Scientists are not sure what caused these abrupt increases, during which carbon dioxide levels rose about 10 to 15 parts per million – or about 5 percent per episode – during a span of one to two centuries. It likely was a combination of factors, they say, including ocean circulation, changing wind patterns and terrestrial processes.

The finding, published Oct. 30 in the journal Nature, casts new light on the mechanisms that take the Earth in and out of ice ages.

“We used to think that naturally occurring changes in carbon dioxide took place relatively slowly over the 10,000 years it took to move out of the last ice age,” said lead author Shaun Marcott, who did the work as a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University and is now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This abrupt, centennial-scale variability of CO₂ appears to be a fundamental part of the global carbon cycle.”

Previous research has hinted at the possibility that spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide may have accelerated the last deglaciation, but that hypothesis had not been resolved, the researchers say. The key to the new finding is the analysis of an ice core from the West Antarctic that provided the scientists with an unprecedented glimpse into the past.

“An important element in ice core research is being able to calculate the difference in age between the gas, in this case carbon dioxide, and the ice that surrounds it. To do that, we need good measurements of both the snow accumulation rate and of temperature,” said Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences.

Steig and T.J. Fudge, a postdoctoral researcher in Earth and space sciences, are co-authors of the Nature paper, and provided analysis from an ice core from the surface to more than 2 miles deep and covering some 68,000 years of climate history, taken from the .

Fudge used electrical measurements on the core to detect seasonal variations in acidity, an indicator of thickness of the snow layer from one year to the next. Steig’s lab analyzed the ratio of heavy oxygen to light oxygen in the ice to provide a measure of temperature differences through time. were published in Nature last year.

Past climate studies have been hampered by the limitations of previous ice cores. Cores from Greenland, for example, provide unique records of rapid climate events going back 120,000 years, but high concentrations of impurities don’t allow researchers to accurately determine atmospheric carbon dioxide records. Antarctic ice cores have fewer impurities, but generally have had lower resolution and so provided less-detailed information about atmospheric carbon dioxide.

However, the West Antarctica core has “extraordinary detail,” said co-author Edward Brook, an Oregon State paleoclimatologist. Because the area where the core was taken gets high annual snowfall, the new ice core provides one of the most-detailed records of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

“It is a remarkable ice core and it clearly shows distinct pulses of carbon dioxide increase that can be very reliably dated,” Brook said. “These are some of the fastest natural changes in CO₂ we have observed, and were probably big enough on their own to impact the Earth’s climate.

“The abrupt events did not end the ice age by themselves,” he said. “That might be jumping the gun a bit. But it is fair to say that the natural carbon cycle can change a lot faster than was previously thought – and we don’t know all of the mechanisms that caused that rapid change.”

The researchers say the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from the peak of the last ice age to complete deglaciation was about 80 parts per million, taking place over 10,000 years. Thus, the finding that 30 to 45 ppm of the increase happened in just a few centuries was significant.

The overall rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide during the last deglaciation was thought to have been triggered by the release of CO₂ from the deep ocean – especially the Southern Ocean. However, the researchers say that no obvious ocean mechanism is known that would trigger rises of 10 to 15 ppm over a timespan as short as one to two centuries.

“The oceans are simply not thought to respond that fast,” Brook said. “Either the cause of these pulses is at least part terrestrial, or there is some mechanism in the ocean system we don’t yet know about.”

One reason the researchers are reluctant to pin the end of the last ice age solely on carbon dioxide increases is that other processes were taking place, Marcott said. As carbon dioxide levels were increasing, atmospheric methane was increasing at the same or a slightly higher rate. He added that ocean circulation changed during at least two of the pulses, and such changes would have affected carbon dioxide and, indirectly, methane by affecting global rainfall patterns.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

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This story is adapted in part from a by Mark Floyd at Oregon State University.

Note: Steig is on sabbatical in Europe but may be reached by email at steig@uw.edu. Contact Fudge at 206-543-0162 or tjfudge@uw.edu.

