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Deepa receives Goetze Prize for Undergraduate Research
At the 2012 EAPS Student Awards Ceremony Deepa Rao received the Christopher Goetze Prize for Undergraduate Research for her thesis entitled : “Exploring the Microbe-mediated Soil H2 sink: A lab-based study of the physiology and related H2 consumption of isolates from the Harvard Forest LTER.” The award recognizes ” innovative experimental design, care in data collection, and sensitive application of results to research problems.” It has been a pleasure to supervise Deepa’s thesis research and her results will contribute to our research efforts to understand the mechanisms driving the soil sink for atmospheric H2. Professor Ron Prinn acts as the faculty advisor for both Deepa and I.
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Spotlight on H2 fluxes at Harvard Forest
PAOC Spotlight: Back to the forest Interview Micro-organisms have produced dramatic shifts in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and continue to be important drivers of ocean- and land-atmosphere exchanges of gases that have a strong influence on atmospheric composition and climate. An interesting example is the microbial influence on atmospheric molecular hydrogen (H2), which dominates the fate of this gas in the atmosphere. H2 is emitted to the atmosphere by about half natural and half anthropogenic, or human-induced, processes but it is predominantly removed from the atmosphere by microorganisms in the soil, which makes this process the most important, yet least understood, player in the atmospheric H2 budget. The MIT Program in…
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I survived the AGU 2011 Fall meeting
I just returned to Boston after the six weeks of travelling. My two weeks in California, filled with conferences and colleagues, was quite different from the intensive and somewhat isolated period spent in India. First stop was San Diego, where I attended the 44th Meeting of Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) Scientists and Cooperating Networks at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla. Anita Ganesan’s instrument in Darjeeling may pave the way for the first AGAGE site in India, so the crowd was eager to hear her describe our success in deploying her instrument. Her dedicated and diligent work is paying off as she is collecting some of…
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Helping deploy Anita’s instrument to Darjeeling, India
Update: The first publication from Dr. Anita Ganesan’s work in Darjeeling has been published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (view document online). I’m in my second week in India, where I am helping fellow Prinn-group graduate student Anita Ganesan deploy her gas chromatograph to Darjeeling, a town high on a ridge in West Bengal in the foothills of the Himalayas (Anita has a blog now!). It’s quite a trek to get to the Bose Institute where her instrument will be housed. We spent a few days adjusting to the change in time and culture in the hectic city of Kolkata. A haze hung over the city, making the day seem…
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Field tripping around Boston – MIT Experimental Atmospheric Chemistry course
It’s my fourth year as a TA for our ‘Experimental Atmospheric Chemistry’ undergraduate and graduate course at MIT, and today we have loaded up the department’s van with nitric oxide (NO) and ozone (O3) monitors, a uv radiometer, and three particulate monitors (PM 10, 2.5, and 1.0 um). As part of the ‘Pollution Exposure’ unit, we will synchronize the monitors and drive around Boston noting changes in pollutant levels and keeping notes to identify possible pollutant sources. The field trip is a good time, and this year our class has grown to ten students, which is the biggest class we’ve had since I helped develop the course in 2007 with my…
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Teaching plant biogeography for the EAPS Extreme Weather and Climate course
This week I traveled up to Mt. Washington with this year’s EAPS FPOP (Freshman Pre-Orientation Program) Discover Earth, Atmosphere and Planetary Sciences: Extreme Weather & Climate. It’s the third time I’ve acted as a TA for the program by heading up the flora and fauna section, or what is now more commonly known as “Flora with Laura.” The 3 day program is Spotlighted on the PAOC website, which describes it as being “designed to provide incoming freshmen with the opportunity to explore the science of weather and climate through an exciting combination of lectures and fluids experiments, providing a glimpse into some of the most interesting and challenging aspects of research…
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How much energy does H2 supply to soil microbes?
I presented a poster at the at the Ecology of Soil Microorganisms conference in Prague, 2011 on the role of soil microorganisms in dominating the fate of atmospheric molecular hydrogen (H2). Recent work has linked atmospheric H2 uptake to a novel high-affinity [NiFe]-hydrogenase expressed in active Streptomyces sp. cells, and is perhaps not driven by abiotic hydrogenases as was previously thought. Consequently, atmospheric hydrogen may be a 60-85 Tg yr-1 energetic supplement to microbes in Earth’s uppermost soil horizon. To understand the role of this supplement to the soil microbial ecology, this work explores the following questions: What is the importance of atmospheric H2 energy to soil microbial communities relative to…
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Is H2 an upper atmospheric tracer?
I presented a poster at the 2010 American Geophysical Union General Assembly on H2 as a “mesotracer.” A rare glimpse into the chemical and dynamical evolution of the Arctic polar vortex is provided by a suite of in situ balloonborne measurements. A set of mesospheric tracers observed in the late vortex validate theoretical mesospheric chemical profiles, which is especially valuable for the case of mesospheric H2. Early vortex mesospheric profiles are constructed to explain mixing in tracer-tracer space. Expanding a model to incorporate three mesotracers, H2, CO, and SF6, instead of only one, will increase our ability to constrain estimates of the amount of mesospheric air that descended to stratospheric altitudes…
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MBL microbial diversity course
In the summer of 2010, I spent six inspiring, challenging, and chaotic weeks at the Marine Biological Laboratory Microbial Diversity Course in Woods Hole, MA. I hoped to take full advantage of the opportunity granted by course directors Steve Zinder and Dan Buckley of Cornell to plunge head on into the world of microbiology. I was eager to learn the theory and hands-on methods to study the microbial world, which has such a profound impact on atmospheric composition, and this course gave me a chance to explore my interests in a way not offered anywhere else.
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Instrument deployment at Harvard Forest
After over a year of designing, building, and testing a custom instrument system to measure fluxes of molecular hydrogen (H2), I deployed the system to the Harvard Forest Long Term Ecological Research site in Petersham, Massachusetts (http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/). With the instrument installed, I will measure hydrogen fluxes for a year to determine the seasonal dynamics of H2 cycling in this mixed deciduous forest, and in particular, to characterize the strong soil sink for atmospheric H2. The instrument shed was tight, and I was packing a lot of equipment. But the move in day was a successful and fun experience thanks to the help of colleagues at Harvard University. This short documentary created by fellow PhD student Ryan Abernathey…