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Recognizing a century of boats against the current

Megan Maneval — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 14:08:19 +0000

Recognizing a century of boats against the current Megan Maneval Fri, 04/25/2025 - 08:08

��ֱ�� Arts and Sciences Magazine

"The Great Gatsby" remains relevant for modern readers by shapeshifting with the times, says ��ֱ�� Boulder scholar Martin Bickman.

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Melting glaciers at the end of the Ice Age may have sped up continental drift, fueled volcanic eruptions

Daniel William Strain — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 03:03:00 +0000

Melting glaciers at the end of the Ice Age may have sped up continental drift, fueled volcanic eruptions Daniel William… Wed, 04/23/2025 - 21:03

Daniel Strain

A glacier flows into the sea from modern-day Greenland. (Credit: CC photo via Flickr)

Around 10,000 years ago as the last Ice Age drew to a close, the drifting of the continent of North America, and spreading in the Atlantic Ocean, may have temporarily sped up—with a little help from melting glaciers, according to a new study from scientists at the University of ��ֱ�� Boulder.

In the new research, geophysicists Tao Yuan and Shijie Zhong used computer simulations, or models, to travel back roughly 26,000 years into the planet’s past. At the time, the massive Laurentide Ice Sheet, which stretched over North America as far south as Pennsylvania, started to recede. Melting ice flooded into the oceans, and sea levels worldwide rose by an average of around 1 centimeter per year.

The Laurentide Ice Sheet at its maximum extent during the last Ice Age. (Credit: Dalton et al., 2022, Earth-Science Reviews)

Graphic showing the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Ridge (red line) and how melting ice from Greenland caused changes in the motion of Earth's crust (purple arrows). (Credit: Tao Yuan and Shijie Zhong)

Fagradalsfjall volcano erupts in Iceland in 2023. (Credit: CC photo by Giles Laurent via Wikimedia Commons)

The scientists discovered that this global thaw may have also had unexpected consequences—including for plate tectonics, or the internal clockwork that has, for billions of years, torn Earth’s continents apart and crushed them together.

According to the team’s calculations, the motion of the North American continental plate may have sped up by 25% as the ice melted. At the same time, spreading at the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Ridge, which sits between the North American and Eurasian plates, may have increased by as much as 40%.

“As ice volume was greatly reduced, it caused a huge motion in Earth’s crust,” said Yuan, a graduate student in the Department of Physics at ��ֱ�� Boulder. “Scientists knew that the ice melting caused the plates to uplift. But we show that they also moved a lot horizontally due to the ice melting.”

The researchers published their findings April 23 in the journal Nature.

Their results may have implications for the planet today. Ice sheets over Greenland are once again melting at a rapid rate, which, in a strange twist, could drive an increase in volcanic eruptions in Iceland not far away.

“That story that we’ve been telling for a long, long time—that processes like seafloor spreading and continental drift operate at timescales of millions of years driven by Earth’s internal engine—thermal convection,” said Zhong, a professor of physics. “That’s still true, but we show that glacial forcing can also cause significant motion on relatively short timescales of 10,000 years.”

Moving gears

The research, which was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, takes a deep dive into the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Ridge. This feature runs for thousands of miles down the center of the Atlantic Ocean and cuts through the island of Iceland. It’s a turbulent place: There, magma from deep within the planet bubbles up through the crust, cooling into solid rock and helping to force the continents of North America and Europe away from each other.

For generations, scientists believed that this process was largely steady—with the ridge spreading by a consistent 2 centimeters every year for the past several million years.

“That’s a fairly well-known, textbook number,” Zhong said.

But could the textbooks be wrong?

To find out, Zhong and Yuan used computer models to recreate the Earth as it was thousands of years ago. The researchers simulated what might happen as glaciers that were kilometers thick disappeared from modern-day Canada and Greenland—shifting that weight off dry land and into the ocean.

It helps to picture the globe as a memory foam mattress. If you’re lying on a mattress and get up, the foam will slowly bounce back to its original shape. Something similar happened on Earth as ice sheets melt, Zhong and Yuan said.

As the weight of the Laurentide Ice Sheet was redistributed around the planet, parts of North America began to bounce back up. (Today, land around Canada’s Hudson Bay is still rising by around 1 centimeter per year because of that rebound). According to the new study, the melting may have also affected the horizontal motion of North America and the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Ridge.