The answers to such questions can reflect different cultural orientations and have an effect on how well science and scientific concepts are communicated, according to new research from Northwestern University and the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý.

“I think there are some trends and norms about science communication that at the least need to be reconsidered, especially around how truths are reported and expertise – or perhaps more accurately lack of expertise – is presumed,” said co-author , a UW assistant professor of educational psychology.

“A view of singular truth as the only possible way of understanding the world will inevitably reproduce particular forms of power and privilege, especially given the still largely homogeneous scientific world,” Bang said. “Perhaps science communication could also take up the voices of those not in formal expert positions.”

The , published in September in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, resulted from a collaboration among the two universities, the American Indian Center of Chicago and the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin.

The authors say the challenge is to identify effective ways of communicating information to culturally diverse groups in a way that avoids cultural polarization.

“We suggest that trying to present science in a culturally neutral way is like trying to paint a picture without taking a perspective,” said lead author Douglas Medin, a Northwestern professor of psychology.

The research builds on their broader research on cultural differences in the understanding of and engagement with science.

“We argue that science communication – for example, words, photographs and illustrations – necessarily makes use of artifacts, both physical and conceptual, and these artifacts commonly reflect the cultural orientations and assumptions of their creators,” the authors write.

Native Americans, for example, traditionally see themselves as part of nature and tend to focus on ecological relationships, while European-Americans tend to see humans as apart from nature, the researchers found previously.

“We show that these cultural differences are also reflected in media, such as children’s picture books,” said Medin. “Books authored and illustrated by Native Americans are more likely to have illustrations of scenes that are close-up, and the text is more likely to mention the plants, trees and other geographic features and relationships that are present compared with popular children’s books not done by Native Americans.

“The European-American cultural assumption that humans are not part of ecosystems is readily apparent in illustrations,” he said.

They searched Google images using the term “ecosystems,” and 98 percent of the images that turned up did not have humans present. A fair number of the remaining 2 percent had children examining the ecosystem by, for example, observing it through a magnifying glass and saying, “I spy an ecosystem.”

“These results suggest that formal and informal science communications are not culturally neutral but rather embody particular cultural assumptions that exclude people from nature,” Medin said.

“There are profound implications not only for perceiving the issue but studying it, forming policy, or forging adaption for our collective futures,” Bang said. She and the other researchers have developed a series of “urban ecology” programs at the American Indian Center of Chicago.

“In our work we have found that presenting multiple perspectives, both human and non-human, on phenomena and related consequences may help to support more complex ecological thinking.”

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

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This story is adapted in part from a news release by Northwestern University.

At about 960,000 square miles it covers slightly more land area than Alaska, Texas and California combined, and its elevation is on the same scale as Mount Rainier in the Cascade Range of Washington state. Because it rises so high into the atmosphere, it helps bring monsoons over India and other nations to the south while the plateau itself remains generally arid.

For decades, geologists have debated when and how the plateau reached such lofty heights, some 14,000 feet above sea level, about half the elevation of the highest Himalayan peaks just south of the plateau.

But new research led by a ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý scientist appears to confirm an earlier improbable finding – at least one large area in southwest Tibet, the plateau’s Zhada Basin, actually lost 3,000 to 5,000 feet of elevation sometime in the Pliocene epoch.

“This basin is really high right now but we think it was a kilometer or more higher just 3 million to 4 million years ago,” said , a UW associate professor of Earth and space sciences and the lead author of a paper describing the research.

Co-authors are Joel Saylor of the University of Houston and Jay Quade and Adam Hudson, both of the University of Arizona. The paper was published online in August and will appear in a future print edition of the Geological Society of America Bulletin.

The Zhada Basin has rugged terrain, with exposed deposits of ancient lake and river sediments that make fossil shells of gastropods such as snails easily accessible, and determining their age is relatively straightforward. The researchers studied shells dating from millions of years ago and from a variety of aquatic environments. They also collected modern shell and water samples from a variety of environments for comparison.

The work confirms results of a previous study involving Saylor and Quade that examined the ratio of heavy isotope oxygen-18 to light isotope oxygen-16 in ancient snail shells from the Zhada Basin. They found the ratios were very low, which suggested the basin had a higher elevation in the past.

