Transcripts
“Like Looking Over His Shoulder”
“A 16 year-old high school dropout who was known as the boy genius on campus.” (1:09)
Hello and welcome to the Special Collections here at Oregon State University. I’m Cliff Mead, Head of Special Collections, and the Special Collections at Oregon State University are comprised of the history of science and technology in the 20th century.
The cornerstone to this collection are the Eva Helen and Linus Pauling papers. Linus Pauling, the only person to have won two unshared Nobel prizes, gave his papers to Oregon State University, his alma mater in 1986. Pauling first came to Oregon State University or Oregon Agricultural College, as it was known back then, in 1917 as a 16-year-old high school dropout who was known as the boy genius on campus. Pauling’s knowledge of scientific matters was such that by the time he was a junior, he was hired by the institution to teach freshman chemistry.
The Pauling papers are accessed both through our Web site and through a six-volume, 1,800-page catalog which lists every single item in the collection.
Final notes on a blackboard (2:42)
We are now in a replica of Linus Pauling’s office. This is much smaller than Linus Pauling’s actual office. We have here a photograph of what Linus Pauling’s office looked like. This is Linus Pauling in his Caltech office in 1959. Obviously, we don’t have that much room here at Oregon State University to replicate that, so what we have … is a small area here where we do have some of Pauling’s personal artifacts. This is the last desk that Linus Pauling used before he died, and on the desk are a number of the implements that he used. There is a Dictaphone which he used to record his letters and speeches. This is a sample of the slide rule that he would often use. This particular slide rule is one that he used while he was here at Oregon Agricultural College from 1917 through 1921.
The blackboard that we have is a prized possession. It contains the last writings of Linus Pauling before he died. In this Pauling sketches out some ideas that he has regarding use of large amounts of vitamins to treat diseases such as heart disease and cancer. In this he has some information such as using large amounts of ascorbate (vitamin C) to stimulate the production of lymphocytes.
Other things in the Pauling office are the original Nobel medals that Pauling received. This is the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry which Pauling received for his work out of a series of papers from the 1930’s in which he had applied quantum mechanical principles to the study of chemistry. The 1954 Peace Prize was given to Pauling for his work on getting the Soviet Union and the United States to agree to a nuclear nonproliferation policy, that is, no more above-ground nuclear testing.
We also have perhaps what is the most famous paper that Linus Pauling wrote. It’s the original manuscript of his paper, “The Nature of the Chemical Bond.” First written in 1931, published later in 1939, and this turned out to be, according to Science and Citation Index, the most-used scientific paper of the 20th century.
OSU students work with history (1:21)
This is the backroom of the Special Collections. And we refer to this as the work room, because this is where a majority of the work is done regarding our various Web sites, catalogs and preparation for public speaking on Pauling’s life and work.
Because there are only a small number of full-time people in Special Collections, three to be exact, we have to rely rather heavily upon student help, and we hire about 100 hours of student work per week. And we use Honors College students, the best and brightest that OSU has to offer. These students are busy inputting information regarding our Web sites that we put up yearly.
And they are also working on the various symposia that we offer. Most recently, May 2008, we had Dr. Roderick MacKinnon, the 2003 Nobel laureate in chemistry, come to Oregon State University to accept the Pauling Legacy Award. Prior to that, in October of 2007, we had a three-day symposium at Oregon State University talking about Linus Pauling, the scientist, as educator and public citizen.
Models: structure implies function (1:02)
This is the actual Linus Pauling archives storage area where we keep all the artifacts that we bring out for researchers. Behind me you will see a number of the molecular models that Pauling had created over the years. Pauling was a structural chemist and thought you could best tell the function of any molecule by its shape. So beginning in the late 1920s, he started making these models out of paper or cardboard and then later graduated on to the wooden ball and stick, aluminum rods and ingots, and then later Styrofoam, polystyrene. He would always take advantage of these new materials and the properties of these new materials in order to fashion the molecule. And once he had fashioned this molecule, we would then be able to say, “Well, if it looks like this, it must do this.” Pauling used these models for teaching and research and it was sort of the precursor of the computer modeling that’s done today.
Correspondence with world leaders (1:32)
The half-million items that comprise the Pauling papers are stored in this back area in which there are six rows of shelving that hold over 8,000 boxes. This particular aisle that we are in now is composed exclusively of correspondence, letters to and from Linus Pauling from all of the world’s great scientific, political and international figures. These boxes are arranged alphabetically and then chronologically within the alphabet.