Volcanic eruptions

The thaw may also have had explosive consequences for Iceland, which sits close to Greenland, Yuan and Zhong said.

Geological evidence, for example, suggests that the island underwent a period of intense volcanic activity at the end of the last Ice Age, which has since quieted down. Enhanced spreading at the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Ridge due to ice melting from Greenland may have contributed to that fiery past—allowing more magma to rise to the surface, fueling the eruption of volcanoes and geysers.

“This pattern of volcanism may have been partly due to the glacial melting that we studied,” Zhong said.

Today, ice over Greenland isn’t melting fast enough to have much of an impact on the planet’s continental drift. But it could still have a major influence on Iceland over the next several hundred years, especially if glaciers begin to disappear at an accelerating rate.

“Ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica are still melting,” Yuan said. “We think the ice melting could enhance seafloor spreading and volcanism at nearby mid-ocean ridges in the future.”

Ice melting from modern-day Greenland could again drive an increase in volcanic eruptions around Iceland, a new study suggests.

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AI in synthetic biology? Doctoral student says 'opportunities are endless'

Megan Maneval — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:38:42 +0000

AI in synthetic biology? Doctoral student says 'opportunities are endless' Megan Maneval Wed, 04/23/2025 - 12:38

College of Engineering and Applied Science

Carolus Vitalis, a doctoral student and National Science Foundation fellow who has co-authored several book chapters in synthetic biology, was one of the speakers at this year’s TEDx��ֱ�� event. His talk discussed the pros and cons of artificial intelligence in the field of synthetic biology.

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Controlled burns reduce wildfire risk but require trained staff, funding

Megan Maneval — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:31:43 +0000

Controlled burns reduce wildfire risk but require trained staff, funding Megan Maneval Wed, 04/23/2025 - 12:31

Uncertainty from Washington along with staff and budget cuts have created turmoil for the U.S. Forest Service’s fire management efforts. Read from ��ֱ�� expert Laura Dee on The Conversation.

Read the Article The Conversation on ��ֱ��BT

The Conversation

The Conversation is an independent, nonprofit publisher of commentary and analysis, authored by academics and edited by journalists for the general public. On a mission “to promote truthful information and strengthen journalism by unlocking the rich diversity of academic research for audiences across America,” they publish short articles by academics on timely topics related to their research. ��ֱ�� Boulder provides funding as a member of The Conversation U.S.

Uncertainty from Washington along with staff and budget cuts have created turmoil for the U.S. Forest Service’s fire management efforts. Read from ��ֱ�� expert Laura Dee on The Conversation.

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Don't fear the fungi

Megan Maneval — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 16:10:50 +0000

Don't fear the fungi Megan Maneval Tue, 04/22/2025 - 10:10

��ֱ�� Arts and Sciences Magazine

��ֱ�� Boulder mycologist Alisha Quandt says there's little reason to fear a fungi-zombie apocalypse like the one imagined in the HBO hit TV series "The Last of Us."

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Climate change is transforming how scientists think about their roles

Megan Maneval — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 16:05:15 +0000

Climate change is transforming how scientists think about their roles Megan Maneval Tue, 04/22/2025 - 10:05

��ֱ�� Arts and Sciences Magazine

��ֱ�� Boulder researcher Pedro DiNezio emphasizes solving the problems of climate change in the here and now.

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Research in space, helping people on Earth: BioServe marks 100th orbital launch

Daniel William Strain — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 02:54:14 +0000

Research in space, helping people on Earth: BioServe marks 100th orbital launch Daniel William… Mon, 04/21/2025 - 20:54

Daniel Strain

The space shuttle Atlantis lifts off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida—marking BioServe's first launch into orbit. (Credit: NASA)

Louis Stodieck remembers the first time he saw a space shuttle blast off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In April 1991, Stodieck, an aerospace engineer, was the associate director of BioServe Space Technologies, a research center at the University of ��ֱ�� Boulder.

He had helped to design a set of test tubes that would, among other things, not spill the moment they reached space. Stodieck handed the test tubes off to a NASA crew, then watched as his work lifted away from a launchpad aboard the space shuttle Atlantis.

