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The Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, which was established by President Obama on June 12,

2009, is led by White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley, consists of 24 senior-level officials from Administration agencies, departments, and offices. “The uses of our oceans, coasts and Great Lakes have expanded exponentially over time. These waters provide the United States with many commercial, recreational, cultural, energy, scientific, economic, conservation and national security benefits and they sustain diverse habitats and species. At the same time they are facing environmental challenges including pollution and habitat destruction that make them increasingly vulnerable,” said Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “Without an improved, more thoughtful approach, we risk an increase in user conflicts and the potential loss of critical economic, ecosystem, social, and cultural benefits for present and future generations.”

"Coastal and marine spatial planning may sound like the stuff of policy wonks, but it is actually vital to anyone who works or plays on the oceans," said Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and NOAA administrator. "In fact, coastal and marine spatial planning is an essential tool for anyone who depends on the oceans for sustainable jobs, healthy seafood, clean energy, recreation, or vibrant coastal communities."

“America is a maritime nation so we must consider how we can protect the environment, facilitate maritime commerce, and responsibly harness oceanic resources. By pursuing a “whole of government” approach, we can meet our broad goals while protecting our way of life,” said Coast Guard Commandant, Admiral Thad Allen. “Marine Spatial Planning is an important tool that will inform the decisions that the Department of the Interior makes under its many existing coastal and ocean authorities,” said Associate Deputy Secretary Laura Davis. “It is important that we make every effort to improve communication and coordination on these issues among the federal government, states and stakeholders.”

“The interim framework strengthens the work we do with states, tribes, partners and other stakeholders to protect vital resources in our oceans, coasts, and the Great Lakes,” said Peter Silva, EPA's Assistant Administrator for the Office of Water. “By opening up the flow of information and promoting transparent, sound science, we will be better equipped to deliver the environmental, economic, and health benefits the public rightly expects.” In developing the Interim Report and Interim Framework, the Task Force undertook a robust public engagement process. The Task Force heard from and involved stakeholders and interested parties, including holding six regional public meetings, convening 38 expert briefings, and receiving almost four thousand individual comments via the web.

The Interim Framework includes a number of important provisions that would significantly overhaul the Federal government’s approach to coastal and marine planning, including:

The Task Force’s Interim Framework is now available for a 60-day public review and comment period. After the close of the comment period on the Interim Framework, the Task Force will finalize its recommendations in both this report and the September 10, 2009 Interim Report, and provide a final report to the President in early 2010.

The partnerships expand the “Educate to Innovate” campaign Mr. Obama launched in November. But where the initial campaign focused on out-of-classroom science exposure – bringing in organizations like the Discovery Channel and Sesame Street – the latest efforts focus specifically the teaching part of the issue.

“The in-school intervention that has the highest impact on student achievement is a strong teacher,” says Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, whose teaching fellowship is one of the five programs the administration is helping to expand.

The push for more attention on STEM subjects has been building for some time, with educators, business leaders, scientists, and policymakers calling attention to American students’ lackluster math and science performance relative to other countries and sounding the alarm for what it means for the country’s future.

“Our future is on the line,” said Obama in announcing the new partnerships and honoring more than 100 science and math teachers. “The nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow.”

US students' mediocre ranking

According to one measure, US students are 19th in math and 14th in science out of 31 countries ranked by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And in 2000, the number of foreign students studying physical sciences and engineering in US grad schools for the first time surpassed the number of American students.

Women and minority students are vastly underrepresented among undergraduate majors in science and math, and there is a growing shortage of qualified teachers for STEM subjects.

That shortage is what the programs highlighted Wednesday aims to address, trying to increase both the number and quality of STEM teachers, particularly in high-poverty schools.

Among the partnerships:

• An expansion of the UTeach program, which helps science and math undergraduates receive a teaching certificate along with their baccalaureate degree.

• A commitment by the presidents of more than 75 public universities to prepare 10,000 science and math teachers by 2015.

• An expansion of the Woodrow Wilson teaching fellowships, which will train more than 700 math and science teachers in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan over the next three years.

The focus on teaching is the right one, says Tracy Gray, managing director for the Center on STEM Education and Innovation at the American Institutes for Research, though the key is in how the programs are implemented.

“It’s necessary to have not just some good ideas and good intentions, but a very solid program that is based on evidence of what works, and that is provided to teachers on an ongoing basis,” says Dr. Gray. “A one-shot professional development initiative in August does not help the teacher in February…. The hope is that this [administration] effort, working with the business community, will generate enough funding so that teachers get enough support … to really ensure they have both the content and the pedagogical knowledge to reach all students.”

Programs selected have good track records

Most of the programs being highlighted already have a significant track record, providing extensive support and both practical and theoretical training to the teachers they produce.

