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Posted 23 March 2013
 

New research by the OU and Lancaster University has discovered another type of Icelandic volcanic eruption that could cause disruption. Published in Geology (February 2013), the team found magma that is twice as 'fizzy' as previously believed, which increases the likelihood of disruptive ash clouds from future eruptions.

Many of the largest explosive eruptions in Iceland involve a viscous, high-silica magma called rhyolite, and are driven by volcanic gases (mostly water and carbon dioxide). It is these gases that give a volcanic eruption its fizz. At depth these gases are dissolved within the magma, but as the magma rises towards the surface during an eruption, the gases expand dramatically, causing the magma to froth and accelerate upwards as a foam. The viscous rhyolite foam breaks down into tiny ash fragments which form the ash clouds.

Drs Jacqui Owen and Hugh Tuffen (Lancaster University) and Dave McGarvie (The Open University) analysed pumice and lava from an eruption at Iceland's Torfajökull volcano some seventy thousand years ago. Within these samples they found tiny pockets of magma, called melt inclusions, which trapped the original gas. By measuring how much gas was dissolved within the melt inclusions, they could determine how fizzy the magma was.

Previously scientists had thought that Icelandic magma was less fizzy than those from Pacific Ocean volcanoes and expected much less explosive eruptions by comparison. However, this new research suggests some Icelandic volcanoes could produce eruptions just as explosive as those in the Pacific Rim.

PhD student Jacqui Owen said: “I was amazed by what I found. I measured up to five per cent of water in the inclusions, more than double what was expected for Iceland, and similar in fact to the values for explosive eruptions in the Pacific 'Ring of Fire'. We knew the Torfajökull volcanic eruption was huge – almost 100 times bigger than recent eruptions in Iceland - but now we also know it was surprisingly gas-rich.”

The finding helps explain why thin blankets of fine ash from older powerful Icelandic eruptions are found in peat bogs and lake beds across the UK and Europe. By accurately measuring the original gas content of Icelandic explosive eruptions for the first time, the research shows how Icelandic volcanoes have the power to generate the fine ash capable of being transported long distances and cause disruption to the UK and Europe.

Dr Dave McGarvie, Senior Lecturer, Volcano Dynamics Group at The Open University, said: "We know that large explosive eruptions have occurred at infamous volcanoes such as Hekla and Katla, but it is important also to appreciate that large explosive eruptions are also produced by less well-known Icelandic volcanoes such as Torfajökull and Öraefajökull."

Dr Hugh Tuffen, Royal Society University Research Fellow at Lancaster University, said: “The discovery is rather worrying, as it shows that Icelandic volcanoes have the potential to be even more explosive than anticipated. Added to this is the view of several eminent scientists that Iceland is entering a period of increased volcanic activity. Iceland’s position close to mainland Europe and the north Atlantic flight corridors means air travel could be affected again.”

The research highlights the importance of greater understanding of Icelandic volcanoes to improve forecasts and prepare for the next major explosive eruption.

Find out more:

• Volcanic Dynamics, the OU
• Lancaster Environment Centre

Posted 8 April 2013

The Open University is recruiting people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) to take part in an ongoing research project. 

The research is investigating whether the brains of people with OCD function differently to those without OCD.

Preliminary findings suggest some systematic and interesting differences between brain activity in people with OCD, and non-OCD controls, even in a relaxed state. However, to obtain a more detailed picture researchers need to find more participants with OCD.

They are looking for people between 18 and 60 years of age, who have been diagnosed with OCD and have no learning disabilities.

If you decide to participate, they will need four hours of your time. The timing of these sessions can be flexible and scheduled according to your convenience.

During this time, your brain activity will be recorded using a safe, non-invasive and painless technique known as Quantitative Electroencephalography, or QEEG. You will also be interviewed and asked to fill in a questionnaire.

The study generally takes place at the OU in Milton Keynes or in Camden in London. Travel costs will be reimbursed. In some cases researchers will be able to come to your town or a town near you to perform the scans and interviews.

By participating in this study, you will be contributing to scientific advancements in OCD research. Additionally, you will gain interesting insights about how your brain may have been affected by OCD.

You can get more information from the QEEG and Brain Research Lab project page. If you wish to take part, or have any enquiries, please contact Loes Koorenhof by calling  01908 659 472, or email loes.koorenhof@open.ac.uk

The OU has secured £235,000 of funding from the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission to support 15 students from Uganda and Kenya on the MSc in development management. The cohort will start studying in November 2013.

This announcement follows previous awards sponsored by the Department for International Development since 2008. The OU has strong links with Uganda and Kenya because of its working partnership with the Kulika Trust in Uganda, a charitable trust specialising in the provision of educational scholarships for students in East Africa.

Before awarding the funding the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission’s Distance Learning Committee looked in depth at a variety of criteria including the use of technologies; recruitment and targeting of students; success rates of previous cohorts; data of course completion rates for 'developing' country students; and the intended development impact of course activities as well as subsequent career information of alumni.

