Help Me Choose My Topic

The deadline is fast approaching for applications to the Fulbright - National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship program.

Applicants may submit only one entry, addressing one of the identified topics: Biodiversity, Cities, Climate Change, Cultures, Energy, Food, Oceans, and Water.

It is pretty clear from the program description that the selection process will favor proposals that are both journalistic and personal, and which require investigation outside the US, while chronicling this quest for understanding in real time using digital tools. In other words, they want the ingredients for a good story.

I have one core point of view, which infuses all topics: Time. I ask myself, how do the various contributing factors with different rates of change interact? For which factor is time the constricting limitation? Time rules over all phenomena, from the quick to the interminable, with sweep hands of all speeds ticking simultaneously. If I can understand how time works with a given subject, I think I can understand the subject very well.

Bear with me in this post, as I open my thought processes for your examination, evaluating what my submission to the fellowship program should cover. Let's look at each of the topics in the program from the perspective of time, and then consider the appeal of each question and how credible I would be as the person to pursue it.

1) Time and biodiversity? 
Species are going extinct at a faster rate than since the comet impact that killed off the dinosaurs. I want to see and record as many doomed species as possible before they are gone. 
(A race against time to capture documentation of soon-to-be-lost species is poignant rather than hopeful. Such fatalism would not be favored by the selection committee.)

2) Time and Cities? 
Most of the world's population lives in cities, and many large cities are at water's edge, making them vulnerable to sea level rise. Is this a design opportunity or a dystopian curse? Thinking constructively, is there enough lead time, inventiveness and public resolve to build new urban areas designed for climate change? 
(A journalistic question, where experts in contention can only voice their own opinion. This could be favored.)

3) Time and Climate Change? 
The perceived rate of change is the ultimate determining factor for the pace of policy adoption. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation seems on track to maintain global air temperatures at their current level for another two decades, and then boost the rise in air temperatures relentlessly for thirty years or so thereafter. Can countries make a commitment to policies before the need for them becomes frantically urgent? 
(The issue is way too abstract and not photogenic, although it is the most fundamental question one could ask. It would not be favored as a subject for public consumption, even though it is about how the pace of climate change affects public attitudes.)

4) Time and Cultures? 
Global commercial culture infiltrates every human niche, poured upon and seeping into all the various local cultures of the world, including indigenous cultures whose origins predate globalism. Do the "old ways" of indigenous cultures have anything to teach global modernism about sustainability? 
(Really requires an anthropological point of view, but one expressed by a person who carries none of the considerable baggage from the discipline. I would not be thought the person to address it. This would not be favored coming from me.)

5) Time and Energy? 
Fossil fuel dependency is thoroughly built into the modern way of life, a melding of what is demanded and how those demands are supplied. A complete transition to an industrial alternative energy system with the capacity to serve modern consumption would require considerable fossil fuel and other resources for its construction, and may not even be realistic. Is there time to grow self sufficient alternative energy production systems with a matching low consumption alternative energy usage culture? Or will a new world of energy have to grow from the ruins of the old? 
(Another fundamental question, that verges on being rhetorical. Of course we can't pull this off, no one is even proposing such a course of action. As I believe the modern way of life will first have to fail utterly before it can be replaced, I would not be conducting an investigation so much as making a case for the desirability of collapse and the need to start planning now for the aftermath. This would definitely not be considered favorably by the selection committee.)

6) Time and Food? 
I have begun a quest to find locations where a society is able to live comfortably from the food it produces nearby, and where both the ecology and the infrastructure will be robustly adaptive to climate change in the decades to come. Is such a place possible? 
(A quest by its very nature is both highly personal and journalistic. This could be favored.)

7) Time and Oceans? 
The rise of sea level, over the decades and centuries, will create a changing interface between oceans and land. One type of natural habitat will experience tremendous expansion: estuaries. Where in the world are the estuary restoration efforts conducted, that might be adapted to cultivate this highly productive habitat expansion into a food producing resource? 
(Original, and thus better served by having a reputation for expertise and inventiveness in the particular field. Such a submission would not likely be favored coming from me. I can cover this topic from the quest for food perspective, when searching for innovations.)

8) Time and Water? 
The availability of fresh water for all uses has always been quite variable. Modern water exploitation is based on assumptions about variability that no longer hold, if they ever did. The duration and frequency of drought, the intervals between flood extremes, the type and seasonal pattern for winter precipitation—all these have been mistakenly characterized across the globe because studies were based on short time samples and an insufficient understanding of how the global weather system works. New variability regimes are being established in a warming global climate and no one knows where they will take us. What does long term water planning and development look like in a world of climate change, when we can no longer count on the supposed regularity of the seasons, which perhaps was always a myth perpetuated to serve development of water projects?
(My background in water conservation writing lends marginal credibility to asking this question, especially as a good supply-side answer has not yet been put forth and demand-side answers have not yet been fully considered. This is a journalistic approach, and it could be favored by the selection committee.

