Discover Magazine | Arctic & Antarctic

How I Contained the Mississippi

Fri, 04 May 2012 20:00:00 -0400

A year ago, an unusually rainy spring caused the Mississippi River’s most serious flooding since 1927. Record-setting water levels threatened Memphis, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. It was up to Major General Michael Walsh, then commander of the  Mississippi Valley division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to open floodgates and blow up levees, flooding some areas but averting catastrophe in major cities downstream. In his own words, here’s how he decided where to send the swelling waters.

We knew it was going to be a challenging flood year. I was working in an operations center aboard the Mississippi, the largest motor vessel on the river: 241 feet long, with five decks.

We have a comprehensive flood plan that dictates what to do when water reaches certain levels—where we need to allow controlled flooding to save cities downstream. By April 9 the flood gauges at Cairo, Illinois, which straddles the Missouri and Kentucky borders, exceeded allowable limits. We were supposed to open the nearby Birds Point–New Madrid Floodway when the water reached 61 feet, and on the night of May 1, the forecast level climbed to 63 feet. The decision was clear. If I didn’t open that floodway and relieve the pressure, levees would have broken somewhere else—but the angst level was very high. We planned to submerge 130,000 acres of farmland, and Missouri’s attorney general asked the Supreme Court to stop the operation, but the court refused the request. I gave the order and we blew up the floodway on May 2.

Our first move removed about a fifth of the water flowing through that area, but we hadn’t gone far enough—we still had to open up the next floodway, the Bonnet Carré, just upstream of New Orleans. We opened it on May 9, in bright sunshine, with a few hundred people out to watch.

Even then the river was flowing at record rates...

Impatient Futurist: Your Personal, Automated Mass Transit Vehicle Is on Its Way

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:00:00 -0400

Despite my mania for all manner of irresponsible personal vehicles, I’m actually a public-transportation nut. A few of the reasons:
• I can read, check email, send text messages, or catch a few winks while I’m zipping to my destination
• I have built-in motivation for walking, given that I have to get to and from the bus or train stop
• I feel good that my ride isn’t fueled by the conversion of fossilized sea life into impending climate catastrophe
• I get to trade small talk and occasional newspaper sections with fellow transit riders.

But I know you have your very good reasons for being among the 98 percent of the population that shuns public transportation:
• You can read, check email, send text messages, or catch a few winks while you’re swerving into oncoming traffic and pedestrians
• You have built-in motivation for stopping at Wendy’s for celebration takeout, given that you haven’t had to walk more than nine consecutive steps the entire day
• You feel good about the copious burning of hydrocarbons, which is creating valuable new beachfront property
• You get to trade hand gestures and occasional gunfire with fellow traffic jammers.

Ok, go ahead and sneer at my bus through the windshield of your Range Rollover. Thanks to some snazzy high-tech upgrades coming to public transit over the next several years, I’ll have the last laugh. Surely you’d envy me, for example, were my bus to suddenly lower four large metal wheels next to its tires and jump onto nearby rail tracks to go roaring off past your Toyota Highballer and all the other traffic. Or were my bus to pass over the roof of your Porsche Careen, supported on giant stilts with wheels that ran on either side of the road. Or, perhaps most impressive, were my commuter train to fly by you—really, actually fly by, lifted a few feet in the air by side-mounted wings.

Well, get ready to gawk. The next time you’re in Asia, that is, because the track-riding bus and the flying train are Japanese projects in prototypes (at Toyota and Tohoku University, respectively), and a stilted bus has been developed in China...

Gallery | Our Wonderful Age of Abundance, in 9 Striking Infographics

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:40:00 -0400

Click through to view gallery

Does Rain Come From Life in the Clouds?

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:05:00 -0400

The plane pitches violently as it plows through the milky innards of a cloud bank. A commercial pilot would fly high above these clouds over California’s Sierra Nevada Range, but this 63-foot Gulfstream-1 seems to invite the turbulence. Updrafts grab hold of the aircraft and shove it up even as the pilot noses it down. In the back of the plane, atmospheric chemist Kimberly Prather wears headphones to muffle the roar of the propellers. She steadies herself with a hand on an instrument rack and focuses on the bobbing screen of her laptop. Readings from the clouds spool across it.