“I never get tired of launches,” said Stodieck, who served as BioServe’s director from 1999 to 2019 and is now its chief scientist. “The sound reaches you seconds after the launch because you’re a few miles away. When it hits you, it’s this low vibration, and you just feel it.”

BioServe founder Marvin Luttges in 1989. (Credit: BioServe)

The BioServe team poses for a photo in 1996. (Credit: BioServe)

A test tube designed for space by BioServe. (Credit: BioServe)

BioServe, which was founded in 1987, works with scientists at companies and research institutions around the world to conduct life science experiments in space.

Today, Stodieck and his colleagues are celebrating a new milestone: BioServe’s 100th launch into orbit.

On Monday, April 21, a SpaceX Dragon capsule lifted off from a similar pad in Florida en route to the International Space Station (ISS). It carried equipment belonging to three research projects, or “payloads,” developed by BioServe. They include several colonies containing billions of bacteria and algae.

“This launch is an amazing milestone,” said Stefanie Countryman, the current director of BioServe. “It exemplifies the hard work of everybody at BioServe, not just our engineers and researchers, but also our students.”

The center has come a long way since that first launch, NASA’s STS-37 mission, in 1991.

Researchers at the center have since sent a wide range of living things into orbit. They include single-celled organisms but also ants, silkworms, mice and an intrepid “spidernaut” named Nefertiti. (An 18-year-old student from Egypt proposed studying whether Nefertiti, a jumping spider, could adjust her hunting techniques in space, which she did). But BioServe has also kept one foot planted on the ground. The center’s research has generated new insights into human medical conditions like bone loss and cancer—and could even lead to facilities in the not-so-distant future that orbit Earth while making human stem cells.

“Space gives us an opportunity to look at organisms in new ways, including how they may express genes differently than they do on Earth,” Countryman said.

Single-celled astronauts

David Klaus, professor at the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, was a graduate student at ��ֱ�� Boulder when BioServe’s first launch took off. From 1985 to 1990, he worked as a shuttle launch controller at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and in Mission Control in Houston. Klaus is set to retire this spring and sees the 100th BioServe launch as a “bookend” on his career.

In those early days, BioServe’s work largely revolved around one challenge of conducting science from hundreds of miles above Earth—open liquids and space don’t mix.

“It’s not like taking two test tubes in a lab on Earth and mixing them together,” Klaus said. “With our early payloads, we were really just trying to figure out how we could manipulate biological fluids in a space environment and get some initial experimental results.”

BioServe began as a 5-year grant from NASA under founder Marvin Luttges, a professor of aerospace engineering sciences at ��ֱ�� Boulder. Klaus explained that the center’s space test tubes include up to four sealed chambers. If you push down on a plunger, you can mix the fluids in those chambers one by one, all without exposing them to the air. BioServe has since sent thousands of its test tubes into space, and the basic design remains largely the same.

The team’s early research also revealed something surprising: BioServe scientists discovered that bacteria tend to grow better in space than they do on Earth—perhaps because they’re not being squished down by gravity. A handful of experiments showed that such bacteria could even be transformed into living factories for making anti-cancer drugs.

Astronaut Christina Koch uses a microscope supplied by BioServe aboard the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

A lab 250 miles up

In the decades that followed, BioServe’s scientific equipment wound up on NASA’s four space shuttles, the Russian space station Mir and, eventually, the ISS, which entered into orbit in 1998.

Today, astronauts on the ISS can peer through a microscope flight certified and launched by BioServe and grow cell cultures in four incubators called Space Automated Bioproduct Lab (SABL) 1, 2, 3 and 4. BioServe even supplied the refrigerator where humans on the ISS store their food. On the ground, the center runs a mission operation and control center on the ��ֱ�� Boulder campus. There, BioServe staff talk to astronauts in real time on a giant screen.

“We’re replicating the sorts of biological labs that you can find at ��ֱ�� Boulder in space,” said Tobias Niederwieser, a research associate at BioServe.

Astronaut Alexander Gerst loads biological cultures into a SABL incubator on the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

Adeline Loesch assembles space "petri dishes" containing biological organisms in a lab on the ��ֱ�� Boulder campus. (Credit: Adeline Loesch)

The center has also collaborated with dozens of space agencies, universities and private companies over its history. On the current launch, for example, a company called Sophie’s Bionutrients based in the Netherlands contracted with the center to examine how algae produce proteins in space—which the company hopes will lead to new kinds of algae-based meat substitutes.

