News

The day after Russia invaded Ukraine, UBC Professor Evgeny Pakhomov (Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, IOF and the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, EOAS), chief scientist for the Pan-Pacific Winter High Seas Expedition, set sail on a Russian research vessel to study salmon in the North Pacific. 

As a native Russian speaker with family in Ukraine, Dr. Pakhomov was onboard to take zooplankton, fish, and oceanographic samples and to train young Russian scientists. On day two, a message arrived that the ship was to return to Russia – the expedition was cancelled. Now, the question became just how to get Dr. Pakhomov and scientific samples home safely. Over the next three weeks, expedition organizers worked through multiple time zones and levels of bureaucracy to find a solution: Russian authorities were nervous about the ship entering American waters to drop him off, no ships would come to pick him up, and returning to Vladivostok would likely mean losing the majority of the collected samples – and Dr. Pakhomov entering a country at war. The only thing he could do was concentrate on getting the science done. Of the approximately 90 stations due to be sampled, the researchers managed to sample about 32, gathering valuable data for the more than a dozen projects involved.

Almost a week after he was due back, and just a few days before the ship would have to head back to Russia due to low fuel, a private company agreed to sail out of American waters to rendezvous with the Russian vessel, to the tune of about $16,000. In about 20 minutes, Dr. Pakhomov was onboard, with samples in tow, and soon back in Dutch Harbor, “I’ve never been so happy to step onto American soil.”

Listen to the CBC Radio Quirks and Quarks where Dr. Pakhomov shared his experience on board a Russian research ship amidst the Russo-Ukrainian War. 

To learn more about how Dr. Pakhomov navigated uncertainty amid Ukraine invasion on board of the Russian research ship, read the article by The Globe and Mail.

Check out the IOF news article to learn more about the 2022 Salmon Pan-Pacific Winter High Seas Expedition.

For the past six months, members of the EOAS department have been working closely with UBC’s School of Music on the collaborative project, “Sounds of Earth”. Catalyzed by a visit from the quintet Axiom Brass in October 2021, graduate students and researchers came together with a student composer and group of student musicians to create a piece expressive of their research. For many, it was an entirely new way of communicating science.

“I’m used to communicating one on one with audiences, so this experience has definitely been different” says Ruth Moore, working with fellow scientist Rachel White and composer Ben Ledocohwski on a piece entitled “Three Degrees”. The pair’s collaboration garnered media coverage in national and local news outlets. Ruth, an MSc student, studies polar amplification and focuses on changes that global warming causes on the hydrological cycle in the Arctic. “Music is one of the most emotive art forms, in my opinion, and it has been really fun” she reflects “but also challenging, thinking of ways in which we can use music and science together to bring forward a message about climate change.”

Communicating through music helped some groups express the heightened stakes of climate affects like glacial retreat, as heard in “Glacial Suite”, a piece composed by Ashley Seward in collaboration with Serena Formenti and Christina Draeger. Other groups explored how the mechanics of music can express minutiae of the scientific process. The piece “Fragmenta” uses overlapping musical structures that move from disjointed disorder to joyful melody, representing the inversion processes that allows geophysicists to pull useful patterns from seemingly chaotic data. Joseph Cabriotti, who worked with the piece’s composer Mariah Mennie, notes that he was surprised to find that inversion is also a specific musical technique; “finding the common ground between these two seemingly unrelated fields made it easier to communicate ideas between them.”

Translating geological or atmospheric processes into the equally complex language of music proved an exciting challenge. Annie Borch and Henry Crawford, working with composer Athena Loredo, grappled with how to express the scale of geologic processes in their collaborative piece, “Tuya”. “Taking tens of thousands of years of glacial and volcanic history and condensing it into a six-minute piece is challenging” Annie reflected, “we wanted to accurately express that timescale, but make sure the piece still retained a compelling musical form.” The collaboration proved to be a great lesson in translating effectively between scientific constraints and musical conventions.