Richard Pinder, Development Management Qualification Director at The Open University (OU) said, "This continued funding highlights the commitment to providing educational opportunities to people in East Africa. Our aim is to enable those who study with the OU to engage with the challenges of global development and equip them with the knowledge to address and implement development strategies.”

The importance of such opportunities for students in Uganda and Kenya is evident by the feedback from those who have completed the MSc in Development Management.

“Obtaining a MSc Development Management opens higher positions in the development field as I am able to compete favourably with other peers in the field and my employer values me and already they have committed to take me on as a Program Manager as a replacement of an expat who will be leaving.”(Extract from the 2008 cohort feedback).

“Initially I was recruited as a project manager but three months after my recruitment I was promoted to a senior manager upon recognition of the way I engaged with issues which basically is as a result of the interaction with the course materials.” (Extract from the 2009 cohort feedback)

“A direct example [of my qualification] is my involvement in several tripartite negotiations and discussions between the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP), local grain traders/businessmen and the rural smallholder farmers in Northern Uganda. In 2010, I worked as a senior program assistant in the Purchase for Progress project that the UNWFP was funding and implementing to boost rural incomes and strengthen smallholder farmer organizations and institutions. I contributed my efforts training the rural farmers and helped build their grassroots organizations to enable them market their grains directly to WFP and increased their negotiation power given that they were often cheated in the open markets by the grain traders. This is a direct benefit to local development from my studies.” (Extract from the 2008 cohort feedback).

The MSc in Development Management, with Development Policy and Practice, was launched in 1996. It now has more than 1,000 alumni. To date students in more than 100 countries have studied the OU’s development management modules.

Find out more:

• The scholarships

The birdwatching community has been excited by a rare sighting of a snowy owl identified on the OU's iSpot nature website.

A spotter's photo of the white bird, taken in Scotland's Cairngorm mountains, was posted on iSpot yesterday 26 February, where other spotters confirmed the identification.

The snowy owl is one of Europe's largest owls with a wingspan of over 5 ft, and is native to Arctic regions, Norway, and North America.

It is described in the Aberdeen Press and Journal as 'more or less equivalent to the Holy Grail' for British birdwatchers.

The last pair known to breed in the UK was seen on Shetland in 1975.

iSpot was set up by the OU to help anyone identify a plant or animal and exchange observations and information about nature. An iSpot Android app was launched recently.

Useful links

• BBC website: Snowy owl spotted in Cairngorms 
• Watch a video about iSpot

 

Image: Thinkstock

Santa Claus operated out of Frankfurt last year – and gave the Eurozone the fiscal equivalent of several billion stocking-fillers. But the European Central Bank’s largesse may not extend to those who don’t believe in it, writes Alan Shipman.

The season of miraculous gift-giving is over, but Europeans are still playing happily with their earliest and biggest Christmas present. Santa Claus turned out to be a central banker – and one willing to dispense on the promise of future good behaviour, disregarding recent misdemeanours.  

A single act of generosity by Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank (ECB) governor, has restored lasting calm to the previously turbulent Eurozone, neatly deflecting the winter blizzards across the Atlantic.

Draghi’s most dramatic achievement is to have radically reduced the cost of borrowing for Italy, Spain and other Eurozone countries that have large budget deficits to finance. This cost (the ‘bond yield’) fell to less than 5% in Spain’s early-January auction, from a crisis peak of more than 7.5%. It is a similar story in Draghi’s native Italy, where the public finances have been so effectively shored-up that voters can even contemplate a Silvio Berlusconi comeback. By promising ‘outright monetary transactions’ (OMT), the ECB has asserted the market-stabilising power long enjoyed by its American equivalent, the Federal Reserve. As a result, investors searching for higher yields have now moved back into corporate bonds and shares, lifting Eurozone stock markets to their highest level for two years.

From regarding the Euro area as a sinking ship that would either have to ditch its weakest members or be dragged underwater by them, some investors now view it as a better sovereign borrower than the previously mighty US. Both are currency zones with wide fiscal deficits. At present the US has a more impressive growth rate, while there is still a risk of weaker Eurozone members being cut adrift and forced into default. But in the longer term – if it can now hold together – the Eurozone has a better external balance (exporting more than it imports, thanks to Germany), greater power to impose fiscal discipline on its members, and stronger safeguards against unleashing inflation (sovereign borrowers’ traditional way of short-changing their creditors after securing the cash).

Debt guarantee 
Perhaps most remarkably, Draghi has achieved this monetary escapology without having to part with a single euro of ECB funds. All he has done is announced that his bank will, in future, buy up the debt of any Eurozone country that is forced to default. This guarantees the debt of Italy, Spain and other struggling member-states, making it safe for ordinary investors (and investment funds) to buy. Their governments can now continue to finance the public investment needed to restore growth so that banks and households can bring down their own debt, and the costs of welfare support until new jobs emerge.

The announcement was well timed, coming at a moment when banks and bond-buyers are globally desperate for high-yielding issues, and prefer those which have a government behind them, regardless of quality. After all, Ukraine with an economy stalled by sliding steel sales and politics sliding back into industrial oligarchy and Latvia bailed-out by the IMF in 2008 and dragged through Europe’s deepest ever recession have recently made successful bond issues, despite having higher currency risks and lower credit ratings than any Eurozone member.

