From EOS: “How Dangerous Is Mexico’s Popocatépetl? It Depends on Who You Ask”

1.29.24
Katherine Kornei

The stratovolcano in central Mexico presents a rich case study of risk perception, science communication, and preparedness surrounding natural hazards.

Volcano Popocatépetl, north side, view from Paso de Cortez.
9 June 2006
Author Jakub Hejtmánek

If headlines are to be believed, the 22 million people living in the greater metropolitan area of Mexico City are in danger. The menace is Popocatépetl, a volcano that rumbled to life in 1994 after decades of quiescence. Reports frequently use words and phrases such as “threatening” and “booming eruptions” to describe the active stratovolcano 70 kilometers southeast of Mexico’s capital.

The real story is much more nuanced, of course—Popocatépetl poses varying levels of hazards, and people’s views about volcanic activity are framed by their life experiences and shaped by their own perceptions of risk as well as the communication efforts of scientists and governmental officials.

Popocatépetl is, perhaps, the best-known feature of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, which extends more than 600 kilometers across central Mexico. The 5,400-meter-high stratovolcano can be seen from several cities and towns, and it features prominently in Aztec legends as well as the religious beliefs of many contemporary Mexicans, particularly those living in rural communities. Since the mid-1990s, Popocatépetl has become more active and has therefore been a fixture in the news and on social media.

“It’s one of the most active volcanoes in Mexico,” said Lizeth Caballero García, a volcanologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. “It’s considered the riskiest.”

Active Across the Ages

Popocatépetl has a long history of activity: A research team led by Ivan Sunyé Puchol recently estimated that the volcano has erupted explosively more than 25 times over the past 500,000 years. Sunyé Puchol, a geologist at the University of Rome, and his collaborators reconstructed the past activity of Popocatépetl and other volcanoes by age dating layers of pumice, a porous rock born from volcanic eruptions. The Popocatépetl pumice that Sunyé Puchol and his colleagues studied was birthed in sizeable eruptions, events with a volcanic explosivity index (VEI) in the range of 4–6, the team suggests. (For comparison, the 18 May 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State was characterized by a VEI of 5.)

Popocatépetl’s last explosive eruption of significant size occurred roughly 1,100 years ago. However, the volcano rumbled to life again in late 1994 with a series of small eruptions (maximum VEI of 2) that produced a 7-kilometer-high column of ash. Popocatépetl has remained active since then, and light brown ash has repeatedly dusted nearby towns like Tetela del Volcán and even more outlying cities like Puebla and Mexico City. Mudflows of pumice and ash known as lahars have coursed down the volcano’s nearly vertical slopes. Pyroclastic density currents, clouds of hot gas and volcanic debris that race downslope at hundreds of kilometers per hour, have also been reported at Popocatépetl.

“Ash falls, lahars, and pyroclastic density currents are, in my opinion, the real hazards today,” said Sunyé Puchol.

The Cloud and the Governor

But accurately and effectively communicating the various risks posed by Popocatépetl is challenging work. For example, a phenomenon that outwardly appears to be dangerous—an ash cloud towering high in the atmosphere, for instance—might, in fact, pose little risk to nearby populations.

Ana Lillian Martin del Pozzo, a volcanologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, remembers a government official calling her late one night to ask for advice. The state governor was worried because he had seen a big, black cloud in the sky, and he was considering issuing an evacuation order. That’s just ash, Martin del Pozzo assured him, and it wasn’t cause for evacuation. But if that ash starts falling to the ground, she added, residents should take precautions like staying indoors whenever possible and covering their faces when going outside.

Advice like that makes sense to most people, said Martin del Pozzo, because the public generally has a good understanding that inhaling particulate matter can be harmful to the respiratory system (never mind that volcanic ash bears no resemblance to the ash produced by a fire).

However, there’s another deleterious effect of ash exposure that’s much less well-known, she said: “It’s on the eyes.” Volcanic ash, which is composed of bits of glass and rock, can literally abrade the delicate tissues of the ocular system. Symptoms such as redness, itching, and discharge are common, researchers found when they studied people living near an active volcano in Japan. People who live in the shadow of Popocatépetl should take a few simple steps to protect their eyes when ash is falling, said Martin del Pozzo. “Wear glasses. Wear a hat.”

The Shadow of Don Goyo

Not everyone heeds those warnings, however. When Caballero García visited Hueyapan, a small town in the state of Morelos, she heard stories of local women purposely going outside when ash was falling. They knew that the material came from Popocatépetl, a mountain they viewed as being imbued with spiritual power, and were trying to collect ash on their heads, said Caballero García. The women were mainly driven by curiosity, she said, but it’s important to remember that to many Mexicans, Popocatépetl is more than just a volcano.

“Popocatépetl is considered in some towns to be a sacred mountain, with a complex identity between God and human,” Caballero García said.

Popocatépetl appears in Aztec legends, and small towns near the volcano typically feature murals showing Popocatépetl in two forms: the volcanic edifice and an Aztec warrior known as “Don Goyo,” a generally benevolent personification of the volcano associated with Saint Gregory. Either way, “Popo has a human name,” said Caballero García. Every year on 12 March, the birthday of Don Goyo, people hike up the volcano’s flanks to leave offerings of food and flowers.

That duality—Popocatépetl the physical volcano and its spiritual likeness—affects how people conceptualize volcanic risk, which is itself shaped by life experiences and personal beliefs, among other factors.

Between 2013 and 2016, a team of researchers interviewed more than 130 residents of Tetela del Volcán, a town located just 15 kilometers from Popocatépetl’s crater, to better understand local risk perception surrounding Popocatépetl. Some of the participants were young enough that they had grown up knowing the volcano only in its more active phase; others remembered an earlier time when Popocatépetl was dormant.

The researchers found that older adults tended to harbor more symbolic beliefs about Popocatépetl and its personified form of Don Goyo. “The elderly have more conceptions of respect and symbolism with respect to the volcano,” said Esperanza López-Vázquez, a social and environmental psychologist at the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and a member of the research team. Those beliefs correlated with lower perceptions of risk, the team found.

On the other hand, the research revealed that middle-aged adults and adolescents tended to base their impressions of Popocatépetl-related risks more on scientific information. Accordingly, younger people had a greater perception of risk, said López-Vázquez, despite learning about Popocatépetl from the oral histories of their elders. These differences in perceived risk, she said, can “generate tensions between generations.”

Both middle-aged adults and older adults remembered being urged to evacuate Tetela del Volcán in 2000 and 2001 because of increased volcanic activity. Poor road conditions made mass evacuations difficult, residents recalled, and there were underlying feelings of unease and distrust about leaving belongings and farm animals behind. It’s natural to assume that those life experiences would affect someone’s decision to evacuate again in the future, researchers concluded.

Young people had never experienced a Popocatépetl-related evacuation but had grown up accustomed to hearing and feeling the volcano’s rumblings, the team reported. “At the same time you are afraid, but it is something normal, which we are used to,” one young participant said.

Balancing Safety and Personal Beliefs

The residents of Tetela del Volcán clearly differ in their levels of volcanic risk perception, and they employ a wide range of strategies to cope with the presence of an active volcano. Those strategies include everything from personifying the volcano as a benevolent being, to believing that a dearth of recent disasters confers immunity from future hazards, to developing a strong community identity that views relocation as an act of abandonment.

“People have learned to live with the risk of the volcano,” said López-Vázquez.

In light of those varied coping strategies, scientists and policymakers have found it can be difficult to balance the need for public safety and respect for personal beliefs. Mexican officials have tended to err on the side of providing recommendations to avoid particularly risky areas rather than banning access to Popocatépetl entirely, for instance. (People are legally prevented from living within 12 kilometers of the volcano, however).

Helping people feel empowered is an important aspect of disaster preparedness. From ShakeAlert messages that provide warnings to drop and cover before an impending an earthquake to signs posted in coastal areas indicating tsunami evacuation routes, providing information in advance allows people to prepare and therefore feel more capable and confident when a disaster does strike.

In 1997, Mexico’s National Center for Disaster Prevention (CENAPRED) unveiled the first version of a hazards map for Popocatépetl. That map, which was updated again in 2016, indicates regions most likely to be affected by ashfall, lahars, pyroclastic density currents, and lava flows, among other volcanic risks.

The Popocatépetl hazards map is published online in both Spanish and Nahuatl, and it’s regularly publicized via social media, Tomás Alberto Sánchez Pérez, CENAPRED’s director of Communications, told Eos.

But just because a resource is online doesn’t mean that everyone is seeing it, of course. That’s particularly true because Internet access isn’t a given across all of Mexico. Urban centers like Puebla and Mexico City have plenty of connectivity, but many small communities aren’t as digitally equipped, said Sunyé Puchol, who lived near Mexico City from 2012 to 2018. “There are two worlds in Mexico,” he said.

The digital divide between urban and rural populations means that scientists and government officials alike must rely on multiple methods for communicating volcanic risks. The most tried and true, not surprisingly, involve making face-to-face connections.