Those numbers tell Prather that these winter clouds are cold and heavy, –30 degrees Fahrenheit and just over 100 percent relative humidity. Yet despite being 62 degrees below the freezing point of water, the cloud droplets remain stubbornly liquid. As long as they don’t form ice crystals, these clouds won’t shed more than a few flakes of snow over the Sierras’ 13,000-foot peaks. They are typical clouds, teasers that won’t drop much of anything.

After two hours of flying, though, something changes. The voice of another researcher crackles over Prather’s headset: “Ice!” The plane has entered a cloud layer where suddenly every droplet is frozen. Prather’s instrument—a tangle of metal tubes, wires, and airtight chambers nicknamed Shirley—tick-tick-ticks as its laser blasts apart hundreds of microscopic cloud particles, one by one, that are drawn in from the air outside. The size and composition of each particle flash across Prather’s monitor. The specks at the heart of those ice crystals are high in aluminum, iron, silicon, and titanium, the chemical signatures of dust not from California but from faraway deserts in Asia or even Africa. There’s something else in the crystals too: carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, telltale signs of biological cells...

The full text of this article is available only to DISCOVER subscribers. Click through to the article to subscribe, log in, or buy a digital version of this issue.

Image: A high-altitude balloon is readied for a 2011 launch at a NASA facility in New Mexico. It carried microbe collectors up to 120,000 feet.

Attack of the Flying, Invasive Carp

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 10:20:00 -0400

Ending through corn and  soybean fields southwest of Chicago, the Illinois River eventually comes to the sleepy little town of Havana, Illinois. On the east bank of the river, the populated side, there is a field station run by the Illinois Natural History Survey. For decades now, INHS biologists in aluminum skiffs have scooted up and down the thinly wooded banks, monitoring local fish—these days, catching, recording and releasing approximately 150,000 of them a year. The local species are small and nondescript for the most part; their behavior is unremarkable. Probably the most colorful thing about these fish is their names: gizzard shad, bigmouth buffalo, largemouth bass, bluntnose minnow—hand-hewn names from America’s heartland.

In the mid-‘90s, though, the lazy stretch of river around Havana was roiled by the invasion of two species of Asian carp, the bighead carp and its flamboyant cousin, the silver carp. Imported from China during the 1970s, the carp escaped their ponds in the South, migrated up the Mississippi River, and spread into tributaries like the Illinois. “They puttered along for a few generations,” says Duane C. Chapman, the top Asian carp expert for the U.S. Geological Service, “and then they reached an exponential growth phase.” A quirk of silver carp behavior—an exaggerated startle response, causing them to leap from the water when boats approached—revealed their enormous, unexpected populations in the rivers of the Midwest. Along La Grange Reach, as this section of the Illinois is called, routine monitoring tasks took a dangerous turn. Today, the biologists have to measure the local species amid a glut of flying aliens.

You’re sitting in the kill zone,” Thad Cook remarked to me, as the skiff pulled away from the launch site. Cook, director of the INHS station, was driving. He sat behind a low shield in the stern, but the visitor’s chair beside him was exposed. I stood up nervously, holding onto a strut. I recalled reading about a woman who nearly died while riding a jet-ski near Peoria, upstream from Havana, in 2004. She was knocked unconscious by a silver carp and tumbled into the river. “We’re at ground zero,” Cook warned, smiling. “The carp don’t wax and wane here.” In a video I’d watched on the Internet, a water-skier wearing a football helmet laughs hysterically as he is towed through a fusillade of carp...

The full text of this article is available only to DISCOVER subscribers. Click through to the article to subscribe, log in, or buy a digital version of this issue.

