Pacific Science Center

Earth’s biosphere is in a period of rapid change, resulting from anthropogenic pressures such as climate change, habitat loss and species translocation and extinction. The extraordinary pace of change has led to the suggestion that we live in a new geological epoch of time called the Anthropocene. In this theme issue, we explore the major changes to the terrestrial and marine biospheres, from the deep oceans to the agricultural landscapes of the Anthropocene. We take a deliberately pluralistic approach that represents different viewpoints from the sciences and social sciences, examining our negative and sometimes calamitous impacts on species and ecosystems and our potential for positive interactions with the biosphere, and exploring change over millennia. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The biosphere in the Anthropocene’.

Coastal regions across the globe, including the Salish Sea, are becoming increasingly vulnerable to compound flooding due to the interaction between storm surge, tides, and river outflow. This hazard is anticipated to increase under sea level rise and climate change. This research offers a high-resolution flood hazard mapping approach for King and Pierce Counties of Washington State (United States of America) using the SFINCS (Super-Fast INundation of CoastS) model to facilitate a Continuous Flood Response Modeling (CFRM) framework wherein decades of dynamic coastal and fluvial processes are simulated. By applying a cell-by-cell extreme value analysis, we predict flood areas for return periods of 1 to 100 years and compute the Expected Annual Flooded Area (EAFA) as a probability-weighted indicator of flood exposure. Validation of the model against NOAA and USGS gauge data demonstrated good skill (RMSE: 14-17 cm for coastal water levels; unbiased RMSE: 49-116 cm for river water levels), while comparison with FEMA Special Flood Hazard Areas showed high spatial agreement of flooding (hit rates: 0.75-0.83). The statistical analysis of the historical flooding timing showed that the 28 December 2022, event was primarily responsible for the majority of historical flooding in the region. Climate simulations for today indicate an EAFA range of 56-200 ha in King County and 250-644 ha in Pierce County. Projections of future changes show that the primary driver of increasing flood extent is sea level rise (an increase of 80 %-360 % with 1m SLR), while climate change drivers, such as changes to storm patterns, reduce hazards minimally. A threshold was also identified where there is a substantial increase in the area of land that is flooded when sea levels rise above 100-150 cm. Finally, it was found that simple deterministic flood maps may underrepresent flood hazard by approximately 0.5 m if not all contributing factors are considered. Therefore, these findings provide evidence supporting the use of integrated measures of flood hazard, such as EAFA, to inform more rational and spatially responsive flood risk management.

We describe a virtual member of a knowledge management Community of Practice (CoP), called ATHENA, that knows an individual, his tasks, his organization, and the community. ATHENA employs an agentic chat capability that combines embeddings with knowledge-based faceted search to provide accurate responses to technical questions along with rationale and citations for efficient validation. ATHENA supports natural, in-the-flow capture of task-related insights to share within a CoP, along with proactive dissemination of information tied to an individual and his current needs. An evaluation involving 75 professionals from the Oil & Gas sector shows that ATHENA dramatically improved outcomes and productivity on a set of well-planning tasks compared to their use of a state-of-the-art RAG baseline. Interestingly, ATHENA also enabled eight nonexperts to perform at expert levels.

An oil spill is a catastrophic event that results in various toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) entering the environment. Polycyclic aromatic nitrogen heterocycles (PANHs) are more toxic to the environment than their parent PAHs. The high cost and paucity of available PANH standards, the lower abundance of PANHs relative to PAHs, and the difficult separation due to co-elution with PAHs have all contributed to the scarcity of related published literature on the determination of these compounds. To overcome these challenges, a new quantitative method has been successfully developed and validated for the inclusion of 113 polycyclic aromatic carbon (PAC) compounds in a single injection. The 113 compounds consist of PAHs, nitrogen heterocycles, sulfur heterocycles, and alkylated equivalents. Distinct separation of the PANHs and their alkylated counterparts (APANHs) from PAHs was achieved using a gas chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight (GC-QToF) mass spectrometer. The instrument resolved compounds by the high-resolution extraction of monoisotopic masses, allowing response correction factors (RCFs) to be determined from available PANH standards and to calculate concentrations from PAH calibration standards. The developed method was applicable to crude oil samples, generating concentrations of PANHs and relevant information on compound stability for use in oil spill forensics investigation. Development of this practical PAC method provides a powerful tool for screening toxic contaminants, assessing environmental impact, and monitoring recovery following an oil spill.

Satellite remote sensing is transforming coastal science from a “data-poor” field into a “data-rich” field. Sandy beaches are dynamic landscapes that change in response to long-term pressures, short-term pulses, and anthropogenic interventions. Until recently, the rate and breadth of beach change have outpaced our ability to monitor those changes, due to the spatiotemporal limitations of our observational capacity. Over the past several decades, only a handful of beaches worldwide have been regularly monitored with accurate yet expensive in situ surveys. The long-term coastal-change data of these few well-monitored beaches have led to in-depth understanding of many site-specific coastal processes. However, because the best-monitored beaches are not representative of all beaches, much remains unknown about the processes and fate of the other >99% of unmonitored beaches worldwide. The fleet of Earth-observing satellites has enabled multiscale monitoring of beaches, for the very first time, by providing imagery with global coverage and up to daily frequency. The long-standing and ever-expanding archive of satellite imagery will enable coastal scientists to investigate coastal change at sites vulnerable to future sea-level rise, that is, (almost) everywhere. In the past decade, our capability to observe coastal change from space has grown substantially with computing and algorithmic power. Yet, further advances are needed in automating monitoring using machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision to fully leverage this massive treasure trove of data. Extensive monitoring and investigation of the causes and effects of coastal change at the requisite spatiotemporal scales will provide coastal managers with additional, valuable information to evaluate problems and solutions, addressing the potential for widespread beach loss due to accelerated sea-level rise, development, and reduced sediment supply. Monitoring from Earth-observing satellites is currently the only means of providing seamless data with high spatiotemporal resolution at the global scale of the impending impacts of climate change on coastal systems.