Connecting in Person

Martin del Pozzo and her collaborators often bring physical copies of the Popocatépetl hazards map into schools and universities. “We’ve been doing that kind of in-person outreach for decades,” she said. “We began working with the people before Popo started erupting.” Martin del Pozzo has watched students grow up, and she’s developed a rapport with educators who invite her back year after year. “We’ve constructed this joint relationship,” she said.

Sunyé Puchol and other researchers have also visited numerous communities near Popocatépetl. In the wake of a magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck central Mexico in 2017, Sunyé Puchol and other volunteers traveled to several small towns to provide relief supplies and talk with community members about the risks posed by natural hazards like earthquakes and volcanic activity. The earthquake itself had killed hundreds of people, and the ground shaking had also triggered several lahars on Popocatépetl. Sunyé Puchol and his colleagues emphasized that sometimes an unrelated hazard—in this case, an earthquake—can affect volcanic risks.

A lot of highly technical scientific data—including measurements of ground deformation, volcanic tremors, and gas emissions, for example—go into predicting Popocatépetl’s risks. But most of those measurements won’t make much sense to the average person, said Sunyé Puchol. It’s critical to distill that information to concepts that are understandable to nonscientists, he stressed. “Science is not finished until you explain it to everyone.”

Red, Yellow, Green

With the goal of facilitating clear communication about Popocatépetl, in 1998 the Mexican National Civil Protection System unveiled an alert system modeled on the familiar colors of a traffic light. The lowest level of the Volcanic Traffic Light Alert System is green and corresponds to very little or no risk. The next level, yellow, indicates a state of alert, and it’s divided into three phases. The highest level, red, means that evacuation might be imminent. Since its inception, the Volcanic Traffic Light Alert System has mostly toggled between the second and third phases of the yellow level.

“We’re hardly ever in green,” said Martin del Pozzo.

The relative simplicity of such a system can be helpful for conveying risk quickly. Similar color-based systems are in widespread use (for indicating fire danger, for example). Such systems are effective at conveying risk quickly in an intuitive way, said Simon Carn, a volcanologist at Michigan Technological University in Houghton. “Most people use these kinds of systems in order to avoid being too quantitative.”

However, there is a downside to keeping the inner workings of the Volcanic Traffic Light Alert System hidden from public view. People were initially skeptical about why the levels of the alert system kept changing, said Martin del Pozzo. That was especially true for populations that lived farther away from the volcano and were therefore more isolated from its impacts. But those communities are not immune: Ash from Popocatépetl has fallen on relatively distant Mexico City more than 19 times since 1994, and schools and airports in the region have occasionally been shuttered in response, most recently in May 2023.

Between 2020 and 2021, Caballero García and Edwin Hazel López Ortíz, an Earth scientist also at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, surveyed more than 4,800 people living in Mexico City. Caballero García and López Ortíz queried the respondents, who ranged in age from 12 to 99, about their scientific understanding of volcanic ash, their recollection of prior Popocatépetl ashfall events, their awareness of measures to protect themselves from falling ash, and their feelings surrounding an ashfall event.

The team noted that although most people knew what volcanic ash was and how it was produced, they were largely unaware of how to protect themselves from it. For example, nearly 90% of people aged 12–24 did not know what to do in the event of ashfall, Caballero García and López Ortíz found. Because younger people tended to seek out news about Popocatépetl predominantly from social media, the team emphasized the importance of sharing protective measures related to ashfall on social media platforms.

Experiencing an ashfall event furthermore triggered a wide range of emotional responses, Caballero García and López Ortíz found. Respondents commonly reported feelings of peril, indifference, interest, fear, and surprise. For participants old enough to have experienced an ashfall event in the past, a fresh dusting of ash was also an opportunity for a teaching moment. It allowed people who are parents, said Caballero García, to tell their children about Popocatépetl and how to remain safe.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that individuals who remembered an ashfall event were more likely to believe that ash could once again blanket their home or place of work. People who were aware of Popocatépetl’s hazards map were more likely to feel prepared in the event of falling ash, Caballero García and López Ortíz reported at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2021.

Never Deny

Like other natural hazards, volcanoes clearly manifest their risks in complicated ways. “We can’t predict eruptions very accurately,” said Carn. Moreover, he continued, events like falling ash can be affected by other phenomena that are themselves unpredictable. For instance, “ashfall depends on where the wind is blowing,” he said. “That adds further uncertainty.”

In the face of all that ambiguity, what’s a person to do? López-Vázquez maintained that no one particular mindset is healthiest when it comes to internalizing volcanic risks. Instead, she said, the key is acknowledging that there is always some level of risk associated with living near a volcano like Popocatépetl. “The most important thing is not to deny that it exists.”

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply” at the bottom of the post.

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“Eos” is the leading source for trustworthy news and perspectives about the Earth and space sciences and their impact. Its namesake is Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, who represents the light shed on understanding our planet and its environment in space by the Earth and space sciences.

From “BBC (UK)” Via “EarthSky” : “Iceland braces for volcanic eruption”

From BBC (UK)

Via

EarthSky

11.11.23
Deborah Byrd

Fagradalsfjall volcano might be poised to erupt again.

Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland *New Scientist*.

The BBC and other media are reporting today (November 11, 2023) that Iceland has declared a state of emergency after a series of earthquakes raised fears of a volcanic eruption at Fagradalsfjall volcano. The BBC said:

“Authorities have ordered thousands living in the southwestern town of Grindavík to evacuate … The Icelandic Met Office says it is concerned large amounts of magma – molten rock- is spreading underground and could surface there.

Thousands of tremors have been recorded around the nearby Fagradalsfjall volcano in recent weeks.”

And the Icelandic Met Office reported near midnight last night that:

“The seismic activity has moved south towards Grindavík.”

The tremors have been concentrated in Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. This area had remained dormant to volcanic activity for 800 years before a 2021 eruption of Fagradalsfjall.

When Fagradalsfjall volcano woke up

The 2021 Fagradalsfjall eruption was unexpected. Since then, the volcano has become an attraction for local people and foreign tourists.

Another eruption, very similar to the 2021 eruption, began on August 3, 2022, and ceased on August 21, 2022. A third eruption appeared to the north of Fagradalsfjall on July 10, 2023, and ended on August 5, 2023.

Report from the Met Office

The Icelandic Met Office had reported earlier on November 10:

“Significant changes have occurred in the seismic activity measured near Sundhnjúkagígar north of Grindavík and deformation observed in the Reykjanes Peninsula this afternoon … In light of this outcome, the police chief in Suðurnes, in cooperation with the Civil Protection Authorities, has decided to evacuate Grindavík.

An emergency level of civil protection is now in effect. This is not an emergency evacuation. Residents of Grindavík are advised to proceed with caution.

At this stage, it is not possible to determine exactly whether and where magma might reach the surface. There are indications that a considerable amount of magma is moving in an area extending from Sundhnjúkagígum in the north towards Grindavík. The amount of magma involved is significantly more than what was observed in the largest magma intrusions associated with the eruptions at Fagradalsfjall.

Further data is being collected to calculate models that provide a more accurate picture of the magma intrusion. It is currently not possible to say when this work will be completed.”

‘Panic’ at a popular tourist area

Authorities called for calm, but the evacuations have not always been smooth. Associated Press reported on November 10 that there was “panic” at the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa – one of Iceland’s biggest tourist attractions. AP said the spa:

“… closed temporarily as a swarm of earthquakes put the island nation’s most populated region on alert for a possible volcanic eruption.”

Guests rushed to leave the spa’s hotels in the early hours of Thursday, after they were rattled awake shortly before 1 a.m. by a magnitude 4.8 quake, the strongest to hit the region since the recent wave of seismic activity began on October 25.

Bjarni Stefansson, a local taxi driver, described a scene of confusion when he arrived at the Retreat Hotel, where lava rocks had fallen on the roadway and the parking lot was jammed with 20 to 30 cabs.

‘There was a panic situation,’ Stefansson told The Associated Press. ‘People thought a volcanic eruption was about to happen.’

See the full article here .

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From The Carnegie Institution for Science: “Uncovering Alaska’s Hidden Caldera”

From The Carnegie Institution for Science

11.3.23

All signs point to “supervolcano!”

In 2020, Carnegie Science volcanologist Diana Roman and her colleagues revealed that the Islands of Four Mountains in Alaska may be the location of a giant 166,000-year-old volcano. During a recent Neighborhood Lecture at Carnegie’s Broad Branch Road campus in Washington, D.C., Roman laid out the evidence to an eager crowd of more than 300 attendees.

“I played a bit of a trick to get you here,” stated Roman to a chuckling audience. “You may have noted we put ‘supervolcano’ in quotes. Volcanologists hate that term.”

“From here on out, we’ll use the word caldera.”

