Greg Lester]
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For biologist Nalini Nadkarni, research into the old-growth Douglas
fir forests of the Pacific Northwest isn't always a matter of looking
up -- at least not when she can use a crane -- or ropes and pulleys.
Nadkarni, of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, uses a
giant construction crane to gain access to a part of the forest that researchers,
for lack of wings or claws, have been unable to reach: the canopy. The
canopy, roughly defined as the area between the lowest branches of a forest's
trees and the space where the sky starts, represents a unique place where
the ecosystem can change with
each foot upwards.
Nadkarni, is funded by NSF's divisions of environmental biology and
biological infrastructure to study how the canopies of old-growth forests
-- dominated by Douglas-fir trees but also home to many other tree species
-- differ from those of forests that are exclusively Douglas-fir. According
to Nadkarni, the complex structure of old-growth forests is better at
retaining moisture and nutrients from rainfall and mist than are forests
of only one tree species, which lack a diverse canopy structure. [Greg
Lester]
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