A Storm-Chaser Who's Looked Straight Into a Tornado's Heart

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:50:00 -0400

By early June of 2009, Joshua Wurman was exhausted and discouraged. For weeks, the nomadic teams of VORTEX2 (the second Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment) had crisscrossed the Midwest in pursuit of the violent thunderstorms that can generate tornadoes. Yet all that he and the other meteorologists had encountered so far were a few rain showers. With more than 100 participants, 11 radar trucks, 13 instrument-laden vehicles, an unmanned plane, and millions of dollars from the National Science Foundation in play, the most ambitious tornado field study ever was at risk of failing. The weather was just too nice.

But when the scientists finally intercepted their first  tornado of the season in Goshen County, Wyoming, it offered an amazing coup. For the first time, they were able to capture detailed data on the entire life cycle of a  tornado, from gestation to birth to demise. Analysis of information from this storm and dozens of lesser intercepts in 2009 and 2010, combined with new insights from computer simulations, may finally answer the researchers’  biggest question: What triggers a tornado? Zeroing in on how tornadoes get going could lengthen warning times from the current, dangerously short average of 13 minutes and also lower the rate of false alarms. DISCOVER recently  spoke with Wurman, who has probably collected data on more tornadoes than any other scientist, about his theory of how tornadoes form, the twisters that claimed 548 lives in 2011, and a recent storm that flat-out awed him.

What makes tornadoes so unpredictable? 
We know the fundamentals of how supercell thunderstorms—the ones that produce tornadoes—form. We know that there need to be certain conditions of temperature, relative humidity, and wind speeds at different altitudes. What we don’t really understand very well is why only 25 percent of the supercells make tornadoes and when in their life cycle they do it: Why did that particular supercell make a tornado now, not 15  minutes ago, or 15 minutes from now? The reason we drive 15,000 miles a year to catch 10 tornadoes is because we don’t know which supercells are going to make them or when...

Image: Wurman in Battle Pass, Wyoming, in November. Behind him is the Doppler on Wheels, the mobile radar truck he invented. Photograph by Beth Wald

Climate  Engineers Get  a PR Lesson

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 17:00:00 -0400

It sounded like an odd but harmless experiment.  Last October British scientists planned to send a balloon more than half a mile high to spray water into the air. Yet a few days before the test, it was delayed amid major backlash from environmental groups.

Though the trial itself would surely have been safe, it was a step toward something far more controversial: geoengineering, the use of large-scale human intervention to reverse the effects of climate change. Instead of water, the researchers envision that their balloon may one day release tons of particulates that would reflect sunlight and cool the planet.

But judging by the reaction to the pilot experiment, geoengineers will need to employ a delicate public relations strategy as they pursue their research. The Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering, or SPICE, project entered the public eye last summer when scientists trumpeted the $200,000 balloon experiment at the British Science Festival. The announcement generated interest but also pushback. A Canadian environmental group sent a letter warning of drought resulting from the future release of sun-blocking particles and claiming that the test would cause a distraction from international efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions...

Destination Science: 17 Best Places for a Geek to Go This Summer

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:45:00 -0400

A man was working on a plot of private land in Arkansas last fall when he uncovered a set of huge, fossilized dinosaur tracks. Also last year, interested amateurs photographed tides on low-lying stretches of the California coast to help predict the effects of climate change; they also checked up on local patches of milkweed, prime real estate for monarch butterflies, to keep tabs on the insects’ migration patterns.

Scientific wonders are accessible to anyone with the curiosity to seek them out, and summer is the perfect time to get exploring. In that spirit, we’ve brainstormed a whole season’s worth of places to go, sights to see, and things to do. There are destinations across the country, so whether you’re in Albany or Albuquerque, you should be able to find something nearby.

The adventurous among you may find yourselves strapping on an undersea helmet and strolling through a submarine kelp forest or wielding a Geiger counter in a field strewn with remnants of the atomic era, while those traveling with the family can swing by the bayou for a relaxed but rewarding swamp-by-boat tour. And plan to watch the sunset on June 5—there won’t be another like it for 105 years...

Skip to the quick reference guide of summer getaways or see the descriptions below.