Discovering Alaska’s Hidden “Supervolcano”

The Call of Cleveland

On the remote eastern end of the Aleutian Arc in the northern Pacific Ocean are the Islands of Four Mountains.

Islands of the Four Mountains with volcanoes named. Image courtesy Quantum Spatial Photo, via Power, et al, Dec 2020 via Volcano Discovery

About the Islands of the Four Mountains [IFM]
The Aleutian Islands extend between America and Asia across 2300 kilometers (1400 miles). The Islands of the Four Mountains are located on the eastern end of the chain, between the Fox Islands and the Andreanof Islands.

Islands in the IFM include Amukta, Chagulak, Yunaska, Herbert, Carlisle, Chuginadak, Uliaga, and Kagamil. All of these islands are volcanic, with Mt Cleveland on Chuginadak Island currently the most active. The IFM project is focused on three of these islands, Herbert, Carlisle, and Chuginadak.
Herbert Island is the westernmost of these three islands. It is approximately 10 km in diameter, is ca 1300 m in height, and has a rugged shoreline with high cliffs and very few bays.

Carlisle Island is the northernmost of the three islands and is also considered an active volcano although it has not erupted in recent times. It is 6.9 km in diameter and extends to 1610 m in height. Similar to Herbert, it has a rugged coastline with cliffs and deeply cut ravines with no bays or harbors.

Chuginadak is the largest of the Islands of the Four Mountains, 23 km by 9.7 km in size, and includes two mountain masses joined by an isthmus of coalesced lava flows and volcanic debris, with a stratovolcano, Mt Cleveland, on the west side of the island that extends to 1730 m in height. This island has protective harbors and inlets as well as rugged shorelines.

This chain comprises six tightly grouped volcanoes: Carlisle, Cleveland, Herbert, Kagamil, Tana, and Uliaga. Roman and her team—a powerhouse crew of several current and former Carnegie experts including Staff Scientists Lara Wagner and Hélène Le Mével, as well as then-postdocs Daniel Portner and Helen Janiszewski— were there to study Mount Cleveland.

Diana Roman on the flank of the Cleveland Volcano in 2016. She was dropped off near this location by helicopter, carrying everything she needed to survive for a few days in the Aleutian Islands. Tana Volcano on Chuginadak Island is visible in the background. Image courtesy Anna Barth.

“We did not go to the Island of Four Mountains thinking there was a massive caldera system there,” explained Roman.

Unlike its neighboring volcanoes, Mount Cleveland exhibited frequent and low-level volcanic activity. Roman and her team’s growing suspicion that something more substantial lies beneath the islands led them on a quest to uncover the truth.

Caldera Clues

An illustration of the islands that comprise the Islands of Four Mountains highlighting the ring structure at the edge of the hypothesized caldera.

Roman presented the initial clue to the audience in the form of a ring of islands, a typical feature associated with calderas. A caldera forms when a massive volcanic eruption empties a magma reservoir in the Earth’s crust, causing the land to collapse into an immense depression. The catastrophic nature of these eruptions, often felt worldwide, has historically caused significant societal disruptions.

“People have looked at rings of volcanoes and suggested they were calderas before when they were not,” cautioned Roman. “We could be wrong.”

To test for the presence of an underwater caldera, Roman’s team first relied on data from seafloor maps and satellites and collaborated with geo-archaeologists, who had samples of welded ash sheets from Tana—one of the oldest islands in the chain.

940’s-era NOAA bathymetry (left) confirmed by raw depth soundings from commercial fishing vessels (right).

“Welded ash sheets can only occur close to the source of an active vent,” Roman explained. “As the ash gets farther away, it can’t do this sort of welding together. So, we think this deposit was sourced somewhere close to Tana.”

Dating revealed that these samples were 166,000-years old.

Looking for Action Underground

Now that the team had stronger evidence of the caldera, they needed to see if it was still active.

However, this was all happening in 2020, when fieldwork was restricted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This forced the researchers to use innovative techniques to explore the potential caldera. Carnegie geodesist Helene le Mevel employed satellite gravity measurements to detect density anomalies beneath the seafloor, suggesting the presence of low-density molten rock lurking beneath the surface, a possible indicator of an active caldera.

Satellite gravity measurements show a low-density (dark blue) gravity anomaly beneath the hypothesized location of the caldera, suggesting there could be molten rock beneath the surface.

Back in the Saddle

In 2022, Roman and her team finally set out on an expedition to the region, traveling alongside another research team. Despite facing a hurricane, they managed to install nine seismometers across the chain. This equipment will allow scientists to probe the hidden caldera’s internal structure and activity.

The data they gather will allow the researchers to “see” the inside of the caldera like CAT scans let doctors see inside people’s bodies. The researchers hope that results from this work will provide strong evidence that this island ring is hiding an active caldera beneath the water.

They will go back to collect their data in 2024.

Map of seismometer placement on the Islands of Four Mountains. The red ring indicates the suggested location of the caldera.

Old Crow Geochemistry Show

In a surprising development, the team discovered a massive lava flow on one of the islands, strongly suggesting a source vent for the Old Crow Tephra—an extensive ash deposit in the Yukon and Alaska with an unknown origin. Geochemical analysis of the lava flow closely matched the Old Crow, providing evidence for the lava flow’s connection to the caldera.

While they await an age date for confirmation, Roman remains cautiously optimistic about this revelation.

“This is a big, big lava flow. These are only found in association with big calderas,” Roman told the crowd. “We think this might be the source vent.”

Cataclysm on the Horizon? Probably Not.

Although low-level volcanic activity continues in the Islands of Four Mountains, Roman reassured her audience that a massive eruption is unlikely to occur anytime soon. These calderas typically exhibit periodic low-level eruptions rather than catastrophic events.

“With these kinds of calderas, you can have a leak on the edge, and it’s just going to keep rolling with low-level eruptions like we see at Cleveland,” Roman said.

“Cleveland is going to keep Cleveland-ing.”

Roman concluded-

“I want to end with a promise that our understanding of these beautiful and terrifying systems, these volcanic systems that both enable and threaten the habitability of our planet, is on the cusp of a revolution.”

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply” near the bottom of the post.

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The Carnegie Institution for Science

Andrew Carnegie established a unique organization dedicated to scientific discovery “to encourage in the broadest and most liberal manner investigation; research; and discovery and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind…” The philosophy was and is to devote the institution’s resources to “exceptional” individuals so that they can explore the most intriguing scientific questions in an atmosphere of complete freedom. Carnegie and his trustees realized that flexibility and freedom were essential to the institution’s success and that tradition is the foundation of the institution today as it supports research in the Earth, space, and life sciences.

The Carnegie Institution of Washington (the organization’s legal name), known also for public purposes as the Carnegie Institution for Science, is an organization in the United States established to fund and perform scientific research. The institution is headquartered in Washington, D.C. As of June 30, 2020, the Institution’s endowment was valued at $926.9 million. In 2018 the expenses for scientific programs and administration were $96.6 million.

History

When the United States joined World War II Vannevar Bush was president of the Carnegie Institution. Several months before on June 12, 1940 Bush had been instrumental in persuading President Franklin Roosevelt to create the National Defense Research Committee (later superseded by the Office of Scientific Research and Development) to mobilize and coordinate the nation’s scientific war effort. Bush housed the new agency in the Carnegie Institution’s administrative headquarters at 16th and P Streets, NW, in Washington, DC, converting its rotunda and auditorium into office cubicles. From this location Bush supervised, among many other projects the Manhattan Project. Carnegie scientists cooperated with the development of the proximity fuse and mass production of penicillin.

Research

Carnegie scientists continue to be involved with scientific discovery. Composed of six scientific departments on the East and West Coasts the Carnegie Institution for Science is involved presently with six main topics: Astronomy at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (Washington, D.C.) and the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (Pasadena, CA and Las Campanas, Chile); Earth and planetary science also at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and the Geophysical Laboratory (Washington, D.C.); Global Ecology at the Department of Global Ecology (Stanford, CA); Genetics and developmental biology at the Department of Embryology (Baltimore, MD); Matter at extreme states also at the Geophysical Laboratory; and Plant science at the Department of Plant Biology (Stanford, CA).

Mt Wilson Hooker 100 inch Telescope, Mount Wilson, California, Altitude 1,742 m (5,715 ft). Credit: Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Credit: Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Carnegie 6.5 meter Magellan Baade and Clay Telescopes located at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high.

Carnegie Institution for Science ‘s Las Campanas Observatory on Cerro Pachón in the southern Atacama Desert of Chile in the Atacama Region approximately 100 kilometres (62 mi) northeast of the city of La Serena,near the southern end and over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high.

Carnegie Las Campanas 2.5 meter Irénée Dupont telescope, Atacama Desert, over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high approximately 100 kilometres (62 mi) northeast of the city of La Serena,Chile.

Carnegie Institution 1-meter Swope telescope at Las Campanas, Chile, 100 kilometres (62 mi) northeast of the city of La Serena, near the north end of a 7 km (4.3 mi) long mountain ridge, Cerro Las Campanas, near the southern end and over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high, at Las Campanas, Chile.

