Warming up and snacking between bouts of snorkeling and counting oysters in Pensacola Bay.

Just last week, my colleagues and I ate a delicious “graduation” dinner to commemorate the end of the 2009-2010 Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism at CU Boulder. It was a bittersweet night. The fellowship is a fantastic program, and I’ll miss it. But I’ve also been eager to get back to life as a freelance journalist, equipped with rich new knowledge about the environment from a year of classes, seminars and field trips. (And I’ve missed my blog!)

Just as things were wrapping up in Boulder, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was developing in the Gulf. Armed with my new freedom and rejuvenated eagerness for reporting on environmental news, I rented a car and made a beeline for the Gulf Coast–specifically the Pensacola home of my brother Jack. I had the idea that I could do some combination of volunteering and coverage of the spill. Things looked good for that at first. On Wednesday, I found a chance to go out on an oyster monitoring project, and wrote about it for one of the National Geographic News blogs.

We worked at a restoration site called Dead Man's Island (see the Nat Geo blog for the story of the name). Erosion has left twisted, silvery snags as remnants of a once larger marine oak grove.

But whereas the mood was anxious when I first arrived, people seem to have calmed down here. The weather has been fantastic for the past few days–sunny but not too hot–and the oil has stayed at bay. Many locals are saying the oil’s threat has actually made them appreciate their beach with fresh eyes. They’re spending more time there. Since there’s no help needed on the mainland yet with oiled wildlife, volunteers have been picking up trash instead. Cities have been using the delay to shore up their disaster response plans, and researchers have been beefing up census numbers for the wildlife they study. This way, they’ll have baseline data should the oil imperil the shore. And all the while, BP and a boatload of agency collaborators have been all hands on deck, working miles out into the ocean to minimize and contain the oil.

Lost? This prickly pear cactus was blooming on Dead Man's Island, near Pensacola, Florida. It was a sweet reminder of my western heart's home.

The Audubon Society has begun treating some oiled birds that have been foraging in the slick–they’re based out of Venice, Louisiana as of yesterday–but for now there aren’t horrible stories of death and destruction from this spill. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Click here for more photos of the Dead Man’s Island. The restoration project site is here.

The EPA's Lake Guardian, based in Milwaukee.

Nature is full of heartwarming stories about partnerships. One of my all-time favorites is the three-way mutualism between Western ponderosa pine trees, tassel-eared squirrels and mycorrhizal fungi. The trees house the squirrels in their branches and the fungi on their roots. The mycorrhizae break down nutrients in the soil for easier absorption by the tree roots, and the trees supply sugar to the fungi. The squirrels eat the fruiting bodies of the fungi, called truffles, then defecate the spores throughout the forest, thereby inoculating new trees. Everybody benefits; forest health improves.

Pan east about a thousand miles to the Great Lakes region. Lurking beneath Lake Michigan is another partnership that’s just as impressive. But its effects on the Lake Michigan ecosystem are anything but beneficial, at least the way we perceive a healthy freshwater scene.

Earlier today, about 30 of us attending the Society of Environmental Journalists conference toured the University of Wisconsin’s Great Lakes Water Institute in Milwaukee. We also cruised the lake for a couple of hours aboard the EPA’s research vessel, called the Lake Guardian. Of all the research, I was most struck by new insights into the efficient relationship between quagga mussels and an algae called cladophora.

Quagga mussels fresh off the lake floor.

Ten years ago, scientists were sounding alarms about zebra mussels, Russian stowaways that hitched rides to the Great Lakes aboard ocean liners in the late 1980s and quickly expanded to cover the lake bed close to shore. The inch-long invaders proved annoying and costly, covering anchors, buoys and submerged ladders, and cutting bathers’ feet with their sharp shells.

But already, the zebra mussels have been crowded out by their even more prolific cousins: quagga mussels. Hardier and more adaptable, quagga mussels can live in colder, deeper parts of lakes where zebra mussels can’t. Each quagga mussel filters 1.5 quarts of water a day, extracting nutrients like phosphorous that would otherwise be available for native species, and concentrating it at the lake floor. That means visibility above the mussels is much improved — but the entire food chain is on the decline.

Cladophora. Photo by Linda Preskitt.

