Physics is an abstract subject, often involving imaginary pulleys and balls rolling down ramps. As a result, many students have a hard time understanding physics. Some educators say lecturing and other traditional methods make learning physics even harder. But, educators are working to fix this problem with innovative teaching techniques.

In Columbus, a summer workshop trained teachers in the Modeling Method, which encourages students to take a more active role in learning physics. The method is designed to inject a sense of exploration and discovery in physics. Workshop facilitator and Ohio State University Physics Professor Andrew Heckler says with this method, students collect their own data to re-discover physical laws. He says this method changes the role of the traditional teacher.

“Instead of the sage of the stage, people say, it’s much more of a guide on the side. And so they’re much more of a shepherd where they’re more facilitating the students’ learning instead of up there spouting out wisdom,” Heckler said.

He says this method teaches students the scientific method and gives them a firmer understanding of concepts.

“And we use these techniques that we found that really help students learn. It has a lot to do with more than just memorization, but they really go through the method of science,” Heckler said.

Tests show students who’ve been taught with the Modeling technique understand physics better. High school science teachers who’ve used this method praise the technique. Doug Forrest teaches physics and physical sciences at Pickerington High School North. He’s been teaching in the same district for 12 years, and has used the method for two years.

“I think the method of instruction that we go through works with real kids in real classrooms, not just upper level kids, not just remedial students,” Forrest said.

Forrest says he was skeptical at first, but written feedback from students and diagnostic tests showed this method really works.

“My students in physics had always done pretty well, but I’ve noticed a discernible increase in the gain of their physics understanding over the past two years. Like I said, that’s something I really didn’t expect,” Forrest said.

The Modeling method can also be used to teach chemistry. Olentangey High School student Kim Mowrey says she learned a lot from teacher Jessica Mamais

“We would whiteboard everyday in class so we’d have a class discussion everyday where she would give us problems and we’d have to put them out on a board and she’d asks us does that makes sense to you and then when we looked at it, obviously, no or yes and we’d discuss why or why not,” Mowrey said.

But, Mowrey says not everyone in her chemistry class liked the non-traditional approach. “You had to step out of the box, and I know that was hard for some people and they like hated trying to think another way,” she said.

OSU Physics Professor Lei Bao stresses the importance of understanding how science works, as opposed to just memorizing scientific facts.

“The understanding of what science is, that’s the most important thing, because once you get that, you’re much better prepared in dealing with future situations,” Bao said.

Both Bao and workshop facilitator Heckler say future situations include not only job prospects, but also everyday decision-making and developing educated opinions as citizens.

Called Targeted Investment in Excellence, the initiative selected 10 programs that already have excellent reputations. The hope is that focused investment will allow the selected programs to compete with the top universities in the country

Many of the programs seek to establish collaborative efforts across multiple disciplines. The top-ranked program is a plan to study climate change, availability of fresh water, and the effect of fossil fuel burning on the atmosphere. Two other plans involve public health preparedness and clean, sustainable energy.

Central funds will provide $50 million and individual colleges will provide the rest for a total of $100 million. One of the top-ranked programs is the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics, which is due to receive around $5.7 million over the next five years.

Physicists and astronomers affiliated with the Center try to tackle some of the most fundamental and profound questions in science. One major question is this: what’s the Universe made of? Scientists say nearly 25% of the Universe is made of mysterious matter called Dark Matter. And about 70% of the Universe is made of Dark Energy, which manifests itself by accelerating the expansion of the Universe. No one knows what Dark Matter or Dark Energy might be.

Director of the Center Terry Walker says OSU’s Astronomy and Physics Departments are well-suited to work together and tackle these questions. He says his program is exactly the type that would benefit from targeted investment. Walker says external reviews by other scientists have lauded OSU’s strengths in this field. But, there needs to be stronger connections between Astronomy and Physics Departments.

“And people came in from the outside and said you guys are good, but if you want to be much better, you should take advantage of this and coalesce these two departments,” says Walker.

Walker says money will be used to attract the best post-doctoral researchers, establish workshops for visiting scientists, and to invest in larger projects at facilities like the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona and Fermilab in Chicago.

Walker says OSU occupies about the 8th spot in the U.S. News and World Report rankings of cosmology programs. OSU is just behind notable names like Berkeley, Caltech, University of Chicago, and Harvard.

“Our goal is to pull into direct competition with the people right above us, which is not a trivial exercise,” he says.

But not all of the Targeted Investment funds are aimed at scientific research. The School of Music is set to receive $300,000 to establish a Music Industry curriculum. Director of the Music Department, Mellasenah Morris says OSU will be able to offer students a unique educational experience.