Giant Magellan Telescope(CL) 21 meters, to be at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las Campanas Observatory(CL) some 115 km (71 mi) north-northeast of La Serena, Chile, over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high.

From The California Institute of Technology Via “phys.org” : “One of California’s riskiest volcanoes is very active. Is an eruption coming?”

From The California Institute of Technology

Via

“phys.org”

One of California’s riskiest volcanoes has for decades been undergoing geological changes and seismic activity, which are sometimes a precursor to an eruption, but—thankfully—no supervolcanic eruptions are expected.

That’s according to Caltech researchers who have been studying the Long Valley Caldera, which includes the Mammoth Lakes area in Mono County. The caldera was classified in 2018 by the U.S. Geological Survey as one of three volcanoes in the state—along with 15 elsewhere in the U.S.—considered a “very high threat,” the highest-risk category defined by the agency.

Long Valley Caldera Field Guide. USGS.

Long Valley Caldera. https://www.molossia.org

Long Valley Caldera. https://sierra.sitehost.iu.edu/papers/2010/jarosinski.html

The two other volcanoes in California with that classification are Mt. Shasta in Siskiyou County and the Lassen Volcanic Center, which includes Lassen Peak in Shasta County. The threat assessment is not a list of which volcanoes are most likely to erupt or a ranking of those that are most active; rather, it’s defined as a combination of a volcano’s potential threat and the number of people and properties exposed to it.

The scientists’ findings were published last week in the journal Science Advances [below].

The Long Valley Caldera is a broad depression of land east of the Sierra Nevada. It’s roughly 40 miles east of Yosemite Valley, 200 miles east of San Francisco and 250 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. A caldera is formed when magma erupts or is otherwise taken out from beneath the ground.

The Long Valley Caldera was formed by a super-eruption about 760,000 years ago that blasted 140 cubic miles of magma, covering much of east-central California in hot ash that was blown as far away as present-day Nebraska.

Scientists have long scrutinized the Long Valley Caldera, where there have been noticeable increases in earthquakes and the ground fluctuations that began four decades ago. Notably, there were four magnitude 6 earthquakes in the Long Valley area in May 1980.

Generally speaking, changes in the shape of the ground and earthquake activity are commonly observed before eruptions—but those things do not necessarily mean an eruption will arrive soon.

Researchers have long thought the risk of a supervolcanic eruption in the Long Valley Caldera in our lifetime is extremely low, given that overall, the magma underneath the area is clearly cooling—essentially continuing to calm down.

Still, the recent geological phenomena posed an important question for scientists: What does the increased seismic activity and deformation of the ground mean? Is it a precursor to something alarming?

Fundamentally, scientists sought answers to two questions, said Emily Montgomery-Brown, a USGS research geophysicist who was not involved in the Caltech study. Was there enough magma in connected segments of the underground reservoir to combine and erupt? Or was there a more reassuring explanation for the earthquakes and ground movement, specifically that as the cooling magma crystallized and solidified, were other non-magma fluids now coming to the surface and triggering quakes?

The Caltech scientists concluded that the latter explanation appears to be the answer. That’s based on high-resolution underground images re-created with the use of several dozen seismometers, earthquake measurements and a machine-learning algorithm, according to the university.

“We don’t think the region is gearing up for another supervolcanic eruption, but the cooling process may release enough gas and liquid to cause earthquakes and small eruptions,” Zhongwen Zhan, a Caltech professor of geophysics and a study co-author, said in a statement.

There are some scientists who suspect the Long Valley Caldera as a volcano is moribund—essentially dead— and the increased seismic activity, when it happens, is being generated by fluids that are not magma, but are still hot and moving to the surface as the magma cools and solidifies. Others, however, argue the Long Valley Caldera is active.

Montgomery-Brown, an expert on the Long Valley Caldera who is now with the USGS’ Cascades Volcano Observatory, said the most recent episode of increased earthquake activity in the area began in 2011 and was accompanied by a ground deformation in which the land started to rise. That activity has tapered off, and since 2020, a quiet phase has resumed.

But a magmatic eruption is still something to consider, she said. While the Long Valley Caldera itself is old and its magma is cooling and crystallizing, “there are extremely young lava flows” along the nearby Mono-Inyo Craters chain.

“And so even if the Long Valley magma reservoir is moribund, there are other pockets of magma in the area,” Montgomery-Brown said.

And it’s important to understand the area still poses a significant threat and remains capable of powerful earthquake swarms.

California’s other volcanoes also pose risks. And eruptions could have lasting repercussions that affect the entire state.

Volcanic ash, when wet, is conductive and could disrupt high-voltage lines that supply electricity to millions of California homes. It could interfere with travel on Interstate 5, the main route between California and Oregon, masking windshields and making roads slippery, even impassable.

Ash could disrupt hundreds of daily flights in Northern California or the Mammoth Mountain area or bring down jetliners. And it could contaminate water supplies to much of the state (California’s largest reservoirs are close to the Shasta and Lassen volcanoes).

Mt. Shasta, California’s largest volcano, had many eruptions in prehistoric times but has remained quiet in the modern era. And like the Long Valley Caldera, the magma beneath Lassen Volcanic Center is showing clear signs of cooling and contracting, Montgomery-Brown said.

California’s last major destructive volcanic eruption came more than a century ago. Lassen Peak underwent a series of eruptions between 1914 and 1917. One explosive eruption in 1915 obliterated a forest and created a gigantic mushroom cloud 30,000 feet high that could be seen as far as away as Eureka and Sacramento and blew volcanic ash 280 miles out, reaching Elko, Nev.

Science Advances

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The California Institute of Technology is a private research university in Pasadena, California. The university is known for its strength in science and engineering, and is one among a small group of institutes of technology in the United States which is primarily devoted to the instruction of pure and applied sciences.

The California Institute of Technology was founded as a preparatory and vocational school by Amos G. Throop in 1891 and began attracting influential scientists such as George Ellery Hale, Arthur Amos Noyes, and Robert Andrews Millikan in the early 20th century. The vocational and preparatory schools were disbanded and spun off in 1910 and the college assumed its present name in 1920. In 1934, The California Institute of Technology was elected to the Association of American Universities, and the antecedents of National Aeronautics and Space Administration ‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which The California Institute of Technology continues to manage and operate, were established between 1936 and 1943 under Theodore von Kármán.

The California Institute of Technology has six academic divisions with strong emphasis on science and engineering. Its 124-acre (50 ha) primary campus is located approximately 11 mi (18 km) northeast of downtown Los Angeles. First-year students are required to live on campus, and 95% of undergraduates remain in the on-campus House System at The California Institute of Technology. Although The California Institute of Technology has a strong tradition of practical jokes and pranks, student life is governed by an honor code which allows faculty to assign take-home examinations. The The California Institute of Technology Beavers compete in 13 intercollegiate sports in the NCAA Division III’s Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC).

As of October 2020, there are 76 Nobel laureates who have been affiliated with The California Institute of Technology, including 40 alumni and faculty members (41 prizes, with chemist Linus Pauling being the only individual in history to win two unshared prizes). In addition, 4 Fields Medalists and 6 Turing Award winners have been affiliated with The California Institute of Technology. There are 8 Crafoord Laureates and 56 non-emeritus faculty members (as well as many emeritus faculty members) who have been elected to one of the United States National Academies. Four Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force and 71 have won the United States National Medal of Science or Technology. Numerous faculty members are associated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as well as National Aeronautics and Space Administration. According to a 2015 Pomona College study, The California Institute of Technology ranked number one in the U.S. for the percentage of its graduates who go on to earn a PhD.

Research

The California Institute of Technology is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity”. Caltech was elected to The Association of American Universities in 1934 and remains a research university with “very high” research activity, primarily in STEM fields. The largest federal agencies contributing to research are National Aeronautics and Space Administration; National Science Foundation; Department of Health and Human Services; Department of Defense, and Department of Energy.

In 2005, The California Institute of Technology had 739,000 square feet (68,700 m^2) dedicated to research: 330,000 square feet (30,700 m^2) to physical sciences, 163,000 square feet (15,100 m^2) to engineering, and 160,000 square feet (14,900 m^2) to biological sciences.

In addition to managing NASA-JPL/Caltech , The California Institute of Technology also operates the Caltech Palomar Observatory; The Owens Valley Radio Observatory;the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory; the W. M. Keck Observatory at the Mauna Kea Observatory; the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory at Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington; and Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory in Corona del Mar, California. The Institute launched the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at The California Institute of Technology in 2006; the Keck Institute for Space Studies in 2008; and is also the current home for the Einstein Papers Project. The Spitzer Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center located on The California Institute of Technology campus, is the data analysis and community support center for NASA’s Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope [no longer in service].

Caltech Palomar Observatory. Credit: The California Institute of Technology, Altitude 1,713 m (5,620 ft), located in San Diego County, California.