Neither Spain nor Italy, the most dangerous of the Eurozone’s weak links, has asked for a bailout so far. Both know that, if they do so, they will be subject to a German-driven, EU-administered ‘adjustment programme’ – worsening their already perilous economic and social situation, and probably discrediting whichever government has to enforce the emergency measures. Their additional borrowing is raising the scale of any future rescue effort. The ECB’s calculation is that, by making it clear that all Euro debt will be honoured in the event of a bailout, this becomes less likely to happen. That’s because member countries now have the fiscal strength required to drive a recovery, and because speculators will stop short-selling the debt in order to fulfil their own expectations of its collapse. The ECB’s promise buys time for governments to act so that the promise won’t need to be fulfilled.

Cross-Channel fallout
If this gamble works, it should be good for other European governments – notably the UK, which will blame its imminent return to recession on the weakness of demand and investor confidence in the single currency area. But in one important respect, the Eurozone’s improbable gain is its non-members’ loss. The UK had retained its top AAA credit rating, allowing it to finance its overrunning budget deficit at negligible cost, partly because it was regarded as a ‘safe haven’ for investment funds that felt at risk from Eurozone exposure. Now that Euro debt has been turned into a positive one-way bet, that of the UK doesn't look so enticing.

A credit-rating downgrade need not (as the US has demonstrated) cause any rise in UK interest rates, or loss of confidence in its turnaround strategy. But it makes it harder to maintain the present low rates long enough to complete the banks’ recapitalisation and float Britain’s mortgage borrowers off the rocks. 

Mario Draghi is unlikely to be on George Osborne’s Christmas Card list at the end of 2013. But if his gamble succeeds, it’s a small price to pay.
Alan Shipman 24 February 2012

Alan Shipman is a lecturer in Economics at the Open University. He is responsible for the modules You and your money:personal finance in context and Personal investment in an uncertain world,  part of the foundation degree in Financial Services.

 

The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.

Cartoon by Catherine Pain 

 

 

Tropical peat swamps may be a more significant source of global carbon emissions than previously thought, according to new research published in the journal Nature by The Open University and partners. 

Peatlands in Asia that are being deforested to grow crops, are haemorrhaging carbon from deep within their peat soils, with potentially serious consequences for the environment.

Tropical peatlands form vast stores of organic carbon, tens of metres thick. The majority are in Indonesia, where the natural swamp forest are increasingly being destroyed to make way for agriculture – in particular oil palm for biofuels and food.

Dr Sam Moore, lead author of the study and former Open University PhD student, explained: “We measured carbon losses in channels draining intact and deforested peatlands, and found it is 50 per cent higher from deforested swamps, compared to intact swamps.

"Dissolved organic carbon released from intact swamps mainly comes from fresh plant material, but carbon from the deforested swamps is much older – centuries to millennia – and comes from deep within the peat column.”

Carbon lost from the drainage systems of deforested and drained peatlands is often not considered in ecosystem exchange carbon budgets, but the research team found it increased the estimated total carbon loss by 22 per cent.

Dr Vincent Gauci,  Senior Lecturer in Earth Systems and Ecosystem Science at The Open University, and corresponding author, said: “Essentially, ancient carbon is being dissolved out of Asian peatlands as they are increasingly being turned over to agriculture to meet global demands for food and biofuels.

"This has led to a large increase in carbon loss from Southeast Asian rivers draining peatland ecosystems – up by 32 per cent over the last 20 years, which is more than half the entire annual carbon loss from all European peatlands.

"The destruction of the Asian peat swamps is a globally significant environmental disaster, but unlike deforestation of the Amazon, few people know that it is happening."

More information and related courses

• Deep instability of deforested tropical peatlands revealed by fluvial organic carbon fluxes
• Peatland forest destruction raises climate concern
• Open University media release
• S396 Ecosytems  
• S288 Practical Science 
• S216 Environmental Science 

 

Image: Oil palm plantation. The cultivation of oil palms for food and biofuels is a significant cause of peatland deforestation. Image source: Thinkstock

 

Hoorah, it’s snowing in the UK again! Time to have a snowball fight, build a snowman and have a few unplanned days off school and work. But what about the economy? The OU's Helen Roby explains on OpenLearn.

 

Dr Rita Rhodes, Visiting Research Fellow at the Co-operatives Research Unit of The Open University has written the first book to deal with the development of co-operatives in the British Empire.

Empire and Co-operation: How the British Empire used Co-operatives in its Development Strategies 1900-1970 traces how and why the British Empire came to promote co-operatives as part of its development strategies in its dependent territories, and the global impact that this subsequently had.
 
The book describes how co-operative development policies were implemented in widely varied settings and the results achieved.

By the 1970s co-operatives had become the major alternative business form to investor-led businesses, and their global reach has been attributed to the fact that they are ‘versatile’ and ‘universal’.
 
The British Empire, the largest the world has known, helped them to become universal by taking them to the four corners of the world.

The book is published in paperback by John Donald. ISBN 9781 9065 66562.