GET DOWN TO EARTH  The most exotic geological hot spots in the country

Grand Prismatic Spring Yellowstone  National Park, Wyoming
The plume of molten rock that rises from more than 400 miles inside Earth beneath Yellowstone National Park powers the 10,000 springs, geysers, and other thermal features located where magma-heated water and steam come simmering to the surface. Yellowstone’s biggest hot spring, Grand Prismatic, also hosts some of the planet’s strangest, hardiest life.

“Yellowstone’s known for its bison and bald eagles,” says John Spear, an environmental microbiologist at the Colorado School of Mines, in Golden, “but it’s really a microbial wonderland”...

Tools of the Trade: Fierce Old Warplane Has a New Mission: Flying Into the Hearts of Thunderstorms

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:40:00 -0400

The National Science Foundation provided $10.9 million to convert an old military A-10 Thunderbolt into the world’s most formidable storm-chasing research vessel, outfitted to withstand the lightning, turbulence, and hail that big clouds unleash. “The A-10 was designed to be shot at,” says Paul Smith, an atmospheric scientist at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, who helped acquire the aircraft.

The A-10 will replace the T-28 Trojan, which retired from chasing storms in 2005...

Illustration: Steve Karp

The Continent Where Climate Went Haywire

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:00:00 -0400

“The river came up to right where we’re sitting, and the waters were more than two feet deep,” Peter Goodwin tells me in the driveway of his ranch-style house perched on the banks of the Balonne River in St. George, a village of 3,500 in eastern Australia. It is a drizzly Sunday afternoon in April, three months after a devastating flood that drenched a landmass the size of France and Germany combined and isolated the town after the rain-swollen river rose to a record 45 feet.

Agricultural areas like St. George were hardest hit by the relentless rains and overflowing rivers that swamped roads, cut off power lines, washed away vineyards and fruit orchards, drowned thousands of head of cattle and other livestock, and covered homes and everything inside them in thick layers of sediment and mud. Shell-shocked residents are still digging out from under the debris.

“That’s the hard part of the flood—the aftermath,” says Goodwin, 60, a crusty, compactly built man with piercing blue eyes and calloused hands who works as an operations manager for the local municipality and has been staying with his grown daughter while he makes his home habitable again. “You get a lot of help during the flood, but then everyone settles back into their routine. There are a lot of houses down there that are still empty,” he adds, gesturing toward the riverbank. “And they will be for a long time to come”...

The Giant, Underestimated Earthquake Threat to North America

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 13:35:00 -0400

Just over one year ago, a magnitude-9 earthquake hit the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan, triggering one of the most destructive tsunamis in a thousand years. The Japanese—the most earthquake-prepared, seismically savvy people on the planet—were caught off-guard by the Tohoku quake’s savage power. Over 15,000 people died.

Now scientists are calling attention to a dangerous area on the opposite side of the Ring of Fire, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a fault that runs parallel to the Pacific coast of North America, from northern California to Vancouver Island. This tectonic time bomb is alarmingly similar to Tohoku, capable of generating a megathrust earthquake at or above magnitude 9, and about as close to Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver as the Tohoku fault is to Japan’s coast. Decades of geological sleuthing recently established that although it appears quiet, this fault has ripped open again and again, sending vast earthquakes throughout the Pacific Northwest and tsunamis that reach across the Pacific.

What happened in Japan will probably happen in North America. The big question is when.

On a foggy spring morning just before sunrise, 27 miles northwest of Cape Mendocino, California, a pimple of rock roughly a dozen miles below the ocean floor finally reaches its breaking point. Two slabs of the Earth’s crust begin to slip and shudder and snap apart.

The first jolt of stress coming out of the rocks sends a shock wave hurtling into Northern California and southern Oregon like a thunderbolt. For a few stunned drivers on the back roads in the predawn gloom, the pulse of energy that tears through the ground looks dimly like a 20-mile wrinkle moving through a carpet of pastures and into thick stands of redwoods.

