Something is Stirring Under Mount St. Helens Again: In your semi-regular reminder that the backbone of the Pacific Northwest is a chain of active volcanoes, a series of over 130 small earthquakes (<1.3 magnitude) have been recorded under Mt. St. Helens by Pacific Northwest Seismic Network since March 14th. The reason for this “swarm of earthquakes,” as they are evocatively described? Molten rock is moving into the volcano’s magma chamber, recharging for the mountain’s next eruption. Though researchers say that event is still “years to decades down the road,” it’s worth pausing to reflect once again on the scale of St. Helen’s infamous 1980 cataclysm, which coated cities from Portland to Spokane in appreciable amounts of ash and killed 57 people. Among the dead included USGS Vulcanologist David Johnston, whose final, haunting missive will be forever fixed in our regional psyche: “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!”
Hypoxic Oceans as Harbinger of Extinction: Of the many bad things anthropogenic global warming will do to our oceans, acidification tends to attract the most attention in the Northwest, likely due to its potential impact on the local shellfish industry. But as a recent feature in Pacific Standard describes, the related problem of hypoxia, or oxygen depletion, may be a more immediate threat. Most readily associated with agricultural runoff (which causes plankton blooms that eventually die and leach oxygen from the water), hypoxia is also a result of more global processes. These include winds that exacerbate nutrient-rich upwellings and the lower capacity of warm water to hold dissolved oxygen. Hypoxic waters up and down the West Coast have already manifest as traps full of dead crabs and migrating Humboldt squid, early signs of a world in distress. More existentially, however, is geologic evidence that ties periods of prehistoric hypoxia with Earth’s major extinctions, which scientists attribute to the runaway potential of its destabilizing effects.
A Few More Words on Preprints and the Evolution of Peer Review: In previous posts, I have made comments about the peer review process and cited research initially published as a “preprint.” But what is a preprint, anyway, and how are these two things related? The answer has to do with the warped economics and inefficiencies of the academic publishing industry, already notorious for having figured out a way to have its authors pay to publish their work, pay to read the work of others, and volunteer their services as editors. Preprints are an attempt to address another of the system’s flaws, reducing the lengthy delay between submission and publication of a manuscript by posting results online directly. While well established in some disciplines (such as physics), they’ve only recently become widely adopted in others, such as biology, where they remain controversial. (Journals are predictably opposed, claiming poor quality work will proliferate; advocates claim scientists care too much about their reputations to pump out sloppy work anyway.)
Currently, most preprints are only a stopgap measure to make findings widely accessible while the manuscript undergoes official peer review. But in a more radical vision of the process, preprints could entirely supplant the traditional publishing model in combination with something called post-publication peer review. In this scenario, research would be subject to scrutiny and revision after being made widely available, a change its advocates claim would have a positive impact on many aspects of publication, from cost to more merit-based evaluation of a scientist’s work. Given the career incentives for researchers to publish in the highly visible journals, however, it’s unlikely to be implemented any time soon.
Science Event of the Week: Town Hall Seattle is hosting a of discussion 2013’s precedent-setting Elwha River dam removal project this Thursday, May 12th, at 6:30 p.m.. Speakers (representatives from the K’lallam Tribe, NOAA, and the US Geological Survey) will focus on the river’s remarkable ecological recovery over the past few years. Sometimes, things get better.