California Institute of Technology The Owens Valley Radio Observatory, Owens Valley, California, Altitude 1,222 m (4,009 ft). Credit: Caltech.

Caltech’s Deep Synoptic Array-2000, or DSA-2000, an array of 2,000 radio antennas planned to be built in the Nevada desert and begin operations in 2027.

W.M. Keck Observatory two ten meter telescopes operated by California Institute of Technology and The University of California, at Mauna Kea Observatory, Hawai’i, altitude 4,207 m (13,802 ft). Credit: Caltech.

Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo. Credit: Caltech.

Caltech/MIT Advanced aLigo Hanford, WA installation. Credit: Caltech.

Caltech/MIT Advanced aLigo detector installation Livingston, LA. Credit: Caltech.

The California Institute of Technology partnered with University of California-Los Angeles to establish a Joint Center for Translational Medicine (UCLA-Caltech JCTM), which conducts experimental research into clinical applications, including the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancer.

The California Institute of Technology operates several Total Carbon Column Observing Network stations as part of an international collaborative effort of measuring greenhouse gases globally. One station is on campus.

From The California Institute of Technology Via “Science Alert (AU)” : “Giant Supervolcano in California Is Sleepy But Scientists Say It’s Restless”

From The California Institute of Technology

Via

“Science Alert (AU)”

10.29.23
CARLY CASSELLA

A diagram depicting the magma chamber beneath the Long Valley Caldera. The diagram was developed from tomographic imaging using seismic waves. (Biondi et al. Science Advances, 2023)

A new study from researchers at the California Institute of Technology (CIT) suggests the Long Valley Caldera in eastern California is restlessly tossing and turning as its deep magma chamber cools down for a big, long sleep.

The last time the volcano blew was roughly 100,000 years ago. Long before that, it spewed up enough ash to bury the modern city of Los Angeles beneath a kilometer of sediment.

Today, the Long Valley volcano exists in a relatively sluggish state. But all is not quiet on California’s eastern front. In the late 1970s, a swarm of earthquakes began to emanate from the caldera – a depression that sits atop the buried volcano.

For decades thereafter, the volcano produced regular periods of “pronounced unrest”, which inflated and deflated the ground.

Thankfully, that isn’t necessarily a sign of impending doom. Researchers at CIT have now found evidence that all this fussy activity is due to the supervolcano cooling down, not heating up.

“For example, in May 1980, there were four magnitude 6 earthquakes in the region alone.”

The team’s findings are based on data collected from a 100-kilometer stretch of fiber optic cable using distributed acoustic sensing.

Over the course of a year and a half, researchers at Caltech used this interconnected system – which is equivalent to 10,000 individual seismometers – to catalog more than 2,000 seismic events, many of which would not have been felt by humans on the ground.

This data was then plugged into a machine learning algorithm, which turned the measurements into a high-resolution map of the caldera and the volcano that lies beneath.

Ettore Biondi, a seismologist from Caltech and first author on the study, says this is the first time that a network of deeply distributed acoustic sensors has revealed Earth’s interior dynamics.

The images produced are of “exceptional lateral resolution” in depths up to 8 kilometers, the team says. Even images of deeper portions, up to 30 kilometers down, were achieved with a “remarkable level of detail”.

The findings show a definite separation between the large magma chamber of the volcano, sitting 12 kilometers below the surface, and the shallow hydrothermal system that sits above.

It seems that as the deeper chamber cools off, gasses and liquids bubble up toward the surface, possibly causing the quakes and inflated ground.

This boiling effect could “induce the observed surface deformation and seismicity,” researchers write.

This is different and far less hazardous than what happens during an active volcanic eruption when magma in the chamber of the volcano forces itself up into the upper crust and out into the world.

The way seismic activity travels through these layers suggests the top of the magma chamber has a hardened lid of crystallized rock, which has cooled over time.

As the supervolcano’s activity winds down, researchers say its “beating heart” is gradually slowing.

The team plans to measure those last beats at 20 kilometers deep with a 200-kilometer-long cable of seismic sensors.

The study was published in Science Advances.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi9878

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Research

From The California Institute of Technology: “California Supervolcano is Cooling Off but May Still Cause Quakes”

From The California Institute of Technology

10.18.23
Lori Dajose

Credit: Caltech.

Since the 1980s, researchers have observed significant periods of unrest in a region of California’s Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains characterized by swarms of earthquakes as well as the ground inflating and rising by almost half an inch per year during these periods. The activity is concerning because the area, called the Long Valley Caldera, sits atop a massive dormant supervolcano. Seven hundred and sixty thousand years ago, the Long Valley Caldera was formed in a violent eruption that sent 650 cubic kilometers of ash into the air—a volume that could cover the entire Los Angeles area in a layer of sediment 1 kilometer thick.

A diagram depicting the magma chamber beneath the Long Valley Caldera. The diagram was developed from tomographic imaging using seismic waves. Credit: Biondi et al. (2023).

What is behind the increased activity in the last few decades? Could it be that the area is preparing to erupt again? Or could the uptick in activity actually be a sign that the risk of a massive eruption is decreasing?

To answer these questions, Caltech researchers have created the most detailed underground images to date of the Long Valley Caldera, reaching depths up to 10 kilometers within the Earth’s crust. These high-resolution images reveal the structure of the earth beneath the caldera and show that the recent seismic activity is a result of fluids and gases being released as the area cools off and settles down.

The work was conducted in the laboratory of Zhongwen Zhan (PhD ’14), professor of geophysics. A paper describing the research appears in the journal Science Advances [below] on October 18.

“We don’t think the region is gearing up for another supervolcanic eruption, but the cooling process may release enough gas and liquid to cause earthquakes and small eruptions,” says Zhan. “For example, in May 1980, there were four magnitude 6 earthquakes in the region alone.”

The high-resolution image shows that the volcano’s magma chamber is covered by a hardened lid of crystallized rock, formed as the liquid magma cools down and solidifies.

To create underground images, the researchers infer what the subsurface environment looks like by measuring seismic waves from earthquakes. Earthquakes generate of two types of seismic waves: primary (P-waves) and secondary (S-waves). Both kinds of waves travel at different speeds through different materials—waves are slowed down by elastic materials like liquids but travel quickly through very rigid materials like rock. Using seismometers at various locations allows one to measure discrepancies in the timing of the waves and determine the characteristics of the materials—how elastic or rigid—they traveled through. In this way, researchers can create images of the subsurface environment.

Though there are several dozen seismometers placed throughout the Eastern Sierra region, Zhan’s technique utilizes fiber optic cables (like those that provide internet) to make seismic measurements in a process called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). The 100-kilometer stretch of cable used to image the Long Valley Caldera was comparable to a stretch of 10,000 single-component seismometers. Over a year and a half, the team used the cable to measure more than 2,000 seismic events, most too small to be felt by people. A machine learning algorithm processed those measurements and developed the resulting image.

This study is the first time that such deep, high-resolution images have been created with DAS. Previous images from local tomography studies have either been confined only to the shallow subsurface environment at depths of about 5 kilometers, or covered a larger area in lower resolution.

“This is one of the first demonstrations of how DAS can change our understanding of crustal dynamics,” says Ettore Biondi, DAS scientist at Caltech and the paper’s first author. “We’re excited to apply similar technology to other regions where we are curious about the subsurface environment.”

Next, the team plans to use a 200-kilometer length of cable to image even deeper into the Earth’s crust, to around 15 to 20 kilometers deep, where the caldera’s magma chamber—its “beating heart”—is cooling.

Science Advances

Fig. 1. Study area and local and regional events from DAS array.

(A) Map of the study area in which the distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) channels (green line), seismic stations (blue triangles), and earthquakes (red dots) are indicated. The black dashed line delineates the limit of the Long Valley Caldera. The white arrows point to the two events shown in the bottom panels. The red box in the map inset indicates the study area within the United States. (B and C) Strain recorded by the DAS arrays induced by local events with Northern California Earthquake Data Center (NCEDC) double-difference (DD) catalog IDs 73482516 and 73491170, respectively. The red and blue curves in these panels show the P- and S-wave neural network–picked travel times on these two events, respectively. M, Magnitude.
See the science paper for further instructive material with images.

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From “Science Alert (AU)” : “Glass Shards of Ancient Volcanic Eruption Found in Antarctic Ice 3000 Miles Away”

From “Science Alert (AU)”

10.11.23
Clare Watson

(jacus/iStock/Getty Images)

Nearly 2,000 years ago, when Rome was at its peak, a volcano erupted on New Zealand’s North Island with such violence it was thought to have cast a pall over the empire’s lands half a world away.

Scientists have now unearthed six glass shards traced to the heat of the explosion, flung 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) south where they lay buried beneath 280 meters of Antarctic ice for some 2,000 years.

A seventh shard, formed from an earlier eruption of the same volcano, helped the team pinpoint their exact origins, and helped confirm the timing of the explosive event.

