Ocean drilling: Digging in
A new ship and a wave of funding will let scientists drill where they have never been able to drill before, from near the North Pole to the rocks lying beneath Earth's crust. Rex Dalton and David Cyranoski report.
Last-ditch funding keeps ocean drilling project afloat
Ralph Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist and leading climate-change researcher, is set to become the next president of the US National Academy of Sciences. The academy’s council announced the nomination of Cicerone, who is currently chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, on 15 June. Once elected — usually a formality under the academy’s system — he will serve a six-year term from July 2005,replacing the current president, molecular biologist Bruce Alberts. The 2,000-member academy is generally considered to be the United States’ pre-eminent scientific body, and is regularly asked by the government to provide scientific advice on issues ranging from stem cells to global warming. The 61-year-old Cicerone will be the first climate-change scientist to become its president. His nomination comes after a period in which the scientific community has clashed with the federal government over climate change. In 2001, Cicerone led an academy study that angered the Bush administration by confirming the likelihood that human activities are causing global warming. Cicerone is certainly no stranger to politically sensitive research. In the early 1970s, he was among the first atmospheric chemists to tie chlorine to the destruction of the ozone layer, according to Sherwood Rowland, a chemist at UC Irvine who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on ozone depletion. Cicerone testified at the time about the impact of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) on the ozone layer. Colleagues say that Cicerone’s easy-going personality and skill as a consensus-builder have helped to maintain his credibility with policy-makers. “He’s very practised in the relationship between scientific discovery and sound public policy,” says James Anderson, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who worked with Cicerone at the University of Michigan. The 2001 climate-change report was requested by President Bush just before a trip to Europe where he sought to repair damage done by the US withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change (see Nature 411, 725; 2001).“There were people who thought our panel would be seen as carrying the water for somebody’s agenda,” Cicerone says. But in the end, the group delivered a scientifically precise document that provided little support for the administration’s position. “It was a very honest report,” says Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Washington DC. As chair of the 2001 study, Cicerone did “exactly what we want a president to be able to do”, says Peter Raven, head of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis and chair of the academy’s nominating committee. Raven says that Cicerone’s proven ability as a fundraiser and manager during his six years at UC Irvine also strengthened his candidacy. As well as addressing politically awkward scientific issues, Cicerone pledges continued attention to education and international outreach — areas emphasized by Alberts during his two six-year terms. The academy produced a set of standards in 1996 that has strongly influenced science education in US schools, and Alberts helped form the InterAcademy Council, an international consortium of science academies, in 2000. But it is Cicerone’s experience in tackling tricky areas of science policy that most excites his fellow academy members. “He’s quite experienced on Washington affairs,” says Frank Press of the Washington Advisory Group, who served as president of the academy from 1981 to 1993. “He is a balanced, unbiased person, and that’s what the academy needs these days.” ■ news
A spectral gamma ray (SGR) tool
A new natural spectral gamma logging tool has been developed which contains a 2'' diameter X 12'' long Csl (Na) crystal and transmits 256 channels of pulse height data to the surface. The large crystal provides improved sensitivity, and the availability of 256 channel spectra up hole allows great flexibility in the real time and post processing of the data. The tool has been calibrated in five model wells constructed at the Gearhart site in Fort Worth. In normal real-time operation, the 256 channel data are analyzed in terms of three energy windows. This reduction yields a log which displays the thorium and uranium concentrations in ppm, the potassium concentration in percent and the gross gamma count in API units. The pulse height spectra are continuously recorded on magnetic tape during the logging operation and can be played back in post-processing to yield more sophisticated analyses using five, six or any number of windows up to 250.