Findings
Getting a Handle on Environmental Hazards
America's former and present industrial cities often face
daunting environmental woes: landfills that leak chemicals,
incinerators spewing air pollution, toxic waste buried at
abandoned factories.
Johns Hopkins researchers have won a $5 million-plus
federal grant to determine exactly how urban industrial
sites become contaminated, and to find better ways to clean
them up. The new
Center
for Hazardous Substances in Urban
Environments, a joint five-year project involving
researchers from Hopkins, the University of Maryland,
University of Connecticut, and other institutions, will
study an array of environmental threats to city dwellers,
including air pollution, contaminated groundwater, and toxic
chemicals generated by landfills, incinerators, and
Superfund sites.
The center, directed by Edward Bouwer, professor in the
Hopkins Department of Geography and
Environmental Engineering, also will focus on community
outreach,
including technical and scientific assistance to residents
hoping to clean up and redevelop abandoned properties known
as "brownfields."
Water Aplenty on Ancient Mars
Planetary researchers have reported new evidence that Mars,
the dusty red planet, was once likely covered with oceans
vast and deep.
Paul Feldman, Hopkins professor of
physics and
astronomy, and Vladimir Krasnopolsky of Catholic
University
analyzed data gathered by the orbiting
Far Ultraviolet
Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE), which is operated by
Hopkins
for NASA. FUSE measured the abundance of molecular hydrogen,
a remnant of primordial water on Mars. The researchers then
compared those readings to Mars data collected earlier using
the Hubble Space
Telescope and to measurements of frozen
water currently present on Mars.
"We calculate that if the initial quantity of water on
Mars could have been evenly distributed across the planet
somehow, it would have been equivalent to a global Martian
ocean at least three-quarters of a mile deep," says
Krasnopolsky. The scientists report their findings in the
November 30, 2001, issue of Science.
Their findings that Mars's upper atmosphere contains
molecular hydrogen, or H2, confirms earlier theories about
the planet's water history. Over the past few billion years,
it is believed, Mars's atmosphere has been thinning and the
planet losing water because of a variety of factors,
including bombardment from asteroids and comets. Through
their research, Krasnopolsky and Feldman were able to derive
how much Martian water has been lost to space and then
estimate the amount of water on Mars shortly after its
formation.
Mars is not officially a dry planet, even today. The
planet's polar ice caps have been measured by NASA's Mars
Global Surveyor probe, and orbiting spacecraft recently have
taken photos that seem to show erosion furrows created by
the flow of water. Whether such indications of water
translate into life remains a Martian mystery, for now.
--JCS