Telephone poles whip back and forth as if caught in a hurricane. Power lines rip loose in a shower of blue and yellow sparks, falling to the ground where they writhe like snakes, snapping and biting. Lights go out and the telephone system goes down.

Cornices fall, brick walls crack, plate glass shatters. Pavement buckles, cars and trucks veer into ditches and into each other. A bridge across the Eel River is jerked off its foundations, taking a busload of farm workers with it. With computers crashing and cell towers dropping offline, all of Humboldt and Del Norte Counties in California are instantly cut off from the outside world, so nobody beyond the immediate area knows how bad it is here or how widespread the damage.

At the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) lab in Menlo Park, seismometers peg the quake at magnitude 8.1, and the tsunami detection centers in Alaska and Hawaii begin waking up the alarm system with standby alerts all around the Pacific Rim. Early morning commuters emerging from a BART station in San Francisco feel the ground sway beneath their feet and immediately hit the sidewalk in a variety of awkward crouches, a familiar fear chilling their guts...

Image: The "ghost forest" of dead cedar trees at the Copalis River on the Washington coast is evidence of a major quake three centuries ago.

Water Wranglers

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:50:00 -0400

Climate change and population growth are both stressing the planet’s freshwater supply.  Our experts debate the tough choices scientists, politicians, and the general public will have to  make to adapt to a world where water could outstrip fuel as the most prized commodity.

This year, Texas suffered through the worst one-year drought in its history, while states along the Mississippi River endured record flooding. Shifting climate patterns mean these radical disruptions could be a harbinger of things to come.

DISCOVER recently partnered with NBC Learn, the National Science Foundation, and Arizona State University to convene a town hall discussion that explored the impact of climate change on our freshwater resources. Anne Thompson, NBC’s chief environmental affairs correspondent, moderated the expert panel, which included (from left): Heidi Cullen, a correspondent for Climate Central, a nonprofit that reports on climate science; Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico and a board member of the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank; Grady Gammage Jr., a practicing attorney and a senior scholar at the ASU Global Institute of Sustainability; and Pat Mulroy, general manager  of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

Anne Thompson: Water covers more than 70 percent of the Earth, but only 2.5 percent of it is freshwater. And two-thirds of that is locked up in ice caps and glaciers. Freshwater accessible in lakes, rivers, and streams is just six-thousandths of one percent of the world’s total water. With that in mind, what is the status of freshwater around the world today?

Heidi Cullen: Freshwater around the world is definitely stressed, and climate change is the great exacerbation. With water, the rich get richer globally, and the poor get poorer.  Places that tend toward drought are going to see it more. The subtropical drought regions will expand. And in places like Asia, the monsoon system is expected to intensify. It’s a problem of greater uncertainty, greater variability, and more stress overall.

Thompson: Governor Richardson, do you see water scarcity as a source of global crisis?...

Destination Science: The Natural World Outside Disney World

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:40:00 -0400

Unpaved Orlando
Where: Central Florida
 What: Pristine wilderness in the shadow of America’s theme park capital

Orlando is famous as the family-fun city that Disney built, but it has quietly developed a secret second identity as a jumping-off spot to some of the most pristine wilderness in Florida. Sadly, the bulk of the 50 million-plus visitors who converge on this tourist megalopolis every year, spending hours creeping along congested highways from hotels to theme parks, probably never realize that the other, wilder Florida lurks just an exit away. When I passed through recently with my daughters en route to a family reunion, we were able to explore this hidden Orlando, where tropical ecology is the prime attraction. It was a relaxing antidote to the hyperstimulating theme park experience: no crowds, no merchandise booths, no imitation castles, and the only mouse ears in sight belong to Podomys floridanus, the Florida mouse.

Photo: Look Die Bildagentur der Fotografen GMBH/ALAMY

4 Bold Ideas to Make America’s Energy Supply  Safer, Cleaner &  Virtually Inexhaustible

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:50:00 -0500

Greenhouse-gas emissions produced by each economic sector in the United States. Source: EPA; numbers rounded.