“Combined, the seven shards provide a unique and undeniable double fingerprint of the Taupō volcano as the source,” says environmental scientist Stephen Piva, the study’s lead author and a PhD candidate at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington.

The Taupō volcano has been active for about 300,000 years, but the timing of its most recent major eruption – one of the largest and most energetic eruptions on Earth in the past 5,000 years – has been surprisingly hard to pin down.

Historical records from ancient Rome and China describing events around 186 CE [Nature (below)] and [Nature (below)]suggest a distant volcanic eruption clouded their skies, half a world away: the Sun rose “red as blood and lacking light” and “the heavens were ablaze”, two scribes wrote.

Vivid as those descriptions might be, they don’t quite line up with the geological record. Sulfur deposits in ice cores are the usual signal of volcanic activity, and ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland narrowed the timing of the Taupō eruption to around 230 CE, give or take a few decades.

Sulfur is ejected from volcanoes all over the world though, so it’s not nearly as precise as scientists would like. Radiocarbon dates of tree logs entombed in hot volcanic flows from the Taupō eruption refined its timing to around 232 CE (1,790 years ago). Fruits and seeds on those preserved trees, and their lack of darker, outer latewood, suggested the volcano blew its top in late summer or autumn, but the year of the eruption was still disputed.

So Piva and colleagues turned to an ice core 764 meters long, extracted from the Ross Ice Sheet in West Antarctica and packed with some 83,000 years of climate information.

At a depth of 279 meters the researchers found seven glass shards about 10 to 20 microns long and made of the granite-like mineral rhyolite.

Scanning electron microscope images of the glass shards from the Antarctic ice core. (Piva et al., Scientific Reports, 2023)

Their geochemical make-up matched other samples from the Taupō eruption, collected in New Zealand. One shard in particular stood out: it was a match for volcanic glass produced by the earlier Ōruanui supereruption of the Taupō volcano, which occurred 25,600 years ago.

This ‘double fingerprint’ of Taupō gave the researchers extra confidence as to the glass shards’ source, while their position in the ice core was dated to the early months of a year close to 230 CE.

The Ōruanui glass, being centuries older but made of the same material, was likely unearthed from the Taupō volcano and expelled into the stratosphere along with the newly formed glass shards of the 230 CE eruption.

“A massive eruption plume would have sent a huge volume of volcanic particles into the air where they would have been widely dispersed by the wind,” explains Piva.

While there is still some margin of error with ice core dating, the researchers say their findings validate the age estimate of the buried tree logs, which likely died in an instant when engulfed by the Taupō volcano’s blistering hot ejecta.

“Confirming the eruption date provides an opportunity to study the volcano’s potential global effects on the atmosphere and climate, which is crucial for better understanding its eruptive history and behavior,” Piva says.

The study has been published in Scientific Reports.

Figure 1

Location of the RICE (green circles), WDC06A (dark blue circles), and SPC14 (purple circles) ice cores, and Mt. Berlin and Mt. Melbourne volcanoes (red circles) in Antarctica relative to the location of Taupō volcano, New Zealand (red star; after Dunbar et al.13*). Inset map of New Zealand shows the location of the main eruptive vent (red triangle) and Pureora buried forest (pink circle: Clarkson et al.62*), as well as the outer limit of the Taupō ignimbrite (red line) and tephra fallout isopachs (dashed lines; summed thickness of all phases in cm) from the Taupō eruption (after Wilson and Walker28*; Wilson29*). Inset map of Antarctica (after Howat et al.70*; Johnson et al.71*) shows the location of the targeted ice cores relative to other Antarctic ice cores (light blue circles). For more information about the characteristics of the selected ice cores refer to Table S1.
*Studies cited in science paper.
See this science paper for further instructive material with images.

Nature 1980
Nature 2018

Fig. 1

Radiocarbon ages for the Taupo First Millennium eruption in relation to distance and direction from the eruptive vent. Ages are oldest nearest the vent (“Taupo”) and youngest away from the Taupo Volcanic Zone (Data in Supplementary Information Table 1). a Relationship between median calibrated age and distance from the presumed vent: yellow, local regression, 0.6 smoothing factor; blue, linear regressions for sample median ages 60 km from vent, with 95% confidence limits; vertical broken line, limit of linear relationship between distance and age; white broken line, date of eruption from second wiggle match analysis; red, oldest; blue, youngest. Outer wood wiggle match age distribution in red. Note monotonic distributions of ages on samples >60 km from the vent, with 90+% of their distributions younger than the wiggle match age. 1, NZ165, on material from Arapuni, adjacent to the Waikato River; 2, NZ1059, on peat from Lake Poukawa, probability distribution (darker shading) extends well into the calibrated range of the monotonic distant ages. b Geographic pattern of magnitude of median calibrated radiocarbon ages: red, oldest; blue, youngest. Legend shows age gradient and dated materials. c Summed probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon ages for the Taupo eruption, for dates other than the two wiggle match series, for pooled samples at different distances from the eruption vent. Red broken line, second wiggle match date for eruption; blue line, highest probability of combined calibrated ages on samples >60 km.
See this science paper for further instructive material with images.

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From The University of Texas-Austin: “Discovery of Massive Undersea Water Reservoir Could Explain New Zealand’s Mysterious Slow Earthquakes”

From The University of Texas-Austin

10.4.23
Constantino Panagopulos
University of Texas Institute for Geophysics
512-574-7376
costa@ig.utexas.edu

Anton Caputo
Jackson School of Geosciences
512-232-9623
anton.caputo@jsg.utexas.edu

Monica Kortsha
Jackson School of Geosciences
512-471-2241.
mkortsha@jsg.utexas.edu

A seismic imaging instrument trails behind a research vessel during a survey of New Zealand’s Hikurangi subduction zone. Led by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, the survey found a vast and ancient water reservoir buried miles beneath the seafloor. Credit: University of Texas Institute for Geophysics/Adrien Arnulf.

Researchers have discovered a sea’s worth of water locked within the sediment and rock of a lost volcanic plateau that’s now deep in the Earth’s crust. Revealed by a 3D seismic image, the water lies two miles under the ocean floor off the coast of New Zealand, where it may be dampening a major earthquake fault that faces the country’s North Island.

The Hikurangi plateau is a remnant of a series of epic volcanic eruptions that began 125 million years ago in the Pacific Ocean. A recent seismic survey (red rectangle) led by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics imaged the plateau as it sinks into New Zealand’s Hikurangi subduction zone (red line). Credit: Andrew Gase.

The fault is known for producing “slow-motion earthquakes” called “slow slip events”. These can release pent-up tectonic pressure harmlessly over days and weeks. Scientists want to know why they happen more often at some faults than others.

Many slow slip earthquakes are thought to be linked to buried water. However, until now there was no direct geologic evidence to suggest such a large water reservoir existed at this particular New Zealand fault.

“We can’t yet see deep enough to know exactly the effect on the fault, but we can see that the amount of water that’s going down here is actually much higher than normal,” said the study’s lead author, Andrew Gase, who did the work as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).

The research was published in the journal Science Advances [below] and is based on seismic cruises and scientific ocean drilling led by UTIG researchers.

Gase, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Western Washington University, is calling for deeper drilling to find where the water ends up so that researchers can determine whether it affects pressure around the fault — an important piece of information that could lead to more precise understanding of large earthquakes, he said.

The site where the researchers found the water is part of a vast volcanic province that formed when a plume of lava the size of the United States breached the Earth’s surface in the Pacific Ocean 125 million years ago. The event was one of the Earth’s largest known volcanic eruptions and rumbled on for several million years.

A seismic image of the Hikurangi plateau reveals details about the Earth’s interior and what it’s made of. The blue-green layer under the yellow line shows water buried within rocks. Researchers at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics think the water could be dampening earthquakes at the nearby Hikurangi subduction zone. Credit: Andrew Gase.

Gase used seismic scans to build a 3D picture of the ancient volcanic plateau in which he saw thick, layered sediments surrounding buried volcanoes. His UTIG collaborators ran lab experiments on drill core samples of the volcanic rock and found that water made up nearly half of its volume.

“Normal ocean crust, once it gets to be about 7 or 10 million years old should contain much less water,” he said. The ocean crust in the seismic scans was ten times as old, but it had remained much wetter.

Gase speculates that the shallow seas where the eruptions took place eroded some of the volcanoes into a porous, broken-up rock that stored water like an aquifer as it was buried. Over time, the rock and rock fragments transformed into clay, locking in even more water.

The finding is important because scientists think that underground water pressure may be a key ingredient in creating conditions that release tectonic stress via slow slip earthquakes. This usually happens when water-rich sediments are buried with the fault, trapping the water underground. However, the New Zealand fault contains little of this typical ocean sediment. Instead, the researchers think the ancient volcanoes and the transformed rocks — now clays — are carrying large volumes of water down as they’re swallowed by the fault.

