SOEST researchers receives $1.2 million to study restless volcanoes

SOEST will receive $1.2 million in funding from the National Science Foundation as part of a six-university collaboration with the Volcano Hazards Program of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), studying volcanic crises at Kīlauea, Hawaiʻi and Long Valley, California. The study will be made by seven institutions: USGS, UH Mānoa, University of California-Berkeley, University of Washington and Duke and Marquette Universities, and is led by University at Buffalo.

“The goal is to improve our relationship with ‘restless,’ potentially dangerous, active volcanoes in the United States,” said Kīlauea project lead Bruce Houghton, the Gordon A. Macdonald Professor of Volcanology at UH Mānoa and Hawaiʻi State volcanologist. “Moderate to large volcanic eruptions in this country are infrequent but long-lasting and high-consequence events with multiple hazards.”

“Volcanic crises contain a swarm of volcanological, engineering, human, planning and economic problems, often with very high levels of uncertainty in all types of data,”said Houghton. “The uncertainties in how the volcano, the community and decision-making institutions will behave can turn events into crises and sometimes disasters.”

As a consequence the costs of volcanic crises are often out of proportion to the magnitude of the parent eruptions.

A key component of this project is recruitment of graduate students and young researchers into interdisciplinary hazard research to train the next generation of volcanologists and hazard researchers in the United States. These individuals will split time between a home university and either the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory or the USGS California Volcano Observatory in Menlo Park, California.

Read more at Big Island Now and UH News.

A year in a bubble: NASA begins most ambitious Mars-analog mission yet

On Friday 28 August 2015, six scientists left the comforts of civilization, set to be gone for an entire year. Their mission will simulate what it might be like for astronauts journeying to Mars.

In the confines of a 36-foot-wide and 20-foot-high solar-powered dome in a remote location on the slopes of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawai‘i, the six team members will have to live together for 365 days. They will have no face-to-face contact with humans outside of the dome. This is the fourth and longest such mission carried out by the Hawai‘i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation program (HI-SEAS).

“We hope that this upcoming mission will build on our current understanding of the social and psychological factors involved in long-duration space exploration,” said Kim Binsted, principal investigator for HI-SEAS, as well as graduate student in Geology & Geophysics (G&G) and professor of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS).

Read more about in NBC News, ABC News, Christian Science Monitor, Engadget, and Discovery News.

OTEC plant plugs into Hawai‘i island grid

Makai Ocean Engineering Inc. officially flipped the switch of its Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) power plant in Kailua-Kona on Hawai‘i island during a dedication ceremony on Friday. The OTEC power plant uses the temperature difference between the near-freezing deep water of the ocean and the surface waters heated by the sun to generate electricity.

The power plant at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority is a renewable energy facility that provides power 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The facility will generate 100 kilowatts of electricity, which is enough to power 120 Hawaii homes every year. It mostly will be used for research. The research and development at the plant was funded by the Office of Naval Research through the Hawai‘i Natural Energy Institute (HNEI), and the infrastructure was funded by Naval Facilities Engineering Command.

Undersea photographers bring “coral bleaching” to the surface

Alongside the lush and steep windward coast of the island of O‘ahu researchers are creating images of coral reefs that are in danger of dying because of warm ocean waters. They are taking high-definition 360-degree panoramic images of the reefs and using them to monitor and study the health of corals over time. The XL Catlin Seaview Survey — sponsored by the insurance company XL Catlin — has already taken 750,000 images in the waters off 26 countries over the past three years using the SVII camera. The SVII is actually three cameras enclosed in a waterproof housing. Its wide angle lenses allow it to capture photographs of corals and then geolocate each photo using GPS technology.

Scientists working with the team say they are concerned about how much coral off the coast of Hawai‘i already is beginning to bleach, especially because it’s the second such event in two years. The team’s expedition in Hawai‘i is particularly urgent, because the coral here faces a 90 percent chance of “bleaching” this year, said Ruth Gates, an expert on coral bleaching from, and new director of, the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB).

Read more about it and watch the videos at NBC News and WSB-TV.

UHM ranked 15th university in the world for earth and environmental science

The University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa is ranked the 15^th university in the world for earth and environmental science according to this year’s Nature Index. Anchored by the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), UHM ranked higher than nearly 8,000 other institutions.

The Nature Index ranks institutions based on the number of research papers published in Nature and a select group of other prestigious journals, each of which include peer-review by active researchers.

“Publication in these journals is a significant achievement in and of itself. To be in the top tier of universities with such highly impactful publications is testament to the quality and importance of the earth and environmental science research undertaken by our faculty, postdoc and students,” said Brian Taylor, dean of SOEST and UHM Interim Vice Chancellor for Research.

“The Nature Index provides absolute counts of high-quality publication productivity at the institutional and national level, and as such is one indicator of high-quality research output across the globe,” according to the Nature Publishing Group.

