Researchers and Educators head for better understanding of Antarctica

It's been more than 100 years since anyone has journeyed to this section of Antarctica's Amundsen Sea, but that is about to change। Next month five UTSA researchers and a Boerne High School science teacher will join a crew of 22 researchers from several countries to set sail on a two month expedition.

The trip, funded by a $533,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant to UTSA, is designed to study the relationship of sea ice and the Antarctic environment. UTSA's research team will depart Sept. 1 from Punta Arenas, Chile.
The expedition, sponsored by the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS), is one of 20 annual trips planned involving a teacher accompanying a research expedition. ARCUS coordinates NSF's PolarTREC educational program, designed to bring educators and researchers together to explore, collaborate and experience life in the Polar Regions.
"We hope that once these teachers get this hands-on experience they will be better equipped to teach science in the classroom and convey their sense of excitement to their students, especially after going through this amazing experience," said Janet Warburton, PolarTREC program manager.
Leading UTSA's efforts is world-renowned sea ice expert Stephen Ackley, research associate professor of earth and environmental science, who has made more than a dozen trips to the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Ackley's outstanding contributions to sea ice research were recognized in 2004 when the Antarctic geographic feature, Ackley Point, was named after him by the U.S. Board of Geographical Names.
"We are going to investigate the processes of how sea ice forms, moves, decays and interacts with the environment, said Ackley। "It's highly exploratory and since the ice is so tightly packed this time of year, no one has attempted to travel this deep into the Amundsen Sea during winter since 1899 when the Belgica was trapped there. The sea was named after one of the explorers to survive that expedition, Roald Amundsen, who later made the first trip to the South Pole in 1911."

Accompanying Ackley on the trip aboard the U.S. icebreaker N.B. Palmer will be four UTSA undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degree students. The UTSA researchers will conduct numerous investigations including observing marine and mammalian life on and under the ice and determining how the sea ice interacts with the ocean and atmosphere. Joining the UTSA team will be 43-year-old Boerne High School science teacher Sarah Anderson. Anderson was chosen from among 150 educators that submitted applications to the PolarTREC program.
"I'll be interacting regularly by phone and e-mail with my students so they will know about all the research we are conducting aboard the ship," said Anderson. "I also plan on posting a journal online so teachers and students will be able log on and see notes and photos from Antarctica."
The trip to Antarctica is the second one in less then a year involving UTSA researchers, last December UTSA assistant professor of earth and environmental science Hongjie Xie and doctoral student Burcu Cicek were part of a three-week international expedition of scientists and educators trying to determine if global warming was affecting the South Pole.
UTSA' s Antarctica research teams are a part of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science's Laboratory for Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics. The department hopes to develop a program of researchers that will be able to accompany future NSF-funded trips to conduct sea ice observations.
PolarTREC (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating in the Arctic and Antarctic) is a program funded by the National Science Foundation in which K-12 teachers participate in polar research, working closely with scientists as a pathway to improving science education. PolarTREC builds on the outstanding scientific and cultural opportunities in the Arctic and Antarctic to link research and education through intriguing topics that will engage students and the wider public.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Texas at San Antonio.

Researchers unravel intricate animal patterns

There is a scene in the animated blockbuster "Finding Nemo" when a school of fish makes a rapid string of complicated patterns—an arrow, a portrait of young Nemo and other intricate designs. While the detailed shapes might be a bit outlandish for fish to form, the premise isn't far off. But how does a school of fish or a flock of birds know how to move from one configuration to another and then reorganize as a unit, without knowing what the entire group is doing? New research by University of Alberta scientists shows that one movement started by a single individual ripples through the entire group—a finding that helps unravel the mystery that has plagued scientists for years."It is known that there is a connection between the signals animals use to communicate with each other and their behaviour," said Raluca Eftimie, a graduate student in the U of A's Centre for Mathematical Biology. "But until now, the connection between the complex spatial group patterns that we can see in nature and the different ways animals communicate, has not been stated explicitly."For decades people have puzzled about how animals—fish schools, locust swarms, large flocks of birds—form large complex dynamical groups. It is clear individuals in the group are only communicating with nearby neighbours, but then the groups somehow emerge spontaneously with complicated patterns of their own. Eftimie and her co-authors—Dr. Mark Lewis and Dr. Gerda de Vries, also from the Centre for Mathematical Biology housed in the U of A's Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences—used a one-dimensional mathematical model to describe the formation and movement of animal groups. The work is published in the prestigious journal, "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.""Every individual in the group is influenced by movement of the individuals in its neighbourhood," said de Vries. Conversely, the individual's movement can influence the movement of the entire group."It turns out that the entire group can respond indirectly to a single individual, as each individual's movement response is a signal to its next neighbour," said Lewis, the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Biology. "By this method, signals are passed quickly from individual to individual. So for example, one fish turns, causing the next one to turn, then the next one, and so on. This produces the complex collective behaviours—swarm formation, zig-zag group movements—that emerge from the `bottom up', simply based on interactions between neighbors."Until Eftimie's work, these complex emergent patterns could not be connected clearly to simple rules for the small scale communication between individuals.People have had some success in proposing rather complex and detailed explanations for how specific species form into groups, says Lewis. "What Raluca's work does is show that very simple and straightforward sets of rules can produce the complex kinds of patterns seen in nature," says Lewis, also from the Department of Biological Sciences. "Her work has stripped out the unnecessary detail to the core elements of communication that give rise to the patterns found in large scale groups."In particular, the researchers looked at the direction from which animals can receive signals from their neighbors. "For example, some species of birds use directional communication, and therefore, we may assume that in this case the behaviour of an individual will be influenced by the signals received from those con-specifics that face towards this individual," said Eftimie. "Based on these observations, we come up with some simple rules that can describe the different ways animals communicate. Then we incorporate these rules into the mathematical model, and check what kind of movement patterns we get."The team came up with 10 complex patterns. Some are classical, such as stationary pulses, ripples or traveling trains but they also describe new patterns that have not been reported before such as zigzag pulses, feathers and traveling breathers.This model doesn't apply to specific species, says Eftimie. "However, we can think of those flocks of birds that fly in one direction, and then suddenly change direction 180 degrees, and compare this with the zigzagging type of pattern shown by the numerical simulations. Or we can think about the anti-predatory behaviour exhibited by some schools of fish—when a predator is nearby, the school contracts in a tight aggregation, to expand again when the predator is gone. And we can try to compare this behaviour with the breather pattern described in our paper."The results of the model suggest that if we want to better understand the aggregations we see in nature, says Eftimie, we should take a look at how these animals communicate.University of Alberta