Love and Loss on the Ice
By Matt Windsor
Polar researcher Jim McClintock offers a firsthand look at climate change in his new book, Lost Antarctica.In his new book, Lost Antarctica, polar biologist Jim McClintock, Ph.D., offers plenty of reasons to be concerned about the fate of the frozen continent: a few trillion, at least.
That’s the approximate number of sea butterflies currently floating in the chilly waters of the Southern Ocean. The tiny, shelled creatures serve as the base for an intricate food chain that extends upward to the mighty blue whale. Hundreds of species depend on the sea butterfly, but it is under assault on a massive scale. Rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, transferred to the polar oceans by complex climate effects and simple chemistry, are making the sea butterfly’s home waters more acidic.
Trillions of sea butterflies float through the waters around Antarctica. Ocean acidification threatens the animals' shells—which could spell disaster for an entire ecosystem. (Photo courtesy Jim McClintock)When the pH reaches a critical point, it will dissolve the animals’ protective shells—killing them and risking the collapse of an entire ecosystem. Acid seas are the “other CO2 problem,” McClintock says—one that, unlike the problem of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, has received little media attention.
Lost Antarctica offers a host of other reasons why we need to sweat the seemingly small stuff now occurring in this icy world. Combining the latest scientific data with personal observations from two decades of Antarctic research, McClintock lays bare the intricate inner workings of his beloved continent. In Antarctica, he explains, everything from microscopic phytoplankton to state-sized ice shelves is interconnected—and under threat.
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UAB Magazine: Your book describes many worrying changes in Antarctica. Which is the most apparent when you visit?
McClintock: The most obvious to me are the changes in the ice, especially in the Antarctic Peninsula [the section of the continent closest to South America]. The annual sea ice along the peninsula has receded about 40 percent in the last 30 years. And that has had a major effect on a community that surrounds Palmer Station. There has been a large colony of Adelie penguins on Torgersen Island for 700 years, but in the last 30, it has dwindled rapidly. In the book, I call it a “ghost rookery.” The Adelies use the sea ice to reach their feeding grounds. But as the ice has shrunk, they have had to swim farther and farther to reach those grounds. These animals are living right on the edge of their energy budgets anyway, and they can’t make it. Then there’s the warming of the air, which makes it more humid and increases snowfall. The Adelies are genetically programmed to show up on Torgersen at the same time every year, but now they are often caught up in unseasonably late snowstorms while nesting their eggs. And when the snow melts, the eggs drown.
UAB Magazine: After 20 trips to Antarctica, what keeps you coming back?
McClintock: Several things. Antarctica’s natural beauty is just breathtaking. You look off in the distance and think you can reach out and touch a mountain range, and it’s actually hundreds of miles away. Also, Antarctica is one of the most fabulous places on our planet to study marine biology. When you dive under the ice, the seafloor is covered with life—just as much as you would find in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. There are so many intriguing scientific questions about the marine life and how it’s adapted to such a unique environment. I feel very lucky to get to work there.
UAB Magazine: Considering you named your book Lost Antarctica, do you have any hope that the continent can be saved?
McClintock: We haven’t yet lost the continent, but its marine life is genuinely being threatened. There is hope that remediations that will reduce the production of greenhouse gases will slow down what is happening. But the dramatic changes being witnessed are a wake-up call. I’m not saying we need to give up our cars tomorrow. But we do need to start thinking rationally about where we can make accommodations in energy conservation.
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| Watch a live webcam of activity at Palmer Station—and follow UAB's Antarctica research team on their blog. |
In December I got the chance to lead a group on a philanthropic “Climate Change Challenge” expedition cruise for Abercrombie and Kent to Antarctica. With All Seasons Travel here in Birmingham handling the cruise bookings and in my role as a professor of Polar and Marine Biology at UAB, I took a group of 16 from Birmingham, which makes 100 people from this city that I’ve been able to take down there over the past six years. Many of them are business leaders and other very influential people in our community. It’s life-impacting. They come back and are ambassadors for Antarctica.
UAB Magazine: Do you ever see yourself retiring from Antarctic expeditions?
McClintock: Once you’ve been, getting back to Antarctica becomes a vocation in and of itself. I don’t see this amazing continent leaving my horizon until I physically can’t go. It’s a love affair, really, and I’m not ready to give it up.
James McClintock is the UAB Endowed University Professor of Polar and Marine Biology. You can purchase a copy of Lost Antarctica at any bookstore or online. The book’s website is www.lostantarctica.com.
Take FiveMcClintock on what he couldn’t live without on a polar expedition. I’ve got it down to five “C”s. First is communication. When I was a graduate student on my first trip in 1982, all we had were Western Union telegrams. And at $3 a word, I couldn’t say much. Now I have an Internet-connected phone in my office and another beside my bed. To be able to talk to my wife and family whenever I need to is a wonderful thing.
Camaraderie is vital. You’ve left your family behind, so you need that sense of connection to others. And I’ve always experienced a wonderful camaraderie, not only within my research station “family” but in many other settings. A ship pulls in from Argentina or Chile, and you get to share a glass of wine with the crew and talk about your work. The same thing occurs when you visit another country’s station. It transcends gender and age, too. Warm clothing, of course, is another must. Despite climate warming, you still need to wear a jacket when you go outside! Several layers, in fact.
When a ship arrives, everyone drops what they’re doing and goes down to the “freshies line.” We lift boxes of avocados, grapefruit, etc., and pass them from person to person until they’re safely in the kitchen. When I worked at McMurdo Station in the 1980s and ’90s, we’d have periods with no freshies. I remember a sign over the lettuce, which had been grown in a greenhouse at the station, saying that each person was entitled to one leaf. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case.