What’s even more amazing is that the quagga mussels transform the lake into a nursery for another invader: cladophora. The long, filamentous algae can take advantage of the rich phosphorous around the mussels, and it likes the extra sunlight that filters through the newly cleared water. The algae turns rocks into gardens wherever it takes hold. But in rough water, cladophora breaks off and floats free, covering beaches with stinking bacterial breeding grounds and costing power companies  millions of dollars in clogged pipes.

Now, would-be lake stewards find themselves in a bind. Markets for quagga mussels aren’t obvious. They’re terrible eating, and burning them as biomass would require destructive dredging of the already beleaguered lake floor. Harvey Bootsma, a UW-Milwaukee scientist, said in smaller water bodies, chemicals could be added to kill the mussels — but “there’s virtually nothing you can do in a body of water as large as Lake Michigan.”

Even reducing the amount of available phosphorous in the lake with tighter pollution controls, which might seem like a no-brainer, carries unsavory risks — especially for the open-water fisheries that are already suffering the reduction in available nutrients.

Speaking of drama, check out my iPhone's little color freakout on the boat. Whoa!

I can’t help trying to take a step back on this one, avoiding a view of it as a “bad” environmental story. I’m impressed with the rapidity of the changes — with the sheer natural action of the story. Wherever quagga mussels and cladophora take the lake from here, this eco-drama will be one to watch.

This post also appears on the SEJ blog, at http://sej2009.sej.org/.

Still, early indications are that my co-producer and I showed some raw talent today. Note the reaction of Ted Chamberlain, editor at National Geographic News: “FABULOUS! I love the silent, almost heartbreaking ending… I’ll have my people call yours. Don’t do anything until you have a chance to hear me out. If I end up in a bidding war with Discovery over this, you’ll never eat lunch in this town again!”

Enjoy!

Fluorite at an abandoned mine near Jamestown, Colorado

Back in the 1880s, George W. Coffin lived along St. Vrain creek, which flows in a mountainside ponderosa pine forest northeast of Boulder, Colorado. He made good use of the water, for irrigation. So did the Left-Hand Ditch Company, even though they lived a ways south of it — closer, actually, to another drainage called Left Hand Creek. Left Hand Creek ran smaller than the St. Vrain, with not enough water to supply the company’s business. So the company dug ditches to divert water from the St. Vrain into James Creek, and from there into Left Hand Creek, and then through still more ditches so they could sell it to irrigators. One year, there was a bit of a drought. Ol’ Mr. Coffin tore out part of the Left Hand Ditch Company’s dam, effectively restoring the natural flow of St. Vrain Creek — toward his own property where by rights, he thought, it ought to go.

The Colorado Supreme Court decided otherwise, thereby laying down (in 1882) one of the still-standing cornerstones of Western water law: first come, first serve, even though the Left Hand Ditch Company diverted the St. Vrain into an entirely different drainage to the exclusion of people living on its banks. They’d gotten to it first, and Coffin was out of luck.

This week, more than 100 years later, we studied the case for Charles Wilkinson’s environmental law class at CU Boulder. And today, in a happy convergence, I got to see Left Hand Creek for myself.

The occasion was a field trip for mineralogy class to an abandoned fluorite mine near Jamestown, presumably named for the once controversial James Creek. I’m learning through my law classes and mineralogy that this whole area was a hotbed of discovery. For example, the nearby resort town of Telluride, Colorado is named for tellurium, the only element with which gold will partner to make an ore (otherwise, gold occurs by itself).  We saw several historic mine shafts along the road to Jamestown, which in places parallels Left Hand Creek.

And at the fluorite mine, I learned one amazing way the Earth spewed forth the minerals that so richly rewarded the first white Westerners.

TA Dave Brown performs a secret handshake with a streak of granite (unrelated to the fluorite mine)

Dave Brown, the lab teaching assistant and a master’s student in the CU Boulder geology department, explained it like this:

Much earlier in Earth’s history — many millions or even several billion years ago — a blob of magma was cooling just beneath the Earth’s crust at what would become Jamestown. Trapped inside of it was water.

As the magma cooled (which took hundreds of millions of years), more and more water was concentrated in that wet little prison until the pressure became so extraordinary and the heat so intense that the water flashed to steam and escaped, up into fissures near Earth’s surface. It carried with it all the minerals that hadn’t crystallized in the magma — including some, like fluorite, that are valuable to people.