Scientists and musicians first meet at a collaboration fair hosted by Axiom Brass in October

Working with the School of Music allowed some scientists consider their own research. Johan Gilchrist worked with composer Bahar Tahari on the piece “700°C The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes”, a piece that blends the sounds of the brass quintet with field recordings to describe the eerie build up and onset of the devastating 1912 Alaskan eruption of Novarupta volcano. “I’ve learned that recording the sounds of the natural phenomena I study is incredibly valuable and worthwhile” Johan remarked, “in fact, recording everything I observe with all my senses could prove useful for communicating my research in the future.”

Composers, musicians, and scientists came together to share the final musical pieces at the Chan Center on April 19th. After the successful night of performances, the minds behind the collaboration - EOAS’s Kirsten Hodge and the School of Music’s Valerie Whitney - are looking forward to reprising the project next year.

To read more media coverage on the collaboration, check out the following links:

Glacier Media via North Shore News, Castanet, Vancouver is Awesome, New Westminster Record, Alaska Highway News, Tricity News, Pique NewsMagazine, Richmond News, Delta Optimist, Sechelt / Gibsons Coast Reporter, Dawson Creek Mirror, Burnaby Now

Spice Radio

CBC On The Coast

EOAS' Professor Dominique Weis is one of UBC's six newest University Killam Professors speaking at the upcoming panel Research horizons: What now, what next? An evening with UBC's newest University Killam Professors. on Monday, May 2nd from 6:30 onward at the Robert H. Lee Alumni Center. Professor Weis is a renowned leader in the application of trace elements and radiogenic isotopes analysis. Her analytical insight has enabled new discoveries into Earth systems such as mantle plumes and hotspot volcanoes. Through the analysis of a wide range of materials such as honey, salmon, or belongings, her expertise allows the opening of new lines of research into health/epidemiology, local pollution/food security, and archeology/Indigenous-led studies. Professor Weis is a Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in the Geochemistry of the Earth’s mantle, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, of the Geochemical Society and the American Geophysical Union.

Geochemistry helps us understand how the Earth formed and how it works. We can also use geochemistry directly to help in the discovery of mineral resources, in keeping the planet habitable and in assessing how clean our cities are. The potential applications of these tools over the last century have been highly dependent on the development of analytical techniques. These techniques helped us to determine an absolute age for the Earth as recently as 1956. Nowadays, Uranium-Lead dating means we can determine the age of objects and materials with astonishing precision, while using ever-smaller samples–as little as a nanogram. In this presentation, Professor Weis will share recent game-changing applications of geochemistry, looking at volcanoes, environmental biomonitoring, archaeology and anthropology.

The event is free, but has limited space. Reserve your spot by booking a ticket here.

Sam Anderson is a PhD candidate in geophysics working with Dr. Valentina Radic at the University of British Columbia. He is curious about the relationships between ice, water, and people. His research seeks to understand how community-scale water supplies in Western Canada will be shaped by climate change through experiences such as the loss of glaciers and heat waves, and he is interested in applying data science techniques such as deep machine learning to investigate environmental problems. Before his graduate work at UBC, Sam did his undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta, obtaining a BSc in Engineering Physics and specializing in nanoelectronic engineering.

To celebrate Earth Day, the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences joined forces with the School of Music to present a collaborative concert in which student composers worked with Earth science students and faculty to explore the some of the most powerful phenomena on Earth. Join us Tuesday April 19 at 7:30 pm in the Telus Studio Theatre. For more information on the program, visit the Chan Center webpage.

How can students be inspired and motivated to interactively explore complex concepts? The introduction of lightweight, focused, interactive learning apps or dashboards is part of the larger TLEF funded OCESE (Opensource Computing for Earth Science Education) project in EOAS.

Online simulations and datasets are not new, so what’s special about our dashboard learning apps? The answer is that they are designed to enable immediate exploration of a tightly focused concept and/or dataset. Some bring to life complex ideas, such as modeling the factors affecting global temperature, while others enable students to address meaningful problems by exploring and interpreting carefully curated existing data sets. Built largely by students and coded in Python, such dashboards can: 

• Fill the gap between older paper-based resources and current feature-rich, or experts-only datasets and software tools;
• Enable un-guided or guided exploratory engagement with concepts or data; 
• Complement a course’s rigorous treatment of a subject by enabling students to gain intuition through exploration of suitable simulations and datasets; 
• Allow students at any level to focus on the problem or concept without the distraction of complicated new tools or larger-than-necessary data sets. 