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Educating Truckers on the Go
By Todd Dills
Karen Heaton is issuing a wake-up call to the nation's truckers with the goal of educating long-haul drivers on the importance of a good, stationary snooze.When UAB nurse practitioner Karen Heaton, Ph.D., met her husband, a long-haul owner-operator, she discovered that the nation’s truckers carry a host of unmet health needs along with their cargo. In particular, “I was struck when I read that individuals who are sleep-deprived and driving have the same levels of impairment as those who are intoxicated,” Heaton says.
Now Heaton, an assistant professor in the UAB School of Nursing, is testing an online intervention program focusing on sleep and fatigue management among the nation’s truck drivers. She has been visiting industry trade shows and reaching out to trucking companies and associations to recruit drivers to participate in the study, which is funded by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.
Heaton’s goal is to arm truck drivers with the information they need to recognize the importance of sleep for safety, well-being, and, ultimately, baseline human health. If the online model proves to be effective in reinforcing the basics of sleep among participants and encouraging them to modify their behavior, Heaton hopes that trucking companies will add it to driver-safety training. The program could even become part of the first health-related requirements for Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA)-regulated training, something every new long-haul driver would take in the interest of public safety.
Inside UAB's 3D Superstore
By Matt Windsor
Looking for a 12th century chess piece? A custom Rubik’s cube? An exact copy of a seashell, the inside of an eyeball, a relief map of an Egyptian burial ground, or an obscure protein?
A scanner in the UAB 3D Print Lab gathers the data needed to turn virtually anything into a printable object. See more examples in this slideshow. UAB computer scientist Kenneth Sloan, Ph.D., has them all in stock. If you’re searching for something else—anything else—he can get it. Or, to be precise, make it. Just give him a day or two, and $20 per cubic inch.
Inside Sloan’s lab on the ground floor of Campbell Hall are five 3D printers, ranging from entry level to commercial grade. These magic machines, which recently earned a spot on the cover of Wired magazine, transform computer files into reality. Instead of ink, their “print heads” extrude a thin stream of superheated plastic in layers seven-thousands of an inch thick. Building layer upon layer, a 3D printer can make a nearly infinite variety of objects.
The hobbyist-level MakerBot (above) is one of five 3D printers in the lab, which include several commercial-grade devices. The spool at top left holds the plastic, which is heated and deposited in ultra-thin slices to form objects.Sloan and his students have made life-size models of Tetris pieces, intricate puzzles, and elaborate contraptions that could be produced in no other way. But these “toys” only offer a hint of what is possible, Sloan says. The printers’ true value is becoming clear as other UAB researchers come to the 3D Print Lab with their own designs.
Putting a New Spin on Computer Security
By Matt Windsor
Nitesh Saxena (right, with graduate student Babins Shrestha) leads UAB's SPIES research group, which is testing everything from brain scans to "playful security" to keep users safe online.Computer security researchers put themselves into the minds of cybercriminals to figure out what they might do next. Nitesh Saxena, Ph.D., takes a different approach. His mission is to get inside the minds of users—quite literally, in his latest project—to figure out how to protect them from new attacks.
Saxena is the head of the SPIES (Security and Privacy in Emerging Computing and Networking Systems) research group in the UAB Department of Computer and Information Sciences. “Most traditional security research focuses on the attackers,” Saxena says. “We work on the defense side, with an emphasis on the end users.”
The SPIES lab puts the “strengths and weaknesses of the computer user” under the microscope, Saxena explains. Or under the brain scanner, to be precise. In one new project, Saxena has partnered with Rajesh Kana, Ph.D., a researcher in the UAB Department of Psychology who specializes in using brain imaging for autism research. The interdisciplinary duo has started scanning volunteers while they perform everyday security tasks. The subjects have to decide whether the sites they are looking at are real or fake—the actual Facebook home page or a knockoff, for example—or they are asked to heed a security warning while reading an article.
“We want to understand, from a neuroscience perspective, what happens when people are making these security decisions, and especially what happens when they are rushed into making decisions, as often happens online,” Saxena says. “We are still in the early stages, but this may give us clues on how to design warnings and safeguards that are more effective.”
Zombies Inspire Student’s Disease Research
By Charles Buchanan
UAB graduate student Virginia Chu is using her braaiiiins, demonstrating how a game of "Humans vs. Zombies" can reveal the spread of infectious disease through a population. Virginia Chu admits that she was a bad zombie.
During her undergraduate years at Georgia Tech, the Atlanta native participated in the campuswide “Humans vs. Zombies” game. Players begin as humans, except for one student zombie with a mission to “infect” the others by touching them. Once tagged, the new zombies seek their own prey, setting in motion a weeklong race to survive the apocalypse.
Players wear bandanas identifying them as human or zombie, so “it’s hard to be sneaky and infect somebody”—always her downfall, recalls Chu, now an epidemiology student in the UAB School of Public Health. But her attempts to hunt human victims helped her to discover the science within the game—and translate it into a tool for modeling the spread of infectious diseases.
Back-of-the-Envelope Idea
“The textbook case for disease modeling is cruise ships—figuring out how fast a disease can spread depending on the size of the ship, and whether quarantine or treatment is the best solution,” explains Chu, who has had a longstanding interest in infectious diseases. The zombie game, however, provides a living, breathing case study that researchers can follow as it progresses in a real-world setting.