Oxygen-18 levels decrease in precipitation at higher elevations in comparison with oxygen-16, so shells formed in lakes and rivers that collect precipitation at higher elevations should have a lower heavy-to-light oxygen ratio. However, those lower ratios depend on a number of other factors, including temperature, evaporation and precipitation source, which made it difficult to say with certainty whether the low ratios found in the ancient snail shells meant a loss of elevation in the Zhada Basin.

So the scientists also employed a technique called clumped isotope thermometry, which Huntington has used and worked to refine for several years, to determine the temperature of shell growth and get an independent estimate of elevation change in the basin.

Bonding, or “clumping” together, of heavy carbon-13 and oxygen-18 isotopes in the carbonate of snail shells happens more readily at colder temperatures, and is measured using a tool called a mass spectrometer that provides data on the temperature of the lake or river water in which the snails lived.

The scientists found markedly greater “clumping,” as well as lower ratios of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 in the ancient shells, indicating the shells formed at temperatures as much as 11 degrees Celsius (20 F) colder than average temperatures today, the equivalent of as much as 5,000 feet of elevation loss.

Just why the elevation decline happened is open to speculation. One possibility is that as faults in the region spread, the Zhada Basin lowered, Huntington said. It is unknown yet whether other parts of the southern plateau also lowered at the same time, but if elevation loss was widespread it could be because of broader fault spreading. It also is possible the crust thickened and forced large rock formations even deeper into the Earth, where they heated until they reached a consistency at which they could ooze out from beneath the crust, like toothpaste squeezed from the tube.

She noted that climate records from deep-sea fossils indicate Earth was significantly warmer when the cold Zhada Basin snail shells were formed.

“Our findings are a conservative estimate,” Huntington said. “No one can say this result is due to a colder climate, because if anything it should have been warmer.”

Funding was provided in part by the , the , the Comer Foundation and the .

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For more information, contact Huntington at 206-543-1750 or kate1@uw.edu, or Saylor at 713-743-3399 or jesaylor@uh.edu.

Subject of Possible Rule Making: Chapter 478-120 WAC, Student Conduct Code for the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý

Statutes Authorizing the University to Adopt Rules on This Subject: RCW 28B.20.130.

Reasons Why Rules on This Subject May Be Needed and What They Might Accomplish: The last substantive revision to this chapter occurred in 1996. This revision is intended to enhance compliance with the federal Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, Title IX, and changes to the Clery Act. Prohibited student conduct will be more clearly defined and will include behaviors which may occur online or in virtual environments. Additionally, appeals avenues will be more clearly articulated and due process rights will be further clarified. It is also anticipated that substantial reorganization of the existing content will make the chapter easier to navigate.

Process for Developing New Rule: Agency study.

Interested parties can participate in the decision to adopt the new rule and formulation of the proposed rule before publication by sending written comments or inquiries to Rebecca Goodwin Deardorff, Director of Rules Coordination:

Mail:     ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý
Rules Coordination Office
Box 351210
Seattle, WA 98195-1210

Email:   rules@uw.edu

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The selection will bring greater intensity to the UW research, with more equipment and scientists involved in the work.

“We’re kind of transitioning from an experiment into a facility. We haven’t quite figured out what the implications of this are,” said Leslie Rosenberg, a UW physics professor and a leader of the .

Dark matter is believed to make up about one-quarter of the mass of the universe, and as much as 85 percent of all matter. However, it apparently does not interact with light or matter and so has never been directly observed. Scientists search for it through gravitational and other interactions.

The Axion Dark Matter Experiment is searching for a theorized-but-never-seen elementary particle called the axion. A very sensitive detector at the UW’s is hunting for cold dark matter axions in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy by detecting their conversion into microwave photons.

For nearly a century, scientists have theorized that there must be an unseen substance that prevents galaxies from spinning apart. Axions are one candidate for cold dark matter that would act as that gravitational glue.