Over ten dashboards have been completed or are in progress. All are described briefly at our project website’s dashboard page. They are licensed for open use, and all will become formal, searchable UBC Open Education Resources (OERs). Find details on our one page project outline, or the emerging project website. Below are some snapshots of the dashboards and you can click on the link in the title or the snapshot to interact.

Two examples of process models or simulations for exploring concepts

1. Factors affecting global temperature: Contributions of several natural and anthropogenic factors to the global temperature anomaly are plotted for 1880-2005.

Piloted  in EOSC 112, 116, 326, 340, 425. Links at “Global temperature” on our dashboards page.

2. Unconfined-flow: Interactive model of linear (“1D”) groundwater flow in an unconfined acquifer between two sources, with surface recharge included. 

Piloted in EOSC 325. Links at “Unconfined-flow” on our dashboards page.

Two examples for exploring limited but real data sets

1. Oceanography dataviewer: observe and compare trace element and physical properties in the water column at selected locations in the Southern Ocean, the Atlantic and the North Pacific. 

Piloted in EOSC 372. Links at “ocgy-dataviewer” on our dashboards page.

2. CO₂ concentrations at Mauna Loa (Hawaii) and the South pole since 1958, including simple linear modeling.

Piloted in ENVR 300. Links at “Atmospheric CO2” on our dashboards page.

Reactions from students and instructors

Student’s reactions via survey questions added to an oceanography course assignment (132 students):

Examples of comments from students: 

"I liked how the dashboard exercise applied various concepts using real data from the world's oceans." 
"The online dashboard was quite easy to use and interesting as it allowed us to compare different nutrients/properties profiles in different oceans, synthesizing all the concepts in the course."

Instructor’s feedback (during design/build discussions):

"I am so impressed ... I love how (a) sliders constrain and adjust axes, (b) data at various real stations can be chosen on a map and compared, (c) results can be saved to submit for assessment. … thank you to the team!

Work in progress

We are actively searching for new ideas! Please contact one of our principles with ideas or questions (Tara Ivanochko, Phil Austin, Francis Jones, Lindsey Heagy). We'd love to discuss new dashboard ideas, ways of including new or existing dashboards into your lessons & assignments, or creative ways to have dashboards inspire your students and help them learn. 

• As of March 2022, the OCESE project has 1 more year of funding. Existing dashboards will be fine-tuned based on experiences in use. 
• Costs – i.e. time to develop: It may take anything from a few days (preferred) to extensive effort spanning several terms, depending on the complexity of the app. But an iterative design cycle is important, even with the simplest. 
• The design cycle involves concept-design, prototype code, test, develop the learning task (in-class worksheet, take-home assignment, etc.), iterate, implement, gather feedback, improve. 
• Theoretical framework: Essentially, “guided inquiry” is a good starting point. There is a fairly extensive literature on use of simulations in learning at all levels – especially from the PhET organization at U. Colorado, Boulder. See references on our project website. The main characteristic of most EOAS dashboards is that the code is kept relatively simple, and scope is tightly focused rather than trying to do too much. 
• In EOAS, several third party dashboards are also in use, such as in EOSC 112 (IPCC climate atlas) and EOSC 340 (greenhouse PhET). See our list for some selected examples. Contact OCESE project principles for help with finding and implementing these types of 3rd party interactive learning resources. 
• OCESE project documentation (in progress) includes the growing list of apps, and pages with dashboard development guidelines, ways of deploying dashboards locally or online, and some guidelines for teaching with dashboards. 

Dashboard development credits

• EOAS student contributors: A. Loeppky, J. Byer, F. Rossmann, Y. Egorovo, Y. Kuzmenko.
• EOAS faculty contributors: Austin, Ivanochko, Jones, Heagy, Maldonado, Orians, Waterman, Sutherland, Orsi, Radic, Hodge, Ameli, Hickey.
• See also our complete list of all student and faculty contributors. 

To learn more, and especially if you have an idea for an app that will inspire students and help them learn in EOAS courses, please contact any of the team members listed on the contributors page.

For more EOAS news items, please use the "search" and "filter" options at the top of our news and events page.