Of the top 22 earth and environmental science institutions, seven are national agencies or laboratories (such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences and NASA) and 15 are universities.

Taken from Kaunānā and Ka Leo O Hawai‘i.

UH researchers return with latest El Niño data from the central equatorial Pacific

The timing could not have been more perfect for this expedition. Kelvin Richards, professor of Oceanography and director of the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), and his team took full advantage of the strong El Niño conditions during the three-week research cruise in the central equatorial Pacific completed yesterday. The expedition aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel (R/V) Falkor left Majuro, Marshall Islands in late July and completed an 11-day time-series at the equator, giving these researchers their first view of the water profile in this region.

The science team, led by Richards, has completed similar water profiling in the western equatorial Pacific region. However, this is Richards’ first time moving to the central Pacific.

Recent research suggests that small-scale turbulence in the ocean plays a critical—and to a certain extent overlooked—role in large ocean processes like El Niño. Accurately modeling how the ocean absorbs and moves heat, via turbulence, for example, is among the greatest challenges for climate change modeling and forecasting of El Niño Southern Oscillations (ENSOs). “We are seeing small vertical scale features in the shear present here and perhaps even stronger than in the west, giving an indication that these features are important in turbulent mixing,” Richards explains.

Read more about it in the UH System News, Nature, and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (subscription required).

Twin typhoons spin in the Pacific, adding to active storm season

There’s little sign of a let-up in this year’s unusually active storm season with another two typhoons forming in the north-western Pacific.

Typhoon Goni has been upgraded to a category-4 typhoon and is forecast to reach super typhoon strength later on Monday as it moves to the northwest of Guam. That island is reported to have received about 250 millimetres of rain from the event. Typhoon Atsani, meanwhile has also formed east of Guam, and may fall just shy of the 130-knot mark used to register super-typhoon strength. Its path remains over open water and it may weaken to below typhoon strength before reaching Japan, which lies in its current path.

Axel Timmermann, a professor of Oceanography and researcher at the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) researcher, said Hawai‘i had also been in the sights of an abnormally large number of tropical storms so far this year. The hurricane season typically has three to five such storms a year but the island state has had warnings for that range in just June and July, Professor Timmermann said. The season runs until about October.

Read more about it in The Sydney Morning Herald.

NASA rocket launches UH’s scientific payload into space

University of Hawaiʻi community college students watched their scientific payload spin into space on August 12 when a two-stage Terrier-Improved Malemute sounding rocket was launched around midnight Hawaiʻi time from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Students from Honolulu Community College, Kapiʻolani Community College, Kauaʻi Community College and Windward Community College are part of a collaboration known as Project Imua, a joint faculty-student enterprise for designing, fabricating and testing payloads.

“You just see the thing ignite and shoot off into the sky. It’s the most amazing feeling in the world, especially since we’ve been working on it for over a year. And we are finally seeing all of our hard work pay off,” said Kapiʻolani CC student Kalaʻimoana Garcia.

UH’s main Hawaiʻi Space Grant Consortium campus, which provides technical assistance through Hawaiʻi Space Flight Laboratory’s resources and personnel.

Read more about it and watch the video report in the UH System News and read about it in the Pacific Business News.

Research shows catastrophic invertebrate extinction in Hawai‘i and globally

Hawai‘i has been called the “extinction capital of the world.” But, with the exception of the islands’ birds, there has until now been no accurate assessment of the true level of this catastrophic loss. Invertebrates (insects, snails, spiders, etc.) constitute the vast majority of the species that make up Hawai‘i’s formerly spectacularly diverse and unique biota. A team of researchers, including scientists from the Pacific Biosciences Research Center (PBRC), the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Howard University in Washington D.C., and the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris, recently published the first rigorous assessment of extinction of invertebrates in Hawai‘i.

“We showed, based on extrapolation from a random sample of land snail species from all over the world, and via two independent approaches, that we may already have lost 7 percent (130,000 extinctions) of all the animal species on Earth,” said Robert Cowie, research professor at PBRC and co-author of the two studies.

Read more about it in Huffington Post, Washington Post, The Wildlife Society, and UH Mānoa News, and listen at Scientific American, and HPR’s The Conversation.

Hurricanes could produce tsunami-like waves

High surf is something we expect with a hurricane, but can hurricane conditions produce tsunami-like waves? Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering (ORE) professor Kwok Fai Cheung has studied the effects of hurricane waves at UH for 15 years. A new study published in Nature Communications by one of his former students post-doctoral students, Volker Roeber, says it’s possible.

We saw something resembling that during Haiyan in the Philippines. “A surge would come in, but before all the water would go out, another surge would come in, so they propagate on top of each other. That would increase the water level at the coast,” said Cheung.

Read more about it and watch the video report at KITV4.