An example of one of the items in the collection is this box of K’s. And this particular box of K’s — and there probably about 20 or 30 boxes of K’s — we have letters to and from Ted Kennedy, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, materials about the Kennedy assassination, letters from Nikita Khrushchev, letters from Martin Luther King Jr., letters from Henry Kissinger. And this is just one box of the 8,000 boxes that we have in the collection.
Love letters hidden in a safe (2:08)
Almost every special collection and archives has a special area in which the most valuable treasures are stored. The Special Collections at Oregon State University is no exception. When Linus Pauling first decided to give all of his papers to OSU, we had heard that one of the things in the Pauling family was a safe in which only Linus and Ava Helen Pauling had access. The children did not have any idea of what might be in this safe.
When Pauling died in 1994, one of the things that came to Oregon State University was this safe. So we were very excited to see what might be in it. The safe did not have a combination that we know of, so we hired a safe cracker to try to open it for us and unearth its treasures. This he did, and what we found was a steel shelving cabinet with four drawers. And when we opened the first drawer, what we found was a drawer entirely consisting of love letters that Linus Pauling and Ava Helen Pauling wrote each other for the 60 years of their relationship. This was a great prize for us, giving us an intimate look into the Paulings’ life and love for each other. And in addition to the love letters, the second drawer contained material of famous people that Pauling had written to over the course of his life, people such as Albert Einstein and Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell. The third drawer down contained materials of secret work that Linus Pauling was doing during World War II, when he worked for the Office of Naval Research. And the final drawer contained pocket diaries that Pauling had kept throughout the course of his life, in which he recorded his thoughts upon meeting people. He was going to use these pocket diaries for an autobiography, something that we hope to publish someday here in Special Collections.
To learn more (0:30)
What you have seen today is but a small sampling of the treasures that await you at the OSU Valley Library Special Collections. If you would like more information about the Pauling Papers or any of the other collections that we have, please go to the OSU homepage, click on the library and from there go to the Special Collections Web site. There you will find detailed information as to how you may access these treasures. Thank you.
Acid Ocean
“The corrosivity of these upwelled waters would increase for the next 50 years.” Burke Hales, OSU College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences (3:34)
This is Burke Hales at Oregon State University, and I want to talk a little bit about why the upwelled water is so sensitively poised to be impacted by ocean acidification. The first thing I wanted to point out is that upwelled waters that rise up onto the shelf of the West Coast of the United States and in North America were at the surface of the ocean somewhere else some time ago. During transit when these waters sank away from the surface in their source location, these waters were isolated from the sun and the effects of photosynthesis. During this time, respiration in these waters consumes organic matter and produces carbon-dioxide, and that forces the carbon-dioxide content of these waters naturally higher and pushes it toward these thresholds of corrosivity to biologically produced minerals.
We can measure the oxygen content of this water and some of Dick’s previous work in the North Pacific tells us how fast oxygen is consumed in these waters when they’re away from the surface. And from that we can make an estimate of the age of these waters and the transit time that it took to reach the upwelling region from their source region. And that was about 50 years. What it means is that these waters were at the surface last and exposure to an atmosphere that had a CO2 concentration of maybe 310 to 320 parts per million. This is consistent with the addition of anthropogenic carbon-dioxide that Chris will tell you about later in the call.
And what we found is that the naturally elevated CO2 that was the result of the respiration in these water while it transited to the upwelling region was not enough to push it across the line toward corrosivity to these biominerals, and the anthropogenic CO2 is what it took to actually cause the corrosive conditions.
The fact that this has happened, even in waters that were exposed to a 50-year-old atmosphere, has several important implications. This means that this summer’s upwelled waters will have been exposed to an atmosphere that was one year younger and therefore that much higher in CO2 and will therefore be a little bit more corrosive. Because the baseline of the anthropogenic acidification of these waters is rising, even as it transits towards us over these long transit time scales.
This means that even if we were to stop instantaneously the current rate of rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, the corrosivity of these upwelled waters would increase for the next 50 years.
The other thing that I wanted to point out … many of you have heard about the recent research about hypoxia and dead zones in these upwelled regions. I want to point out that there is a very direct relationship between these two phenomena.
Hypoxia is the result of consumption of organic matter and the decomposition of that organic matter, and this process consumes oxygen and also elevates the CO2 content of the water. This further increases the acidity of these waters, and if the recent suggestions that the occurrence of dead zones off the East Coast (note: reference is to the Eastern Pacific or the West Coast of North America) is continuing trend, there will also be an enhancement of the corrosivity or the ocean acidification of these waters as a result of that.