Two federal agencies, the and the , in July approved more than $5 million in funding spanning several years for the second generation of the axion search.

The other dark matter experiments selected for funding are the at SnoLab, located in a nickel mine near Sudbury, Ontario, and the at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, located in a former gold mine near Lead, South Dakota. Both of those experiments are searching for a different dark-matter candidate called a weakly interactive massive particle.

Those projects and the axion experiment were chosen for additional funding from among nearly two dozen proposals.

“Axions are becoming a more and more compelling candidate for dark matter and this is essentially authorization for us to recruit good scientists for the search,” said Gray Rybka, a UW research assistant professor of physics working on the axion project.

The existing detector uses a powerful magnet surrounding a sensitive microwave receiver that is supercooled to less than 4.2 kelvins, or about minus-452 F or minus-269 C. The apparatus is enclosed in a borehole in the floor of the UW’s North Physics Laboratory. Supercooling greatly increases the sensitivity of the detector.

The new federal authorization will bring total funding for the axion search effort to around $20 million since 2011, Rosenberg said. Already there are potential users from other institutions who could plug into the UW-based experiment as soon as October. They would use instruments tuned to frequencies different from the one already in place.

“Certainly we’re going to have a big ramp-up for our project,” Rosenberg said. “We envision more magnet bores, more cryogenic capability.”

With the added capacity, he believes that in as little as three years scientists might have confirmed the axion as cold dark matter or eliminated it from further consideration. Either way, it would be a major step in dark matter research.

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He also created five other endowments in chemistry, including a fund for staff professional development in chemistry, an outstanding faculty award, a common room to foster collaboration and collegiality and a graduate fellowship.

In 1948 he joined the UW, where he spent four decades conducting research in physical chemistry. Rabinovitch – often called “Rab” by colleagues, friends and students – conducted experiments that were instrumental in deciphering processes that occur when molecules collide and rearrange, events that happen in a trillionth of a second. His contributions to molecular dynamics have become standard material in physical chemistry textbooks.

A memorial scientific symposium on campus is being planned.

Rabinovitch was born in Montreal in 1919, and by the age of 23 he had earned bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from McGill University in Quebec. In 1942 he joined the Canadian Army and led a team of scientists in Europe studying German munitions factories and battlefields in search of violations of the Geneva Conventions.

Following the war he was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.

He served as an editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society and chaired the society’s Division of Physical Chemistry. He mentored numerous students, and 41 of them earned doctoral degrees under his guidance.

His honors include being named a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

After retiring in 1986, he took up silversmithing, became a collector of antique silver slices and servers and explored their chemistry. He published three authoritative volumes on the subject, and his collection of contemporary silver servers is on permanent exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Survivors include four children, all UW graduates. His son Peter Rabinovitch is a UW professor of pathology.

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About 20 people – most of them UW physics graduate and undergraduate students, but with a few local high school students as well – took about 50 hours to assemble the diminutive replica, which is small enough to sit atop an office desk.

“We spent a lot of time learning how to build it,” said Nikola Whallon, who just completed his first year as a UW physics grad student. “We ran out of some of the original parts that we were supposed to use, so we had to improvise.”

It’s not the first time a university has built a model of the Atlas detector using Lego bricks. The effort was the brainchild of Sascha Mehlhase, a physicist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany.

More than that 100 model kits have been distributed worldwide. Recently, Mehlhase and numerous others at the , volunteered to sort thousands of pieces into kits for more than 20 models that were then distributed to a variety of institutions around the world, including the one that came to the UW.

Building the model presents a great opportunity to broaden public interest in science and to explain, in lay terms, “the problems we are trying to attack,” said , a UW assistant professor of physics who has worked with the students.

“It’s about outreach education,” he said. “It is something that we think can inspire interest for all ages.”

The UW has strong ties to the Large Hadron Collider, operated by near Geneva, Switzerland. The collider made history in 2012 by providing evidence for an elusive subatomic particle called the Higgs boson – sometimes referred to as “the God particle” – a discovery that provided a major step in understanding the origins of the universe.

