The World On A String
The ever-evolving Serafin String Quartet is raising its profile with a new CD release, a London concert and a project with a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. It’s safe to say, the Serafins aren’t fiddling around.
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Delaware’s Discovery Channel
Our own Christina River is one of the world’s top sites for ecological research. Does it play a role in global warming? Local scientists aim to find out.
Humans may be largely to blame for excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but there may be a more surprising culprit: healthy ecosystems.
Stroud Water Research Center, a world-class research outfit based in Avondale, Pennsylvania, has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to make the Christina River Basin a critical zone observatory—one of only six in the country—a place where every aspect of the ecosystem, from the bedrock to the treetops, will be studied.
“Ours (in the Christina) has a human footprint on it that goes back 300 years or more, so the landscape that we’re looking at is highly impacted,” says Dr. Lou Kaplan, a senior research scientist at Stroud. “Part of what we’re doing is looking at existing conditions, but part of what we’re doing is looking back and trying to interpret how some of those conditions came about and the implications of those past actions for the future.”
The grant will enable researchers from Stroud and UD to collect data using the latest methods and post them on the Internet in real time for scientists everywhere to see, says Stroud scientist Anthony Aufdenkampe. “We are now a magnet for researchers all over the country and, in fact, all over the world to come and collaborate with us,” he says.
Because the data will be available well beyond UD and Stroud, says Liz Brooking, Stroud’s director of communications and marketing, “there’s potential for much greater collaboration and discovery.” —Alexandra Duszak
Page 4: Forgotten No Longer | Renovations of the historic Tweed’s Tavern are complete and a nearby exhibit hall is in the works. Talk about living history.