Effect of ocean acidification on coastal zones, J. Martin Hernandez-Ayon, Instituto de Investigaciones Oceanologicas, the University of Baja California, Mexico (3:19)
The biogeochemistry in coastal ecosystems along the northwest Pacific, from the tip of the Baja California peninsula to Vancouver Island, is strongly forced by oceanic processes, particularly during spring and summer, when the upwelling season occurs. During these events, nutrient-carbon-rich shelf waters are advected into the adjacent semi-enclosed coastal ecosystems, driven by tides transport. Many of these systems are seasonally hypersaline (from Tomales Bay to Bahia Magdalena) and the biogeochemistry mainly depends on input from the ocean.
Different chemistries in the nearby ocean will be pumped by tides into the coast and will have a result in the health of these systems. For example, during an El Niño event, low-nutrient waters will be driven into them, but the opposite will be during La Niña. But what about corrosive water just nearby? Of course, this will be introduced also by tides, but work will need to be done to evaluate the effect of this condition for these natural nursery areas.
Just a few years ago, changes in physical condition were reported for the upwelling season. The regular upwelling events occurred during spring 2005 in the northern California Current system and resulted in anomalously warm, low-nutrient and chlorophyll in coastal waters between Vancouver Island and Oregon. Consequences of this late transition, several articles were published reporting on the physical and biogeochemical anomalies and the resulting adverse ecological effects in zooplankton, nekton, marine birds and marine mammals. By contrast with the northern region, coastal waters off northern Baja California showed positive upwelling index anomalies, evidence of increased supply of colder and saltier nutrient-rich water at oceanic and within a coastal lagoon in northern Baja California.
In Baja California over the last decade, a series of changes in physical conditions have been reported within the limits of the California Current System. These regional changes have been associated with basin-wide events and have included the warming caused by the El Niño in 1997-1998, the La Niña event that lasted in year 2000, a limited influence of a weak El Niño in 2002-2003, and a freshening of the upper 100 meters in 2002 and in 2006. But a lot of questions remain about these changes in physical conditions on the chemistry of the water transported to the surface by upwelling.
Mexico has 11,592 kilometers of coast, of which 8,475 kilometers are located in the Pacific. From this area, just Baja California contributes 20 percent of the commercial fishing per year. If we include Sonora and Sinaloa the total is 70 percent. The possible impact in the fisheries just in the Pacific coast of Mexico can be drastic in the economy, for most of the employment is in this activity.
“This ocean acidification is occurring much faster than it ever has in the geologic record in the past.” Debby Ianson, Fisheries and Ocean Canada, British Columbia (2:05)
I’m Debby Ianson from the Institute of Ocean Sciences in British Columbia. And I’m going to talk about the research that’s been done on biological impacts of ocean acidification and really perhaps repeat or give a little more detail on what Richard Feely did earlier. So this research is really in its early stages. Most of the work has been done in the lab, not in situ. The work does show that many organisms experience negative impacts from both higher levels of acidity and increased levels of carbon dioxide.
These organisms include corals, shellfish, finfish, squid and some types of free-floating plankton. In addition, marine ecosystem are likely to be affected by changes in structure of food web and as the habitat such as coral reefs are lost. And these coral reefs aren’t just in tropical areas. We’ve discovered recently that there are many deep-water, cold-water corals on the British Columbia coast.
In the case of organisms that form hard shells made of calcium carbonate such as corals or oysters, their shells dissolve faster than they are able to rebuild them. An example of such a creature is the free-floating snails, or pteropods that Dick Feely mentioned. Their shells are especially susceptible to increased acidity because of the form of calcium carbonate that they make their shells of. These animals are a major food source for Pacific salmon. They’re what salmon eat as a staple food often when they can’t get other food. And they’re a critical food source for the juvenile stages.
I also want to add that it’s important to recognize that life in the ocean is resilient, and marine ecosystems will adapt in some manner over time. The critical aspect of what we’re facing right now is that this ocean acidification is occurring much faster than it ever has in the geologic record in the past. And that will make it much more difficult for marine organisms to adapt.