“The prevailing myth is that students majoring in math, chemistry, biology, or physics aren’t interested in teaching, and we’ve significantly debunked that myth,” notes John Winn, chief program officer for the National Math and Science Initiative, whose UTeach program had 2,700 students enroll this year at the 13 universities where it currently exists. (It is expanding this year to about 20 schools.) More than 90 percent of UTeach graduates become teachers, and 82 percent are still in the classroom after five years.

The Woodrow Wilson partnership, meanwhile, operates much like a teaching residency program, paying students during their fellowship and asking for a three-year commitment to teach in high-need schools, with on-site mentoring throughout that period.

Just a few teachers, notes Dr. Levine, can make a big difference: In Michigan, the 120 teachers a year that the program will train will be enough to fill all anticipated vacancies in Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Kalamazoo, and the 80 teachers a year it has trained in Indiana is enough to increase the number of certified STEM teachers in the state by 20 percent.

“What we’ve asked [universities] to do is to create brand new programs that focus on student achievement as the goal and the marker of success, are clinically based, and move the instruction from the ivory tower into schools,” says Levine. “Even after this program is completed what we’ll have is a series of leading universities that have changed the way they prepare STEM teachers.”

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Funding Opportunity

NOAA’s Office of Education (OEd) has issued a request for applications for informal/nonformal science education projects that engage the public in activities that utilize emerging and/or advanced technologies and leverage NOAA assets to improve understanding and stewardship of the local and global environment.  There is specific interest in projects that use emerging and/or advanced technologies to (1) facilitate outdoor experiences involving scientific inquiry and exploration of the natural world apart from formal K-12 curricula and (2) visualize, display, and interpret data to improve understanding and provide a systems perspective of Earth's dynamic processes. All projects must focus on one or more of the following informal/nonformal science education activities:

·                Technologically facilitated outdoor experiential learning for youth and adults;

·                Public participation in science related to one or more of NOAA's mission goals;

·                Exhibitions and online programs allowing the visualization and exploration of data supporting the interpretation of ocean, coastal, Great Lakes, weather and climate sciences for public audiences;

·                Spherical display system (including NOAA's Science On a Sphere) installations and programming; and

·                Professional development programs and training programs for informal/nonformal education staff.

                                                                         
Deadlines

Letters of Intent are required.  The deadline for letters of intent is 5:00 PM EST February 16, 2010.

 The deadline for full applications is 5:00 PM EDT on April 6, 2010.

  Additional Information
For further information please visit: http://www.oesd.noaa.gov/funding_opps.html

For automated updates on this funding opportunity, we recommend you subscribe to our RSS feed at http://www.oesd.noaa.gov/funding_opps_feed.xml.

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As the World Churns
By: Alan Buis, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

"Terra firma." It's Latin for "solid Earth." Most of the time, at least from our perspective here on the ground, Earth seems to be just that: solid. Yet the Earth beneath our feet is actually in constant motion. It moves through time and space, of course, along with the other objects in the universe, but it moves internally as well. The powerful forces of wind, water and ice constantly erode its surface, redistributing Earth's mass in the process. Within Earth's solid crust, faulting literally creates and then moves mountains. Hydrological changes, such as the pumping of groundwater for use by humans, cause the ground beneath us to undulate. Volcanic processes deform our planet and create new land. Landslides morph and scar the terrain. Entire continents can even rise up, rebounding from the weight of massive glaciers that blanketed the land thousands of years ago.

Indeed, the outermost layers of the celestial blue onion that is Earth-its crust and upper mantle-aren't very solid at all. But what happens if we peel back the layers and examine what's going on deep within Earth, at its very core?

Obviously, Earth's core is too deep for humans to observe directly. But scientists can use indirect methods to deduce what's going on down there. A new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, by Jean Dickey of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. and co-author Olivier deViron of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, University Paris Diderot, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, has confirmed previous theoretical predictions that the churning cauldron of molten metals that make up Earth's liquid outer core is slowly being stirred by a very complex but predictable series of periodic oscillations. The findings give scientists unique insights into Earth's internal structure, the strength of the mechanisms responsible for generating Earth's magnetic field and its geology.

Peeling Back the Onion

In order to better understand what's going on inside our planet, it helps to first get a lay of the land, so to speak.

Earth has several distinct layers, each with its own properties. At the outermost layer of our planet is the crust, which comprises the continents and ocean basins. Earth's crust varies in thickness from 35 to 70 kilometers (22 to 44 miles) in the continents and 5 to 10 kilometers (3 to 6 miles) in the ocean basins. The crust is mainly composed of alumino-silicates.

Next comes the mantle. The mantle is roughly solid, though very slow motion can be observed inside of it. It is about 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) thick, and is separated into an upper and lower mantle. It is here where most of Earth's internal heat is located. Large convective cells in the mantle circulate heat and drive the movements of Earth's tectonic plates, upon which our continents ride. The mantle is mainly composed of ferro-magnesium silicates.