Reviewing my chain of thought, it seems I'm talking myself into choosing between #2, #6 and #8. Perhaps some recasting of the questions will narrow the field. Or perhaps I'll go with what I most desire to do, even if it is the least likely to be favored.

Your feedback is welcome.

The Hunger Game, 65 Million Years Ago

During my weekly volunteering in the Past Worlds Gallery, I'm often asked what happened to the dinosaurs. Of course, I give the answer that most paleontologists and geologist agree upon today, that a comet or meteor impact killed them off. As I grew up with this hypothesis and enthusiastically watched it mature into a substantiated scientific theory, I have a personal interest in explaining it.

Visitors clearly are not satisfied with this pat answer, however, because they can't grasp the mechanics of it. I think most people know there are always survivors from every catastrophe, and that the survivors recover their numbers and restore what was lost. The Impact Theory does not explain why some species that survived the impact made it through the hard times thereafter, and other survivors of the initial disaster eventually perished. That puzzle makes the Impact Theory an incomplete answer, unless it is elaborated.

People also have a hard time grasping how a local impact can have global consequences, even when the explosion is huge. We all know from news headlines and history books that a volcanic mountain can blow its top, but if we are not near that mountain, we do not fear the consequences. So how did an impact on the Yucatan affect life in all the oceans, and life on land areas far away?

What follows is the response I generally give, phrased here as exposition rather than the Q/A style I like to use in conversation.

To begin: 

How much energy was available for the impact event that caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction? 

A consensus ballpark estimate, based on the object mass and speed required to make the Chicxulub crater, is that the kinetic energy available before impact was 130,000,000 Megatons, using the unit for quantifying nuclear weapon energy yield.

A Wikipedia article on the history of nuclear weapons estimates that, in round numbers, about 130,000 nuclear weapons have been produced by all the world's nuclear powers over time. The yield of these weapons was quite varied, as they were designed for delivery by different systems to different targets. A reasonable guess for the average yield of all the nuclear weapons ever produced would be somewhere between 1 Megaton and 10 Megatons per weapon. A ten Megaton weapon would vaporize an entire metropolitan area.

For comparison purposes, the high side estimate is most useful, ten Megatons. Thus, the high side estimate of total Megaton yield capacity, cumulative for all nuclear weapons, is 1,300,000 Megatons.

This would put the impact energy available before atmospheric entry at 100 to 1000 times the explosive power of all the nuclear weapons ever produced. Upon entry and impact, this energy was converted to blast shock waves traveling through the atmosphere, the ocean and the earth's crust, a fireball of vaporized rock and superheated steam, ejected volumes of rock and water, an immense tidal wave, radiant heat, and seismic waves traveling through the earth.

The most significant contributor to extinction was the amount of small particle debris thrown into the air that stayed there for months, perhaps years, and was distributed around the globe. The impact cloud chilled the global climate by reflecting more sunlight back into space, and it reduced the sunlight available to plants, the base of food chains for land and ocean life. These are the effects of "Impact Winter", a term borrowed from studies of the global effect of total nuclear war, "Nuclear Winter". Most of the dinosaurs that survived the impact explosion starved to death or died of exposure soon after, even if they were far away from the impact site. In the chilled environment beneath darkened skies, there was little food to fuel them against the killing cold.

At this point in the narrative, kids raise their hands. Why didn't the bird branch of dinosaurs also go extinct? Why didn't the mammals? Why didn't all the world's oceanic fish die off for lack of sufficient phytoplankton to support the food chain? Let's rephrase the questions into one central question. Why did some species squeak through and most species did not?

It is probable that there were individual survivors of the impact across all the species on earth 65 million years ago, including the dinosaurs that today are extinct. But a new world had been created in the aftermath of the impact devastation, and the animals that were most adaptive to the drastically changed circumstances were favored. 

An animal that cannot compete with other animals for the same food resources will rapidly dwindle in number until no more are reproduced. An animal that adapts to new opportunities will survive and evolve. This is the way nature heals itself from global extinction events; the fossil record bridging the five major global extinction events provides testimony.

Flowering plants, such as the grasses, had evolved and proliferated late in the dinosaur age; classic dinosaurs ate them as part of their diet but had not evolved to exploit them fully. By contrast, insects, mammals and the avian dinosaurs had co-evolved with flowering plants. As flowering plants recolonized the land after the impact, the animals that could best utilize them were favored, and consequently they out competed the few remaining classic dinosaurs, who were ill suited to an environment in recovery. 

Here's the coda to the narrative, in scientific terms: The classic dinosaurs that survived the impact and its aftermath, eventually died off anyway because their long established success deprived their species of the genetic variation necessary to exploit drastic environmental change through adaptation by natural selection. One hundred, seventy million years of fairly stable ecological relationships did not prepare their genomes for a global catastrophe that gave the world a fresh start.

Of all the dinosaur families, only some species of birds made it through. Along with the mammals, they evolved to fill niches left empty by the absence of classic dinosaurs. Their genomes had the breadth of variability to diversify across generations of natural selection.

That's one story, consistent with what we know today. The job of science is to examine such stories, and find new facts that either support or refute them.