“CO2 is what we call an acid gas,” Christopher Sabine, NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (7:54)
My name is Dr. Christopher Sabine. I work at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington. And I guess if you guys will indulge me a little bit, I’d like to step back and give a little bit of background on where we’re coming from with this. That is to say that Dick Feely and I have been studying the oceans’ absorption of man-made CO2 for a number of years. And CO2 invades into the surface of the ocean pretty much everywhere, and it works its way down into the deeper portions of the ocean. And when we first started to quantify this and wrote our papers in 2004 … Science article, one of the things that came out of that work was this concern over decreasing pH resulting from this uptake, because CO2 is what we call an acid gas. The CO2 actually reacts with water molecules to form carbonic acid. And that carbonic acid is lowering the pH of the oceans. And that that will have an impact on ecosystems as Debby and others have talked about.
In particular we’ve been focusing on those organisms that produce calcium skeletons or shells. As Dick mentioned, the clams, mollusks, snails, there are all kinds of things that produce these calcium carbonate shells. The chemistry is such that in surface waters … well, so the way they form these shells, they go out and they grab a dissolved calcium ion, and then they go and grab a carbonate ion, and they stick the two together, and that forms the solid part, this calcium carbonate. There’s in general quite a lot of calcium in the ocean, so it’s really the carbonate that controls how easy it is for these organisms to make those hard parts, those shells and skeletons. And it’s the carbonate that gets destroyed when you acidify the water.
So in the surface waters, we’re removing the carbonate ion, but in general, in the surface waters, there’s lot of carbonate ion available for the organisms to make their shells. As you go down deeper, as you get into waters that are colder and have higher pressures, and have accumulated more natural CO2, as Burke was explaining, those waters become undersaturated with respect to these mineral phases, this calcium carbonate.
So there’s less carbonate for the organisms to grab, so that makes it harder for them to make their shells. And in fact there’s a point, there’s a depth everywhere in the ocean, there’s a point at which there’s not enough carbonate for those organisms to make their shells anymore. And that’s what we call the saturation horizon that Dick mentioned.
Now as the oceans are taking up CO2, what we’re finding is that that saturation horizon, that depth at which organisms can no longer make their shells, is getting shallower and shallower and shallower with time. And in fact in the North Pacific, that depth has already decreased by 100 to 200 meters in places, and is getting shallower by one to two meters per year.
And when we look at that and kind of project that out into the future, the models that we’ve been using, the approach that we’ve been using, and said, ‘ok, we look at how that horizon is getting shallower and shallower,’ in about 50 to 100 years, depending on how much CO2 we release into the atmosphere, that level is actually going to break the surface. Where actually the surface waters will be corrosive. They will begin to dissolve shells that are in those surface waters. So we’ve been saying, all right, we’ve got about 50 years to really figure this out because that’s where these organisms are really growing.
Now we come to this coastal study. What we found … Well, we’ve known for a long time that in the spring and summer months, when the winds blow from the north, or north northwest down along the coast, that that pushes water off the West Coast of north America, and that in turn draws up deep water from down below up onto the continental shelf. And we’ve known about that process for a while.
But what was new with this study is that we’ve now discovered that that rising saturation horizon has finally reached a level where it is shallow enough so that when these waters get dragged up onto the shelf, that they’re now grabbing these undersaturated waters, these corrosive, these acidified waters and bringing them up onto the shelf. Where before we were thinking, oh, it would take about 50 years for it to get up to the surface, we hadn’t really made that link which ties into the upwelling, which is a physical mechanism that draws water from down deep … these are waters that were originally at 150 or 200 meters depth off shore, that those get physically pulled up onto the shelf and brought to shallower depth. That’s what’s happening.
So with the introduction of the anthropogenic CO2 … so before atmospheric CO2 started to increase in the atmosphere, then these saturation horizons were deeper, they were below the level at which the waters are drawn up onto the shelf. So we were not at that time bringing that acidified, the corrosive waters up onto the shelf. But now that we’ve introduced that man-made CO2 and that depth, that level, that corrosive horizon has gotten shallower, now that corrosive water is being brought up onto the shelf and being exposed to organisms that are living at much shallower depths up onto the continental shelf. And that’s what we’re concerned about.
So where we go from here … This study really focused on understanding the chemistry of what’s going on with the waters. We still need to do some more work to confirm what the impacts are on the ecosystems and that’s going to be a major focus for future research. We also want to go back out again next year.
As Burke mentioned there’s a very close relationship between the hypoxia events and the low oxygen events and these upwellings. We were out in May and June which is fairly early in the upwelling season last year. But the hypoxia events tend to occur generally in more of the August-September time period, a little bit later in the season. So we’re hoping to go out again later in the season so we can get a better understanding of these relationships between the oxygen concentrations on the shelf and the carbon dioxide and see that perhaps we didn’t even capture the highest, or most corrosive, waters that are coming on. We want to try and characterize that a little better. And then that kind of leads into the bigger story, of better understanding how acidification is going to impact the global oceans.