UTIG Director Demian Saffer, a study coauthor and co-chief scientist on the scientific drilling mission, said the findings suggest that other earthquake faults around the globe could be in similar situations.

“It’s a really clear illustration of the correlation between fluids and the style of tectonic fault movement — including earthquake behavior,” he said. “This is something that we’ve hypothesized from lab experiments, and is predicted by some computer simulations, but there are very few clear field experiments to test this at the scale of a tectonic plate.”

Science Advances
See the science paper for instructive material with images.

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University of Texas-Austin

The University of Texas-Austin is a public research university in Austin, Texas and the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, the University of Texas was inducted into the Association of American Universities in 1929, becoming only the third university in the American South to be elected. The institution has the nation’s seventh-largest single-campus enrollment, with over 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students and over 24,000 faculty and staff.

A Public Ivy, it is a major center for academic research. The university houses seven museums and seventeen libraries, including the LBJ Presidential Library and the Blanton Museum of Art, and operates various auxiliary research facilities, such as the J. J. Pickle Research Campus and the McDonald Observatory. As of November 2020, 13 Nobel Prize winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, two Turing Award winners, two Fields medalists, two Wolf Prize winners, and two Abel prize winners have been affiliated with the school as alumni, faculty members or researchers. The university has also been affiliated with three Primetime Emmy Award winners, and has produced a total of 143 Olympic medalists.

Student-athletes compete as the Texas Longhorns and are members of the Big 12 Conference. Its Longhorn Network is the only sports network featuring the college sports of a single university. The Longhorns have won four NCAA Division I National Football Championships, six NCAA Division I National Baseball Championships, thirteen NCAA Division I National Men’s Swimming and Diving Championships, and has claimed more titles in men’s and women’s sports than any other school in the Big 12 since the league was founded in 1996.

Establishment

The first mention of a public university in Texas can be traced to the 1827 constitution for the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. Although Title 6, Article 217 of the Constitution promised to establish public education in the arts and sciences, no action was taken by the Mexican government. After Texas obtained its independence from Mexico in 1836, the Texas Congress adopted the Constitution of the Republic, which, under Section 5 of its General Provisions, stated “It shall be the duty of Congress, as soon as circumstances will permit, to provide, by law, a general system of education.”

On April 18, 1838, “An Act to Establish the University of Texas” was referred to a special committee of the Texas Congress, but was not reported back for further action. On January 26, 1839, the Texas Congress agreed to set aside fifty leagues of land—approximately 288,000 acres (117,000 ha)—towards the establishment of a publicly funded university. In addition, 40 acres (16 ha) in the new capital of Austin were reserved and designated “College Hill”. (The term “Forty Acres” is colloquially used to refer to the University as a whole. The original 40 acres is the area from Guadalupe to Speedway and 21st Street to 24th Street.)

In 1845, Texas was annexed into the United States. The state’s Constitution of 1845 failed to mention higher education. On February 11, 1858, the Seventh Texas Legislature approved O.B. 102, an act to establish the University of Texas, which set aside $100,000 in United States bonds toward construction of the state’s first publicly funded university (the $100,000 was an allocation from the $10 million the state received pursuant to the Compromise of 1850 and Texas’s relinquishing claims to lands outside its present boundaries). The legislature also designated land reserved for the encouragement of railroad construction toward the university’s endowment. On January 31, 1860, the state legislature, wanting to avoid raising taxes, passed an act authorizing the money set aside for the University of Texas to be used for frontier defense in west Texas to protect settlers from Indian attacks.

Texas’s secession from the Union and the American Civil War delayed repayment of the borrowed monies. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, The University of Texas’s endowment was just over $16,000 in warrants and nothing substantive had been done to organize the university’s operations. This effort to establish a University was again mandated by Article 7, Section 10 of the Texas Constitution of 1876 which directed the legislature to “establish, organize and provide for the maintenance, support and direction of a university of the first class, to be located by a vote of the people of this State, and styled “The University of Texas”.

Additionally, Article 7, Section 11 of the 1876 Constitution established the Permanent University Fund, a sovereign wealth fund managed by the Board of Regents of the University of Texas and dedicated to the maintenance of the university. Because some state legislators perceived an extravagance in the construction of academic buildings of other universities, Article 7, Section 14 of the Constitution expressly prohibited the legislature from using the state’s general revenue to fund construction of university buildings. Funds for constructing university buildings had to come from the university’s endowment or from private gifts to the university, but the university’s operating expenses could come from the state’s general revenues.

The 1876 Constitution also revoked the endowment of the railroad lands of the Act of 1858, but dedicated 1,000,000 acres (400,000 ha) of land, along with other property appropriated for the university, to the Permanent University Fund. This was greatly to the detriment of the university as the lands the Constitution of 1876 granted the university represented less than 5% of the value of the lands granted to the university under the Act of 1858 (the lands close to the railroads were quite valuable, while the lands granted the university were in far west Texas, distant from sources of transportation and water). The more valuable lands reverted to the fund to support general education in the state (the Special School Fund).

On April 10, 1883, the legislature supplemented the Permanent University Fund with another 1,000,000 acres (400,000 ha) of land in west Texas granted to the Texas and Pacific Railroad but returned to the state as seemingly too worthless to even survey. The legislature additionally appropriated $256,272.57 to repay the funds taken from the university in 1860 to pay for frontier defense and for transfers to the state’s General Fund in 1861 and 1862. The 1883 grant of land increased the land in the Permanent University Fund to almost 2.2 million acres. Under the Act of 1858, the university was entitled to just over 1,000 acres (400 ha) of land for every mile of railroad built in the state. Had the 1876 Constitution not revoked the original 1858 grant of land, by 1883, the university lands would have totaled 3.2 million acres, so the 1883 grant was to restore lands taken from the university by the 1876 Constitution, not an act of munificence.

On March 30, 1881, the legislature set forth the university’s structure and organization and called for an election to establish its location. By popular election on September 6, 1881, Austin (with 30,913 votes) was chosen as the site. Galveston, having come in second in the election (with 20,741 votes), was designated the location of the medical department (Houston was third with 12,586 votes). On November 17, 1882, on the original “College Hill,” an official ceremony commemorated the laying of the cornerstone of the Old Main building. University President Ashbel Smith, presiding over the ceremony, prophetically proclaimed “Texas holds embedded in its earth rocks and minerals which now lie idle because unknown, resources of incalculable industrial utility, of wealth and power. Smite the earth, smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth.” The University of Texas officially opened its doors on September 15, 1883.

Expansion and growth

In 1890, George Washington Brackenridge donated $18,000 for the construction of a three-story brick mess hall known as Brackenridge Hall (affectionately known as “B.Hall”), one of the university’s most storied buildings and one that played an important place in university life until its demolition in 1952.

The old Victorian-Gothic Main Building served as the central point of the campus’s 40-acre (16 ha) site, and was used for nearly all purposes. But by the 1930s, discussions arose about the need for new library space, and the Main Building was razed in 1934 over the objections of many students and faculty. The modern-day tower and Main Building were constructed in its place.

In 1910, George Washington Brackenridge again displayed his philanthropy, this time donating 500 acres (200 ha) on the Colorado River to the university. A vote by the regents to move the campus to the donated land was met with outrage, and the land has only been used for auxiliary purposes such as graduate student housing. Part of the tract was sold in the late-1990s for luxury housing, and there are controversial proposals to sell the remainder of the tract. The Brackenridge Field Laboratory was established on 82 acres (33 ha) of the land in 1967.

In 1916, Gov. James E. Ferguson became involved in a serious quarrel with the University of Texas. The controversy grew out of the board of regents’ refusal to remove certain faculty members whom the governor found objectionable. When Ferguson found he could not have his way, he vetoed practically the entire appropriation for the university. Without sufficient funding, the university would have been forced to close its doors. In the middle of the controversy, Ferguson’s critics brought to light a number of irregularities on the part of the governor. Eventually, the Texas House of Representatives prepared 21 charges against Ferguson, and the Senate convicted him on 10 of them, including misapplication of public funds and receiving $156,000 from an unnamed source. The Texas Senate removed Ferguson as governor and declared him ineligible to hold office.

In 1921, the legislature appropriated $1.35 million for the purchase of land next to the main campus. However, expansion was hampered by the restriction against using state revenues to fund construction of university buildings as set forth in Article 7, Section 14 of the Constitution. With the completion of Santa Rita No. 1 well and the discovery of oil on university-owned lands in 1923, the university added significantly to its Permanent University Fund. The additional income from Permanent University Fund investments allowed for bond issues in 1931 and 1947, which allowed the legislature to address funding for the university along with the Agricultural and Mechanical College (now known as Texas A&M University). With sufficient funds to finance construction on both campuses, on April 8, 1931, the Forty Second Legislature passed H.B. 368. which dedicated the Agricultural and Mechanical College a 1/3 interest in the Available University Fund, the annual income from Permanent University Fund investments.

The University of Texas was inducted into The Association of American Universities in 1929. During World War II, the University of Texas was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission.