The center’s most lasting contribution to science, however, may be its students. Over the years, hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students at ��ֱ�� Boulder have worked for BioServe. Many have gone on to jobs at NASA and private space companies.

They include Adeline Loesch, a senior studying atmospheric and oceanic sciences at ��ֱ�� Boulder. She started working at BioServe between her freshman and sophomore years. These days, she does a little bit of everything for the center: She helps to build the hardware for experiments, assembles them for flight and sits in the operations center as astronauts carry out the research.

In the fall, Loesch will start work in spacecraft and satellite flight operations for Lockheed Martin in ��ֱ��.

“My favorite is watching the projects come full circle during the operations,” Loesch said. “Watching the research being done in real time by astronauts in space is the coolest thing ever.”

Making humans healthier from space

In the end, BioServe’s research in space doesn’t stay in space.

Roughly 24 years ago, for example, Stodieck and his colleagues designed a specialized habitat for mice to live on the ISS. His team’s research has revealed new clues to why mammals lose bone mass when they leave Earth. Those insights, in turn, helped to inspire new kinds of medications for osteoporosis in people.

Niederwieser, meanwhile, is tackling what may be an even more ambitious goal—he and his colleagues are growing human hematopoietic stem cells in space. Doctors often transplant these cells into people to treat cancers like leukemia and lymphoma.

But they’re also tricky and expensive to make on Earth. In a few early experiments, Niederwieser and his colleagues discovered that stem cells, like bacteria, may grow more freely in space. Later this year, his team plans to transport a facility for producing stem cells en masse to the ISS.

That could lead to a new vision for space—one in which stations in orbit around Earth produce various treatments for human illnesses, then send them back to patients on the ground.

“Humans have been on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years and have evolved with only one gravity,” Stodieck said. “It’s really been a privilege to understand how organisms work in another environment.”

Stodieck didn’t travel to Florida for Monday’s launch, but Klaus was there to see SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket roar off the launchpad. Before he left, he was feeling wistful about seeing his old stomping grounds again.

“I'm looking forward to going down there and reminiscing a little bit,” Klaus said. “I’ll drive around and look at the base—a little 40-year flashback to where my career started.”

Beyond the story

Our space impact by the numbers:

19 ��ֱ�� Boulder-affiliated astronauts
No. 1 university recipient of NASA research awards
Only academic research institute in the world to have sent instruments to every planet in the solar system

Follow ��ֱ�� Boulder on LinkedIn

For nearly 40 years, researchers at BioServe Space Technologies at ��ֱ�� Boulder have conducted life science experiments in space—from studying the behavior of spiders in microgravity to producing human stem cells on the International Space Station.

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Did it rain or snow on ancient Mars? New study suggests it did

Daniel William Strain — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:28:26 +0000

Did it rain or snow on ancient Mars? New study suggests it did Daniel William… Mon, 04/21/2025 - 12:28

Daniel Strain

Artist's depiction of water rushing into Mars' Jezero Crater, which billions of years ago was the site of a delta. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Visit ancient Mars—a surprisingly temperate planet where snow or rain falls from the sky, and rivers rush down valleys to feed hundreds of lakes.

A new study from geologists at the University of ��ֱ�� Boulder paints this picture of a Red Planet that was relatively warm and wet, much different than the frigid wasteland we know today. The team’s findings suggest that heavy precipitation likely fed many networks of valleys and channels that shaped the Martian surface billions of years ago—adding new evidence to a long-running debate in planetary science.

The researchers, led by Amanda Steckel, who earned her doctorate in geological sciences at ��ֱ�� Boulder in 2024, published their findings April 21 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

“You could pull up Google Earth images of places like Utah, zoom out, and you’d see the similarities to Mars,” said Steckel, now at the California Institute of Technology.

Most scientists today agree that at least some water existed on the surface of Mars during the Noachian epoch, roughly 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago.

But where that water came from has long been a mystery. Some researchers say that ancient Mars wasn’t ever warm and wet, but always cold and dry. At the time, the solar system’s young sun was only about 75% as bright as it is today. Sprawling ice caps may have covered the highlands around the Martian equator, occasionally melting for short periods of time.