UW scientists and engineers played a key role in building the Atlas detector, one of two detectors central to the Higgs discovery. The Atlas detector is half the size of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and weighs in at more than 7,700 tons. The UW group was instrumental in designing and building one of its subsystems, the muon spectrometer.

The forward muon detector on Atlas contains more than 430 chambers filled with aluminum tubes ranging in length from about 5 feet to 10 feet. About 30,000 of the tubes were made at UW between 2000 and 2007, fitted into 80 chambers and shipped to Geneva. Another 60,000 tubes were made with UW methods and specifications at two other U.S. sites and then shipped to Geneva. The chambers were mounted into 32 sections shaped like giant pie wedges, which fit together into two rings at either end of the main Atlas detector.

UW physicists continue to work on Atlas, helping to outfit the detector with a new component called the Insertable b-Layer to allow even more sensitive measurements of the Higgs boson and other related particles. The Insertable b-Layer is essentially a digital camera that can create pictures of what happens inside the detector immediately after particle collisions, but while a typical camera has one silicon detector the Atlas pixel detector has more than 1,700.

The dimensions of the UW’s Lego model, built in the Physics-Astronomy Building during May and June, are about one-fiftieth of the real thing. Getting the model just right was an engrossing prospect for the students, Whallon said.

“Surprisingly – or maybe not so surprisingly – the Legos proved to be attractive to the graduate students,” he said.

The Lego model is now displayed on campus in a clear-plastic case and is being featured during the annual U.S. Atlas workshop, which brings together physicists from across the country and this year is being held at the UW.

Eventually the model could be taken to other venues, such as the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, and even taken apart so that a whole new group of students can assemble it.

“It’s a good way to get kids interested in high-energy physics, which isn’t so easy to do,” Whallon said.

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(This story was modified on Aug. 11, 2014, to clarify origins of the Atlas detector model outreach effort.)

The research indicates the landslide, the deadliest in U.S. history, happened in two major stages. The first stage remobilized the 2006 slide, including part of an adjacent forested slope from an ancient slide, and was made up largely or entirely of deposits from previous landslides. The first stage ultimately moved more than six-tenths of a mile across the north fork of the Stillaguamish River and caused nearly all the destruction in the Steelhead Haven neighborhood.

The second stage started several minutes later and consisted of ancient landslide and glacial deposits. That material moved into the space vacated by the first stage and moved rapidly until it reached the trailing edge of the first stage, the study found.

The report, released Tuesday on the four-month anniversary of the slide, details an investigation by a team from the , or GEER. The scientists and engineers determined that intense rainfall in the three weeks before the slide likely was a major issue, but factors such as altered groundwater migration, weakened soil consistency because of previous landslides and changes in hillside stresses played key roles.

The extreme events group is funded by the National Science Foundation, and its goal is to collect perishable data immediately in the wake of extreme events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, landslides or floods. Recent events for which reports have been filed include earthquakes in New Zealand and Haiti, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and Hurricane Sandy on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard in 2012.

“Perhaps the most striking finding is that, while the Oso landslide was a rare geologic occurrence, it was not extraordinary,” said , a ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and a team leader for the study.

“We observed several other older but very similar long-runout landslides in the surrounding Stillaguamish River Valley. This tells us these may be prevalent in this setting over long time frames. Even the apparent trigger of the event – several weeks of intense rainfall – was not truly exceptional for the region,” Wartman said.

Team co-leader Jeffrey Keaton, a principal engineering geologist with AMEC Americas, an engineering consultant and project management company, said another important finding is that spring of 2014 was not a big time for landslides in Northwest Washington.

“The Oso landslide was the only major one that occurred in Snohomish County or the Seattle area this spring,” Keaton said.

Other team members are Scott Anderson of the Federal Highway Administration, Jean Benoit of the University of New Hampshire, John deLaChapelle of Golder Associates Inc., Robert Gilbert of the University of Texas and David Montgomery of the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý.