In 1950, following Sweatt v. Painter, the University of Texas was the first major university in the South to accept an African-American student. John S. Chase went on to become the first licensed African-American architect in Texas.

In the fall of 1956, the first black students entered the university’s undergraduate class. Black students were permitted to live in campus dorms, but were barred from campus cafeterias. The University of Texas integrated its facilities and desegregated its dorms in 1965. UT, which had had an open admissions policy, adopted standardized testing for admissions in the mid-1950s at least in part as a conscious strategy to minimize the number of Black undergraduates, given that they were no longer able to simply bar their entry after the Brown decision.

Following growth in enrollment after World War II, the university unveiled an ambitious master plan in 1960 designed for “10 years of growth” that was intended to “boost the University of Texas into the ranks of the top state universities in the nation.” In 1965, the Texas Legislature granted the university Board of Regents to use eminent domain to purchase additional properties surrounding the original 40 acres (160,000 m^2). The university began buying parcels of land to the north, south, and east of the existing campus, particularly in the Blackland neighborhood to the east and the Brackenridge tract to the southeast, in hopes of using the land to relocate the university’s intramural fields, baseball field, tennis courts, and parking lots.

On March 6, 1967, the Sixtieth Texas Legislature changed the university’s official name from “The University of Texas” to “The University of Texas at Austin” to reflect the growth of the University of Texas System.

Recent history

The first presidential library on a university campus was dedicated on May 22, 1971, with former President Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson and then-President Richard Nixon in attendance. Constructed on the eastern side of the main campus, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum is one of 13 presidential libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration.

A statue of Martin Luther King Jr. was unveiled on campus in 1999 and subsequently vandalized. By 2004, John Butler, a professor at the McCombs School of Business suggested moving it to Morehouse College, a historically black college, “a place where he is loved”.

The University of Texas-Austin has experienced a wave of new construction recently with several significant buildings. On April 30, 2006, the school opened the Blanton Museum of Art. In August 2008, the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center opened, with the hotel and conference center forming part of a new gateway to the university. Also in 2008, Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium was expanded to a seating capacity of 100,119, making it the largest stadium (by capacity) in the state of Texas at the time.

The University of Texas-Austin is the home of

The Texas Advanced Computing Center

On January 19, 2011, the university announced the creation of a 24-hour television network in partnership with ESPN, dubbed the Longhorn Network. ESPN agreed to pay a $300 million guaranteed rights fee over 20 years to the university and to IMG College, the school’s multimedia rights partner. The network covers the university’s intercollegiate athletics, music, cultural arts, and academics programs. The channel first aired in September 2011.

From “The Chronicle” At Cornell University: “Cornell fills data gap for volcanic ash effects on Earth systems”

From “The Chronicle”

Cornell University

10.4.23
Blaine Friedlander
bpf2@cornell.edu

Volcanic ash is no ordinary dust: It gets injected into the atmosphere, climbs to the stratosphere, impacts climate, powders roadways and clogs jet engines.

To bridge the knowledge gap between volcanologists and atmospheric scientists working on climate change and observing global systems, Cornell researchers have characterized volcanic ash samples from many explosive eruptions of a broad compositional range. The work is helping scientists uncover how this tiny material – measured in microns and nanometers – plays a big role in the atmosphere.

Volcanic ash is formed from minerals trapped in a silicate glass, as shown here under a microscope. Reactions with gases from the volcanic plume and atmosphere also form salt crystals on the ash surface, like these asterisk-shaped salts on an ash particle from the 2021 Tajogaite eruption on La Palma, in the Canary Islands, Spain. Adrian Hornby/Provided.

The work was published Sept. 21 in Scientific Reports [below].

“Large volcanic eruptions can have measurable impacts on climate that last for years or even decades,” said first author Adrian Hornby, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “The dispersion and transport of fine volcanic ash and its interaction with the Earth touch on various disciplines – from atmospheric science and climate modeling to environmental studies and even public health.”

Volcanoes can be created by hot spots deep within the Earth’s mantle, like those in Hawai’i, or they can form in subduction zones, where two tectonic plates collide. But each has distinct fingerprint-like compositions that can trigger a variety of environmental problems that pose complications for the planet.

The ash from volcanoes is a complex particulate material formed from the fragmentation of magma and injected into the atmosphere during explosive volcanic eruptions, Hornby said.

“The ash contains fractions of minerals, silicate glass and pores, but the expected composition and properties produced in eruptions are poorly defined,” Hornby said. “This is true for fine volcanic ash that gets transport widely in the atmosphere, creating a broad set of impacts on the Earth system, infrastructure and human health.”

Due to a dearth of data, the scientific community had been relying on rough approximations or poor models of ash composition. Now, the Cornell group collected samples from 40 eruptions, characterized by their size and tectonic background, to provide a better, comprehensive dataset. They focused on volcanic ash grains smaller than 45 microns, which is relevant because atmospheric winds can transport it and prompting wider impact.

They found that the composition of volcanic ash varies significantly with grain size, tectonic setting and chemistry. As grain size became finer, there was an increase in fractions of crystalline silica (which, if you breathe it in, can cause health ailments and lung cancer) and salts, while the components glass and iron oxide decreased.

In their sieved samples – ranging from places like Mount Pinatubo, Philippines (1991), Mount St. Helens, Washington (1980) and Mount Etna, Italy (122 BC) and La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain (2021) – from 23 volcanoes, the group used X-ray diffraction to detect the atomic structure of materials, and to identify and measure the proportions of minerals and glass with improved methods, and scanning electron microscope to confirm phases, evaluate morphology and textures.

The samples varied widely in their mineral content: Pinatubo produced a lot of feldspar (an abundant group of aluminosilicate minerals from the Earth’s crust) and amphibole (an important mineral in volcanic explosivity), and quartz evidence of significant melt evolution by fractional crystallization and other processes before the eruption.

On the other extreme, the 2021 Tajogaite eruptions in La Palma, Canary Island, Spain, the mineral load was mostly feldspar, clinopyroxene and olivine – the last one a mineral characteristic of primitive melts with little evolution from their mantle source.

Hornby said that for samples collected during the 2021 Tajogaite, the average amount of glass decreased from 50% to 35% while the fractions of dense, iron-bearing minerals increased from 35% to 50%. Salts increased for finer particles in all cases.

“In finer grain ash, we saw a significant increase in salt,” said senior author Esteban Gazel, the Charles N. Mellowes Professor in Engineering. “That’s important because salts are easy to dissolve. Salt will be the first thing that gets dissolved when the fine ash reaches the ocean. You don’t want to breathe it in, as it will react with your lungs.”

Volcanic ash, by the nature of its voluminous production, atmospheric transport and deposition into every known ecosystem, is the most interdisciplinary aspect of volcanism. “Our study provides the first data-driven resource to better constrain volcanic ash mineral and glass composition and density needed for atmospheric scientists to examine ash transport and better understand its effects on the Earth system,” said Gazel, who is also a faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

Ash density is controlled by the mineral content. “Regardless of size, regardless of the origin of the magma,” Hornby said, “we were able to obtain a reasonably good density estimate from the minerals and iron oxides.”

This atmospheric ash can go long distances to impact climate and ecosystems – even on other continents – far from the volcano. “Atmospheric scientists have been ignoring the impact of ash on climate and biogeochemistry,” said co-senior author Natalie Mahowald, the Irving Porter Church Professor in Engineering. “With this research, we finally have the data to estimate the impact.”

In addition to Hornby, Gazel and Mahowald, a senior faculty fellow at Cornell Atkinson, the co-authors are Kyle Dayton, doctoral student; and Claire Bush ’22. The work was funded by a NASA Interdisciplinary Science grant, the National Science Foundation and Cornell Atkinson.

Scientific Reports

Figure 1

Global eruption locations and bulk chemistry. (a) Location of the volcanoes that produced volcanic ash used in this study (further details in Supplementary Table 1*) The symbol size is scaled to the eruption volcanic explosivity index (VEI). (b) Total alkalis to silica (TAS) diagram [34*] showing bulk chemistry in wt% oxides retrieved from the literature for the studied samples. Compiled data and references are provided in Supplementary Tables 2* and 7*. Multiple data points bracket the range of chemistry for an eruption where the erupted materials were heterogenous. All symbols and colors in panels a-b follow the legend. Bicolored symbols indicate more complex arc-intraplate tectonic settings, with the bottom-right color indicating the dominant tectonic setting to which they were assigned for calculations and linear regressions. (c) Dry-sieving fractions for the grain size ranges used in the study are shown as stacked bars in order of total < 45 µm fraction. Gold diamonds show sampling distance from the eruptive vent. Map data © 2023 Google.
*References to science paper
See the science paper for further instructive material with images.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land-grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through the SUNY – The State University of New York system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States.

Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation, accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s JPL-Caltech and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.

In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider(JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider(JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the CERN Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.

As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex (UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.