In the new research, Steckel and her colleagues set out to investigate the warm-and-wet versus cold-and-dry theories of Mars’ past climate. The team drew on computer simulations to explore how water may have shaped the surface of Mars billions of years ago. They found that precipitation from snow or rain likely formed the patterns of valleys and headwaters that still exist on Mars today.

“It’s very hard to make any kind of conclusive statement,” Steckel said. “But we see these valleys beginning at a large range of elevations. It’s hard to explain that with just ice.”

A detailed map of the topography of Mars at one region near its equator taken by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) instrument on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. (Credit: NASA)

A tale of two red planets

Satellite images of Mars today still reveal the fingerprints of water on the planet.

Around the equator, for example, vast networks of channels spread from Martian highlands, branching like trees and emptying into lakes and even, possibly, an ocean. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2021, is currently exploring Jezero Crater, the site of one such ancient lake. During the Noachian, a powerful river emptied into this region, depositing a delta on top of the crater floor.

This image from NASA's Perseverance Rover reveals sandstone at the base of Jezero Crater. Scientists believe this feature was created by water carrying fine grains of rock into the crater. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

“You’d need meters deep of flowing water to deposit those kinds of boulders,” said Brian Hynek, senior author of the study and a scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at ��ֱ�� Boulder.

To study that ancient past, he and Steckel, who now serves on the Perseverance science team, created, essentially, a digital version of a portion of Mars.

The team drew on a computer simulation, or model, originally developed for Earth studies by study co-author Gregory Tucker, a professor at the Department of Geological Sciences at ��ֱ�� Boulder. Matthew Rossi, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (��ֱ��) at ��ֱ�� Boulder, also served as a co-author.

The researchers used the software to model the evolution of the landscape on synthetic terrain that resembles Mars close to its equator. In some cases, the group added water to that terrain from falling precipitation. In other cases, the researchers included melting ice caps. Then, in the simulation, they let the water flow for tens to hundreds of thousands of years.

The researchers examined the patterns that formed as a result and, specifically, where the headwaters feeding Mars’ branching valleys emerged. The scenarios produced very different planets: In the case of melting ice caps, those valley heads formed largely at high elevations, roughly around the edge of where the ancient ice sat. In the precipitation examples, Martian headwaters were much more widespread, forming at elevations ranging from below the planet’s average surface to more than 11,000 feet high.

“Water from these ice caps starts to form valleys only around a narrow band of elevations,” Steckel said. “Whereas if you have distributed precipitation, you can have valley heads forming everywhere.”

The team then compared those predictions to actual data from Mars taken by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey spacecrafts. The simulations that included precipitation lined up more closely with the real Red Planet.

The researchers are quick to point out that the results aren’t the final word on Mars’ ancient climate—in particular, how the planet managed to stay warm enough to support snow or rain still isn’t clear. But Hynek said the study provides scientists with new insights into the history of another planet: our own.

“Once the erosion from flowing water stopped, Mars almost got frozen in time and probably still looks a lot like Earth did 3.5 billion years ago,” he said.

A new study from ��ֱ�� Boulder geologists weighs in on a long-running debate about Mars: Billions of years ago, was the Red Planet warm and wet or cold and dry?

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Voices of the Andes: Sharing Quechua stories and culture through modern media

Megan Maneval — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 18:07:44 +0000

Voices of the Andes: Sharing Quechua stories and culture through modern media Megan Maneval Mon, 04/21/2025 - 12:07

��ֱ�� Arts and Sciences Magazine

In a new audio storytelling project, ��ֱ�� Boulder scholar Doris Loayza works to preserve the traditional tales and lore of the Peruvian highlands.

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In the archaeological record, size does matter

Megan Maneval — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:52:09 +0000

In the archaeological record, size does matter Megan Maneval Mon, 04/21/2025 - 11:52

��ֱ�� Arts and Sciences Magazine

��ֱ�� Boulder archaeologist Scott Ortman and colleagues around the world explore relationships between housing size and inequality in this PNAS special feature.

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News Headlines

Recognizing a century of boats against the current

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Melting glaciers at the end of the Ice Age may have sped up continental drift, fueled volcanic eruptions

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Research in space, helping people on Earth: BioServe marks 100th orbital launch

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