The team was formed and approved within days of the landslide, but it began work at the site about eight weeks later, after search and recovery activities were largely completed. The researchers documented conditions and collected data that could be lost over time. Their report is based largely on data collected during a four-day study of the entire landslide area in late May. It focuses on data and observations directly from the site, but also considers information such as local geologic and climate conditions and eyewitness accounts.

The researchers reviewed evidence for a number of large landslides in the Stillaguamish Valley around Oso during the previous 6,000 years, many of them strongly resembling the site of the 2014 slide. There is solid evidence, for example, of a slide just west of this year’s slide that also ran out across the valley. In addition, they reviewed published maps showing the entire valley bottom in the Oso area is made up of old landslide deposits or areas where such deposits have been reworked by the river and left on the flood plain.

The team estimated that large landslides such as the March event have happened in the same area as often as every 400 years (based on 15 mapped large landslides) to every 1,500 years (based on carbon dating of what appears to be the oldest of four generations of large slides) during the last six millennia.

The researchers found that the size of the landslide area grew slowly starting in the 1930s until 2006, when it increased dramatically. That was followed by this year’s catastrophically larger slide.

Studies in previous decades indicated a high landslide risk for the Oso area, the researchers found, but they noted that it does not appear there was any publicly communicated understanding that debris from a landslide could run as far across the valley as it did in March. In addition to the fatalities, that event seriously injured at least 10 people and caused damage estimated at more than $50 million.

“For me, the most important finding is that we must think about landslides in the context of ‘risk’ rather than ‘hazard,'” Wartman said. “While these terms are often used interchangeably, there is a subtle but important difference. Landslide hazard, which was well known in the region, tells us the likelihood that a landslide will occur, whereas landslide risk tells us something far more important – the likelihood that human losses will occur as a result of a landslide.

“From a policy perspective, I think it is very important that we begin to assess and clearly communicate the risks from landslides,” he said.

Other study conclusions include:

• That past landslides and associated debris deposited by water should be carefully investigated when mapping areas for zoning purposes.
• That the influence of precipitation on destabilizing a slope should consider both cumulative amounts and short-duration intensities in assessing the likelihood of initial or renewed slope movement.
• That methods to identify and delineate potential landslide runout zones need to be revisited and re-evaluated.

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For more information, contact Wartman at 206-685-4806 or wartman@uw.edu, or Keaton at 323-889-5316 or jeff.keaton@amec.com.

The ambitious project, a joint undertaking by Earth scientists at Rice University, the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, the University of Texas at El Paso and other institutions, requires placing more than 3,500 active seismological sensors and 23 seismic charges around the volcano during the next few days.

“Mount St. Helens and other volcanoes in the Cascade Range threaten urban centers from Vancouver to Portland, and we’d like to better understand their inner workings in order to better predict when they may erupt and how severe those eruptions are likely to be,” said , a Rice professor of Earth science and lead scientist for the experiment.

Levander said the instruments will measure seismic waves generated by the detonation of charges in 23 boreholes that are each about 80 feet deep. Most of the detonations are scheduled in the evening on July 22-23, but Levander said area residents are unlikely to hear or feel them because of the depth of the boreholes and because the detonations will produce vibrations that approximate a magnitude 2 earthquake, which typically cannot be felt.

“Our shots will provide enough seismic energy to develop a clear picture of the mountain’s inner workings, but in most cases not enough to be felt and certainly no more than low-level seismic activity that occurs in the area on a weekly basis,” Levander said.

Levander said the detonations will take place in areas where the ground has already been disturbed, such as clear-cuts, quarries, gravel pits and garbage dumps.

Dozens of mostly student volunteers are expected to arrive Friday for two days of training about how to set up the 3,500 active seismic sensors that will gather the bulk of the experimental data.

“These sensors are basically a computer in a can with a small battery,” Levander said. “They’re about the size of a water bottle, but because of their limited power supply, we only have about two days to deploy the whole lot.”

He said the volunteers will also pick up all the active sensors — and the data they’ve collected — within a couple of days of the explosions.

A few more detonations will occur on the evening of July 30. A rearrangement of part of the sensor network will accompany those tests.