Fluorite so purple, it rivals a student's notebook. Notebook courtesy of Rae Ann Orkild-Norton.

Fluorite is used in processes to manufacture steel, aluminum, glass and enamels. In some cases it’s used to make telescope lenses (aha! a connection with my astronomy interest!).

I continue to be fairly shocked that I like mineralogy so much. Somehow it didn’t hit me nearly two decades ago — when I was a distracted undergrad — how cool it could be to take a walk outside and notice all around you the story of Earth in its rocks.

We saw several other mineral environments on this field trip — sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic. I won’t go into more detail here, but if you’re interested for any reason, feel free to check out this Picasa photo album (my study guide) showing some examples.

Meteorite!

I’m completely enamored with mineralogy class, in the geology department. I was hooked the first day, when our encyclopedic instructor, Joe Smyth, passed around a meteorite somewhere around 5 billion years old. It was black (iron) but metallic, and really heavy to hold; a true marvel. Mineralogy has sent me back to the chemistry textbooks I thought I escaped years ago, but willingly now, because I want to understand what rocks are made of (e.g., the minerals) as a window into the structure of the Earth and other planets. And of course there’s my special interest in the mineral apatite, the source of much of the world’s phosphate — and a pretty gem, as it turns out.

There’s a bit of a conflict between what I’m learning in mineralogy class and in my mining law class. Geologists say a mineral is (among other things) a solid that is not formed by biological processes. But United States mining laws for more than two centuries have included coal, oil, gas and even water as minerals. Nope, that’s not a typo.  The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1978 (Andrus v. Charlestone Stone Products) that water is indeed a mineral. Bit of a mind-bender, yes?

There are other opportunities that come with the fellowship. On Friday, all of us fellows took a field trip up to Niwot Ridge. The high-altitude site is home of the Mountain Research Station, a facility of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR).

We started our short hike in the subalpine ecotone, and quickly ascended above treeline.

There, we ran into this crew. They’re installing a system to warm the ground by 4 degrees C in isolated plots, and they’ll watch to see which plants will still germinate. The idea is to try to foresee plant responses to climate change. I wonder why there aren’t any intermediate temperature tests, maybe with 1 or 2 degree temperature increases to which plants might actually be forced to adapt in the short term. I asked, but didn’t get much of an answer; the crew wasn’t exactly expecting a pack of camera-toting journalists.

The warming apparatus over one experimental plot.

I think that field tech said each light will use one kilowatt of electricity when the project is up and running. I wasn't taking notes, and I'm numerically challenged. In any case, it's going to be quite an energetically intensive operation!

Historically, Niwot Ridge has made great contributions to ecology. I wrote a story for National Geographic News back in June about the work of Steve Schmidt, who investigates the edges of retreating glaciers to see which microbes move in first to colonize the newly exposed soil. He and his colleagues got their start at the Niwot Ridge Long Term Ecological Research Site and have expanded to investigate the edges of glaciers in South America. (My story is here.)

The ridge also hosts the Tundra Laboratory at 11,600 feet (3,528 meters) above sea level. And it’s the home of the world’s second-oldest sample of atmospheric CO2. Kurt Chowanski, a climatologist at the Mountain Research Station and our tour guide, showed us a couple of the sampling vessels inside the CO2 sampling shack, which was built in the 1950s.

Tom Yulsman, the Scripps fellowship co-chair, takes a video clip of Kurt and some CO2-sampling equipment.

CO2 has pretty much been rising ever since …

This printout was hanging on the wall in the main research station, where people actually have office space.

We made it to the top just as black clouds were starting to convene, so I ate lunch quickly and beat a hasty retreat back down the mountain (I’m more wary of lightning than most), about an hour ahead of the rest of the crew. They assured me they thought I was much weirder for wearing a frog hat than for being scared of lightning! Good crew …

The 2009-2010 Ted Scripps Fellows in Environmental Journalism at CU Boulder. From left: Jim Mimiaga, Laura Frank, Suzie Lechtenberg, Anne Minard (sporting the frog hat) and Michael Kodas.

Thanks to Scripps program co-chair Tom Yulsman for supplying us with much pre-trip information, some of which made it into this post.