PASADENA, Ca.— Students at the California Institute of Technology with an interest in marine science will soon be conducting research aboard the roiling deck of a Boston Whaler at sea, or while kneeling in the wet sand of a Southern California estuary. Such real-world learning will be part of a new Environmental Science and Engineering program funded by a five-year, $700,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
Intended for both graduate and undergraduate students, the ESE program will be interdisciplinary in its approach, spanning the fields of geology, engineering, and chemistry. For the graduate students, the goal is to unify and enlarge environmental teaching and research at Caltech. Undergraduates will have the opportunity to take a lab class in environmental analysis. "The students here have a ton of skills in mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics," says Jess Adkins, a Caltech assistant professor of geochemistry and global environmental science, "and a number are interested in the environment, but don't quite know what direction to go in with that interest." The ESE program will help provide that direction, he says.
The laboratory class will immerse undergraduates in field-based research. Typically, Adkins says, the lab experience in many classes is limited to textbook problems and off-the-shelf samples that are manipulated at a lab bench. Now, students will leave campus and head out into the field, where they'll learn how to properly take scientifically clean samples under varying environmental conditions. Then, back in the lab, they'll be taught the current methodologies in metal, organic, and isotopic analysis.
Besides teaching, the Luce grant has two other equally important components. One is the establishment of a high-quality research platform for Caltech environmental scientists. Home for this part of the program will be the Kerckhoff Marine Biological Laboratory in Corona del Mar, at the mouth of Newport Bay. The lab has been maintained by the Division of Biology since 1930 and provides access to Southern California's estuarine, coastal, and open-ocean waters. It will be modernized and upgraded for environmental science research with the latest standard and specialized analytical tools.
The other component of the program is research. Given its location, the Kerckhoff lab is ideally located to study a variety of research questions that pertain to the transformation from fresh-water to ocean, to so-called "blue water" conditions further offshore, or to the specific differences between polluted and natural waters. Each undergraduate class will also take samples of local water conditions that will, over time, establish a permanent, baseline measurement to evaluate subtle changes in the Southern California marine environment.
Various research projects will be conducted at Kerckhoff as well with the help of students. Adkins, for example, wants to examine the supply of iron to the surface waters. It's thought that, once absorbed, iron may limit the growth of plankton and therefore play an important role in the regulation of marine productivity. To study this, other researchers have had to artificially "fertilize" ocean waters with iron. But Southern California, says Adkins, has a natural experiment going on. "When the Santa Ana winds blow through the L.A. basin," he says, "they carry iron-rich dust that falls into the ocean, especially in the San Pedro Basin. With Kerckhoff as our base, we'll be able to measure the chemistry and the trace metals that fall before, during, and after a Santa Ana event. So we will have a natural, in situ experiment taking place on an ongoing basis."
The Henry Luce Foundation was established in 1936 by the late Henry R. Luce, the cofounder and editor-in-chief of Time Inc. With assets of about $1.1 billion, higher education has been a persistent theme for most of the foundation's programs, with an emphasis on innovation and scholarship. Henry Luce III, son of Henry R. Luce, is the Luce Foundation's chairman and C.E.O.