Earth's innermost layer is the core, which is separated into a liquid outer core and a solid inner core. The outer core is 2,300 kilometers (1,429 miles) thick, while the inner core is 1,200 kilometers (746 miles) thick. The outer core is mainly composed of a nickel-iron alloy (liquid iron), while the inner core is almost entirely composed of a pure solid iron body.

Earth's "Magnetic" Personality

Scientists believe Earth's magnetic field results from movements of molten iron and nickel within its liquid outer core. These flows, which are caused by interactions between Earth's core and its mantle, are neither even, nor evenly distributed. The electrical currents generated by these flows result in a magnetic field, which is similarly uneven, moves around in location and varies in strength over time. Earth's magnetic field is also slightly tilted with respect to Earth's axis. This causes Earth's geographic north and south poles to not line up with its magnetic north and south poles--they currently differ by about 11 degrees.

In just the last 200 million years alone, Earth's magnetic poles have actually reversed hundreds of times, with the most recent reversal taking place about 790,000 years ago. Scientists are able to reconstruct the chronology of these magnetic pole reversals by studying data on the spreading of the seafloor at Earth's mid-oceanic ridges. Unlike the doomsday scenario popularized by Hollywood in the movie "2012," however, such reversals don't occur over days, but rather on geologic timescales spanning hundreds to thousands of years-very short in geologic time but comparatively long in human time. The time span between pole reversals is even longer, ranging from 100,000 to several million years.

Earth's magnetic field is essential for life on Earth. Extending thousands of kilometers into space, it serves as a shield, deflecting the constant bombardment of charged particles and radiation known as the solar wind away from Earth. These solar winds would otherwise be fatal to life on Earth. At Earth's poles, the perpendicular angle of the magnetic field to Earth there allows some of these particles to make it into our atmosphere. This results in the Northern Lights in the northern hemisphere and the Southern Lights in the southern hemisphere.

Here on the ground, Earth's magnetic field has many practical applications to our everyday lives. It allows people to successfully navigate on land and at sea, making it a critical tool for commerce. Hikers use it to find their way. Archaeologists use it to deduce the age of ancient artifacts such as pottery, which, when fired, assumes the magnetic field properties that were present at the time of its creation. Similarly, the field of paleomagnetism uses magnetism to give scientists glimpses into Earth's remote past. In addition, geophysicists and geologists use geomagnetism as a tool to investigate Earth's structure and changes taking place in the Earth.

Getting to the Core of the Matter

Since Earth's liquid core is the primary source of Earth's magnetic field, scientists can use observations of the magnetic field at Earth's surface and its variability over time to mathematically calculate and isolate the approximate motions taking place within the core.

That's what Dickey and deViron did. They combined measurements of Earth's magnetic field taken by observatory stations on land and ships at sea dating back to 1840 with those of the Danish Oersted and German CHAMP geomagnetic satellite missions, both of which were supported by NASA investments. These measurements were then used as inputs for a complex model that employs statistical time series analyses to determine how fast liquid iron is flowing within Earth's core.

"Although we do not observe the core directly, it's amazing how much we can learn about Earth's interior using magnetic field observations," said Dickey.

In order to approximate the flow of liquid in the core, the scientists visualized its motion as a set of 20 rigid cylinders, each rotating about a common point that represents Earth's axis. "Imagine that each cylinder is slowly rotating at a different speed, and you'll get a sense of the complex churning that's taking place within Earth's core," Dickey said.

The scientists analyzed the data to identify common patterns of movement among the different cylinders. These patterns represent how momentum and energy are transferred from the liquid core-mantle interface inward through the liquid core toward the inner core with diminishing amplitudes.

Their analyses isolated six slow-moving oscillations, or waves of motion, occurring within the liquid core. The oscillations originated at the boundary between Earth's core and its mantle and traveled inward toward the inner core with decreasing strength. Four of these oscillations were robust, occurring at periods of 85, 50, 35 and 28 years. Since the scientist's data set goes back to 1840, the recurrence period of the longest oscillation (85 years) is less well determined than the other oscillations. The last two oscillations identified were weaker and will require further study.

The 85- and 50-year oscillations are consistent with a 1997 study by researchers Stephen Zatman and Jeremy Bloxham of Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., who used a different analysis technique. A later purely theoretical study by Harvard researcher Jon Mound and Bruce Buffett of the University of Chicago in 2006 showed that there should be several oscillations of this type; their predicted periods agree with the first four modes identified in Dickey and deViron's study.

"Our satellite-based results are in excellent agreement with the previous theoretical and other studies in this field, providing a strong confirmation of the existence of these oscillations," said Dickey. "These results will give scientists confidence in using satellite measurements in the future to deduce long-term changes taking place deep within our restless planet."