“What we found on this cruise was truly astonishing.” Richard Feely, NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (5:40)
Over the past two centuries, the oceans have absorbed approximately 525 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or about one third of the anthropogenic carbon emissions released during this period. This natural process of absorption has benefited humankind by significantly reducing the greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere and mitigating some of the impacts of global warming.
However the oceans’ daily uptake of 22 million tons of carbon dioxide is starting to have a significant impact on the chemistry and biology of the oceans. Over the last three decades, NOAA, NSF and DOE have co-sponsored repeat hydrographic and chemical surveys of the world oceans documenting the oceans’ response to increasing amounts of carbon dioxide being emitted to the atmosphere by human activities. These studies have confirmed that the oceans are absorbing the excess carbon dioxide and lowering the pH and carbonate ion concentration to the point they are seriously affecting the ability of many calcium-carbonate secreting organisms such as corals, clams, oysters, sea urchins and pteropods to form their skeletons and shells.
Marine geochemists have used a geochemical index commonly called the saturation state to indicate the ability of these organisms to make their shells. When the saturation state is greater than one, the animals and plants can produce their skeletons and shells. When the saturation state drops below one, the shells begin to dissolve in the water, and we say that the waters are corrosive.
On one of our recent cruises from Japan to Mexico in 2004, I noticed that the corrosive waters were moving closer to the continental shelf of Baja California and began to be concerned about the possibility that the corrosive water might move up onto the continental shelf during the regular summer upwelling season and seriously impact the local marine ecosystems.
Consequently, Chris Sabine and I hosted a meeting at our laboratory in Seattle in 2006 to address this issue. We invited experts such as Debby Ianson from IOS in Canada, Burke Hales from Oregon State University and J. Martin Hernandez-Ayon from the University of Autonoma of Baja California to come and help us design a cruise to determine if this process was indeed occurring along our coast. They helped us design the station sampling and agreed to participate on the cruise, which occurred in May and June of 2007.
What we found on this cruise was truly astonishing. We found that the seasonal upwelling of corrosive water onto the shelf impacted the entire continental shelf from Canada to Mexico. The upwelling process happens during the spring and summer months when upwelling favorable winds bring CO-rich corrosive waters from a depth of about 100 to 200 meters off the continental shelf to much shallower waters on the shelf. In fact we observed some of the low-pH corrosive waters that actually upwelled all the way to the surface and near to the coast off Northern California.
Before we started this work, no one considered that upwelling of corrosive waters on shore would make our waters on our continental shelf vulnerable to ocean acidification much sooner than any of the models had previously suggested. Our findings represent the first evidence that a large section of the North American continental shelf is seasonally impacted by ocean acidification.
This means that ocean acidification may be seriously impacting marine life on our continental shelf right now today. Many marine organisms that produce calcium carbonate shells have been negatively impacted by increasing carbon dioxide levels in seawater and the resulting decline of pH. For example, increasing ocean acidification has been shown to significantly reduce the ability of reef-building corals to produce their skeletons, affecting their growth and making the reefs more vulnerable to erosion.
Ongoing research is showing that decreasing pH may also have deleterious effects on commercially important fish and shellfish. Calcification rates of edible mussels and Pacific oysters declined linearly with increasing CO2 levels. Sea urchins raised in lower pH water show evidence for inhibited growth due to their inability to maintain internal acid-base balance. Food supply of commercially valuable fish species is also in jeopardy from ocean acidification. In particular, one type of free-swimming mollusk called the pteropod is a major food source for North Pacific juvenile salmon. And it also serves as food for mackerel, pollock, herring and cod.
Other marine calcifiers such as coccolithophores, foraminifera, coralline algae, echinoderms such as sea urchins and starfish and mollusks such as snails, clams and oysters, all exhibit a general decline in their ability to produce their shells in decreasing pH. While comprehensive field studies of organisms in their response to seasonal increases in CO2 along the western North American coast are lacking, current studies suggest that further research under field conditions is warranted.
Our results show for the first time that a large section of the North American continental shelf is impacted by ocean acidification. Other continental shelf regions throughout the world may also be impacted where anthropogenic CO2-enriched water is being upwelled onto the continental shelf.