The coming tests follow two years of detailed planning and are part of a four-year project called , which could bring improvements in volcanic monitoring and advance warning systems at Mount St. Helens and other volcanoes.

The work area for the tests extends from Mount Rainier on the north to the Columbia River on the south, and from Interstate 5 on the west to Mount Adams on the east. An advance team of researchers has been in the area for weeks installing 70 . Levander said these instruments, which take several hours to set up and will be left in place for two years, are more sophisticated and sensitive than the active sensors.

“The active-source monitoring will provide very high-resolution images at a relatively shallow depth, while the passive experiment data will be at a lower resolution but will be at a much greater depth,” said , a ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý professor of Earth and space sciences who is leading the passive monitoring.

Having both sets of monitors recording data from the active-source detonations will help scientists have a much clearer idea of how the deeper, harder-to-see structure compares with better-defined shallow structure, he said.

A third technique, magnetotelluric monitoring, which produces data based on fluctuations in Earth’s electromagnetic field, will also be used to image the subterranean structures.

Mount St. Helens was chosen for the study because it has been the most active volcano in the Cascade Range, erupting twice in the last 35 years, and is readily accessible for the researchers and their equipment, Levander said.

The National Science Foundation funded the research. Levander is principal investigator on the active source component of the project. He said the team hopes to publish its findings in 2015. Other institutions involved include Oregon State University, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule of Zurich and the United States Geological Survey.

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This story was adapted from a from Rice University and the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, prepared by Jade Boyd of Rice.

They hope the research will produce science that will lead to better understanding of eruptions, which in turn could lead to greater public safety.

The project involves three distinct components: active-source seismic monitoring, passive-source seismic monitoring and magnetotelluric monitoring, using fluctuations in Earth’s electromagnetic field to produce images of structures beneath the surface.

Researchers are beginning passive-source and magnetotelluric monitoring, while active-source monitoring – measuring seismic waves generated by underground detonations – will be conducted later.

Passive-source monitoring involves burying seismometers at 70 different sites throughout a 60-by-60-mile area centered on Mount St. Helens in southwestern Washington. The seismometers will record data from a variety of seismic events.

“We will record local earthquakes, as well as distant earthquakes. Patterns in the earthquake signatures will reveal in greater detail the geological structures beneath St. Helens,” said John Vidale, director of the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý-based Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

Magnetotelluric monitoring will be done at 150 sites spread over an area running 125 miles north to south and 110 miles east to west, which includes both Mount Rainier and Mount Adams. Most of the sites will only be used for a day, with instruments recording electric and magnetic field signals that will produce images of subsurface structures.

Besides the UW, collaborating institutions are Oregon State University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, Rice University, Columbia University, the U.S. Geological Survey and ETH-Zurich in Switzerland. The work is being funded by the National Science Foundation.

Mount St. Helens has been the most active volcano in the Cascade Range during the last 2,000 years and has erupted twice in the last 35 years. It also is more accessible than most volcanoes for people and equipment, making it a prime target for scientists trying to better understand how volcanoes get their supply of magma.

The magma that eventually comes to the surface probably originates 60 to 70 miles deep beneath St. Helens, at the interface between the Juan de Fuca and North American tectonic plates. The plates first come into contact off the Pacific Northwest coast, where the Juan de Fuca plate subducts beneath the North American plate and reaches great depth under the Cascades. As the magma works its way upward, it likely accumulates as a mass several miles beneath the surface.

As the molten rock works its way toward the surface, it is possible that it gathers in a large chamber a few miles beneath the surface. The path from great depth to this chamber is almost completely unknown and is a main subject of the study.

The project is expected to conclude in the summer of 2016.

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 For more information, contact Vidale at 310-210-2131 or vidale@uw.edu. The lead scientist on passive-seismic monitoring is Kenneth Creager, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, who can be reached at 206-685-2803 or creager@ess.washington.edu. The lead scientist for magnetotelluric monitoring is Adam Schultz, professor of geology and geophysics at Oregon State University, 541-737-9832 or adam.schultz@oregonstate.edu.

The Imaging Magma Under St. Helens website is at .