Perhaps it is time to retire the term “energy crisis.” People have been talking about one crisis or another since at least the early 1970s, for so long that the term has nearly lost its meaning. At any rate, we are not about to run out of energy: We have enough fossil fuels on the planet to power civilization for another half century or more. It is more honest to say that we are in the midst of an energy transition, a wrenching change in the kinds of energy we use and the ways we produce them. If we continue to rely on coal to keep the lights burning and gasoline to keep our cars running, we are bound to pay a heavy price. Imported oil accounts for 42 percent of our trade imbalance. Fossil fuels collectively produce 95 percent of the carbon emissions that are heating the planet. And the need for reliable sources of energy becomes more evident with every geopolitical tremor.

To explore a future in which the United States powers itself both independently and cleanly, DISCOVER teamed up with the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to organize a series of briefings on Capitol Hill. The presentations brought lawmakers together with eight leading energy scientists and policy experts to map out the road to a new energy economy. This is the way forward...

When Arctic Ice Locks up Your Submarine, It's Time to Break Out the Chainsaw

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:55:00 -0500

Mechanical engineer Nicholas Michel-Hart chainsaws through ice blocking the hatch to the nuclear submarine USS Connecticut last March. The boat surfaced through three feet of Arctic ice 200 miles north of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, where the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab conducts underwater communications and sonar experiments for the Navy...

Image: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Westward H2O!

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:14:20 -0500

North America's 2080 Water Forecast

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:14:10 -0500

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Clouds

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:35:00 -0500

4 So much for People Power. After reviewing 40 years of cloud-seeding efforts in an area north of Israel, researchers at Tel Aviv University have concluded that seeding doesn’t actually produce additional precipitation (pdf).

12 Highest of them all: 50 miles up, noctilucent, or “night shining,” clouds glow an eerie bluish white. They are invisible by day, but after sunset they catch solar rays shining from far below the horizon.

13 Noctilucent clouds seemed to first appear after the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa and are now a common sight.

18 In 1959 Lt. Col. William Rankin was flying his F-8 fighter jet over a cumulonimbus when the engine failed. He parachuted out and spent the next 30 minutes bounced around inside the storm. Amazingly, he survived.

19 In 2007 German paragliding champion Ewa Wisnierska experienced “cloud suck.” While gliding under a cumulonimbus, she was pulled upward to 32,000 feet. She blacked out due to lack of oxygen but regained consciousness at roughly 23,000 feet.

Image: A lenticular cloud over the Tararua Mountains in the North Island of New Zealand. Courtesy: NASA

Fortress of Solitude-like Cave Houses Ridiculously Slow-Growing Crystals

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:45:00 -0500

The 36-foot-long beams of gypsum in Mexico’s Cave of Crystals are the largest exposed crystals on earth. Now Spanish crystallographer Juan Manuel García-Ruiz has awarded them another record: They exhibit the slowest crystal growth ever measured. García-Ruiz collected gypsum and water from the site and used a custom-built, ultrasensitive microscope to  determine that the sample grew 0.000000000014 millimeter per second—the equivalent of a pencil width every 16,000 years...

How I Put a Murderer Away With Doppler Radar

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 11:20:00 -0500

For years, Howard Altschule worked as a meteorologist for television station WNYT in Albany, New York, where each night he told viewers whether the next day would bring precipitation and misery. It was a fun gig for a while, but then Altschule grew bored. So in 2007 he started Forensic Weather Consultants, which offers meteorological snooping to local lawyers, providing expert analysis of weather data and satellite imagery. Now he investigates 175 cases a year: roof damage, slips and falls—even a gruesome double murder. In his own words, here’s how he solved that case in May, helping send Michael Mosley to prison for life.

The police had arrested someone, but then they found Mosley’s blood in the Troy, New York, apartment where the murder occurred. Years and years went by, until one day they came up with a DNA match...

