Public Outreach

We had some mention in the press recently. Globo published a short article about the broader project and produced a short video of the burn.

News Article - Controlled Burn in the Amazon for Scientific Research

Data, data everywhere...

I am just starting to sort through the data we collected in Rio Branco. 24 pages of notes like this listing conditions during field monitoring of soil mercury emissions at various sites, during different times of day, and before/after the fire (my field notebook still smells like smoke). Over the next few weeks I hope to match the conditions recorded in the notebook with the results recorded by our instrument to get a sense of soil mercury emissions pre- vs. post-burn. The one tricky thing is the instrument we were using. The loaner we managed to scrounge up at the last minute had its problems. Unfortunately the baseline on the instrument continued to drift downward over the course of each day.
The peaks and valleys in this data represent mercury concentrations going into and out of our chamber, which allows me to calculate the emissions of mercury from the soil surface. However, the slow downward trend in the data, emphasized by the blackline, is due to instrument drift. I should be able to subtract that out, but I will have to get one of my statistics friends involved just to be safe.

Leaving Rio Branco

We left Rio Branco on Saturday. It was a great trip and yet it was good to come home. I hadn't seen my family for two weeks, and I got a big warm welcome from my kids. The work in Rio Branco was hard, and everyone was a bit exhausted by the end. It took several days to wash off the salt, dirt, and sunscreen. But I will miss the city.

Even more now that I have had a chance to get to know the area, it feels that we were on the edge of civilization, or at least on the edge of developed civilization as we have come to expect. Staying in the city center was a bit disorienting as it is highly developed and not dissimilar from a small-sized American city - lots of restaurants, small shops, bars, civic buildings, etc. Yet just outside of the center the area transitions quickly.

I went for an early morning run on my last day into some of the outskirts of the neighborhood, just 5 or so minutes from our hotel. At one point I found myself along a dirt path running on a hillside through a cluster of small houses. Each was the size of a large living room in the US, with only the bare necessities - a bit of electricity and minimal plumbing. I received a few long stares as I ran through the area. At first, I was a little concerned, but I eventually realized that the stares were more because I was a peculiar novelty in the area.

Most people were beginning their chores as I ran by. Men tinkering with bicycles or other things that needed to be fixed, children playing, and women sweeping in the hours before the hot midday sun. Brazilians have an interesting fascination with cleanliness. Interesting because the climate alternates between extremely dry periods that cause dirt to blow in large clouds, and torrential rains that cause rivers of mud to cascade by. Yet they were out sweeping, and not only their houses, but also the dirt paths in front of their houses to remove litter or leaves that had blown in during the night. There was a curious tranquility to the area that is hard to describe.