The Citizen Scientist

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:25:00 -0500

In a former life, Darlene Cavalier was a cheerleader for the Philadelphia 76ers. Today she channels her enthusiasm into spreading the word that science is something anyone can do. She is the brains behind scienceforcitizens.net, which lets untrained people collaborate on serious research projects, such as gathering pollution data and monitoring insect swarms. She is the founder of sciencecheerleader.com, a community of cheerleaders with science backgrounds who promote science literacy. And as a consultant to  DISCOVER, Cavalier helped organize our recent Changing Planet town hall discussion on the future of water. She recently talked with us about how her varied passions fit together.

How did you get interested in communicating science  to the public? 
I got my start stuffing envelopes for DISCOVER. I was mailing out applications for the magazine’s Award for Technological Innovation, and researchers would respond by writing two or three digestible sentences about their innovations. If they left out some information, I would call them to clarify, and that was my “aha” moment. I realized how down-to-earth scientists were. They also sent in samples of their work. I remember holding a fire-resistant tile made for NASA after the Columbia disaster, and I just thought that was really special...

Discover Magazine | Arctic & Antarctic

How I Contained the Mississippi

Impatient Futurist: Your Personal, Automated Mass Transit Vehicle Is on Its Way

Gallery | Our Wonderful Age of Abundance, in 9 Striking Infographics

Does Rain Come From Life in the Clouds?

Attack of the Flying, Invasive Carp

A Storm-Chaser Who's Looked Straight Into a Tornado's Heart

Climate  Engineers Get  a PR Lesson

Destination Science: 17 Best Places for a Geek to Go This Summer

Tools of the Trade: Fierce Old Warplane Has a New Mission: Flying Into the Hearts of Thunderstorms

The Continent Where Climate Went Haywire

The Giant, Underestimated Earthquake Threat to North America

Water Wranglers

Destination Science: The Natural World Outside Disney World

4 Bold Ideas to Make America’s Energy Supply  Safer, Cleaner &  Virtually Inexhaustible

When Arctic Ice Locks up Your Submarine, It's Time to Break Out the Chainsaw

Westward H2O!

North America's 2080 Water Forecast

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Clouds

Fortress of Solitude-like Cave Houses Ridiculously Slow-Growing Crystals

How I Put a Murderer Away With Doppler Radar

The Citizen Scientist

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #73: Quake Science on Trial in Italy

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #41: The Ozone Satellite, 1991–2011

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #45: Have Humans Left  a Permanent Scar on the  Geologic Record

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #36: Forests Stage A Comeback

Discover Magazine | Arctic & Antarctic

How I Contained the Mississippi

Impatient Futurist: Your Personal, Automated Mass Transit Vehicle Is on Its Way

Gallery | Our Wonderful Age of Abundance, in 9 Striking Infographics

Does Rain Come From Life in the Clouds?

Attack of the Flying, Invasive Carp

A Storm-Chaser Who's Looked Straight Into a Tornado's Heart

Climate Engineers Get a PR Lesson

Destination Science: 17 Best Places for a Geek to Go This Summer

Tools of the Trade: Fierce Old Warplane Has a New Mission: Flying Into the Hearts of Thunderstorms

The Continent Where Climate Went Haywire

The Giant, Underestimated Earthquake Threat to North America

Water Wranglers

Destination Science: The Natural World Outside Disney World

4 Bold Ideas to Make America’s Energy Supply Safer, Cleaner & Virtually Inexhaustible

When Arctic Ice Locks up Your Submarine, It's Time to Break Out the Chainsaw

Westward H2O!

North America's 2080 Water Forecast

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Clouds

Fortress of Solitude-like Cave Houses Ridiculously Slow-Growing Crystals

How I Put a Murderer Away With Doppler Radar

The Citizen Scientist

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #73: Quake Science on Trial in Italy

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #41: The Ozone Satellite, 1991–2011

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #45: Have Humans Left a Permanent Scar on the Geologic Record

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #36: Forests Stage A Comeback

Climate  Engineers Get  a PR Lesson

4 Bold Ideas to Make America’s Energy Supply  Safer, Cleaner &  Virtually Inexhaustible

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #45: Have Humans Left  a Permanent Scar on the  Geologic Record