“We will have something unique. While there are many schools that have a music business program, that will have a recording arts program, this is going to have multiple interdisciplinary opportunities,” says Morris.

Interdisciplinary opportunities include business-oriented courses that teach students how to deal with contracts and engineering courses in instrument design. Morris says U.S. News and World Report ranked OSU’s music department 24th overall, and 11th for state universities. She says the addition of the Music Industry curriculum can propel OSU into the top ten.

“I think as an outgrowth of this, the Ohio State University will be on the cutting edge of interdisciplinary work with the arts,” she says.

TheCenter is a research group at the University of Florida that publishes a report on the top American research universities. It puts OSU in the middle of the top 25 among public institutions. Among all research institutions, OSU just misses the top 25 cut-off, right behind schools like Caltech and Princeton. Unlike the oft-cited U.S. News and World Report college rankings, TheCenter uses nine objective measurements, such as total research dollars, endowment assets, and SAT and ACT test scores. U.S. News and World Report relies heavily on faculty surveys about university reputations, which critics say are sometimes skewed towards famous names, instead of actual strength in research.

Astronomers have just calculated a new distance to the Triangulum Galaxy, also called M33. They found it’s 15% farther away than previously thought. OSU Astronomy Professor Kris Stanek is one of the astronomers involved in the project.

“Distance to something is a basic number. If we want to know anything about an object in the Universe, the very first thing we need to know is how far away they are,” he says.

When measuring astronomical distances, astronomers use a series of measurements they call the distance ladder. It’s easiest to measure distances to close objects like neighboring planets. Then, based on those measurements, astronomers calculate distances to farther objects like stars. Finding distances to even farther objects like other galaxies often involves more complicated steps – or rungs of the distance ladder. The problem is, inaccuracies accumulate with more rungs.

What sets this new measurement apart from previous ones is that astronomers have directly calculated the distance to M33 without intermediate steps. These new findings could be a more accurate, initial rung of the distance ladder.

Stanek says, “we do a lot of very basic measurements – they’re hard but they’re basic. We measure how big the stars are, we measure how hot they are, we measure how much light they emit. But that allows us to be pretty accurate and precise.”

One way astronomers calculate distances to the stars is by comparing how bright they appear and how bright they actually are. A candle at the end of a football field would look a lot dimmer than if it were just two feet away. By measuring how much dimmer the distant candle looks, you can figure out how far away that candle is.

For M33, scientists looked at a pair of stars that orbit around each other. As the stars orbit, one of them moves in front of the other, changing the amount of light the telescope receives. From the light, astronomers can then determine how big and how hot the stars are. It’s like knowing how big the candle is, and therefore how bright it would be if it were two feet away, instead of 100 yards away. Knowing how bright the stars actually are, and comparing with how bright they appear, astronomers can calculate a distance.

It took scientists 10 years to do this measurement of M33. Stanek says it was a tedious and time-consuming project, requiring some of the world’s largest telescopes and continually improving technology.

Accurate distance measurements are important because they tell astronomers how big the Hubble constant is. The Hubble constant is a number that astronomers use to determine the size and the age of the universe.

The fact that M33 is 15% farther away than previously thought could mean the universe is 15% larger and 15% older than previously thought. But Stanek won’t jump to conclusions.

“It could actually mean that the universe is 15% bigger, but I would not bet my money on this right now,” he says.

Currently, astronomers believe the universe to be about 14 billion years old. The recent findings, which have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, show that M33 is about 18 million trillion miles away.

It’s called the Buckeye Speech Corpus – a collection of interviews with 40 Columbus residents on everyday topics, like sports, politics, and schools. OSU scientists recorded their speech, and carefully transcribed every sound, syllable, cough, and laugh. After several years of transcribing, they’ve created a database that’s the largest of its kind, with 40 hours of sound and nearly 307,000 words. In March of this year, they released half the database for use by anyone who studies speech and language.

OSU Psychology Professor Mark Pitt is one of the leaders of the project. He says this work is important because it helps people understand the fundamental human property of language.

“Language – how you and I communicate right now – language is an inherent property of being a social creature, and humans are super-social creatures,” says Pitt.

OSU postdoctoral researcher Laura Dilley also helped lead the project. She says spoken communication is a lot more complex and subtle than people realize.

“What most people miss on a daily basis is that that process is far from trivial,” Dilley says. “The fact that we’re able to vibrate molecules in the air and on the receiving end pick those vibrations up as spoken language which we can subsequently understand is amazing. And we’re interested in helping to further the effort of scientists around the world in understanding that process.”

Dilley says people often take liberties in pronunciation, leading many variations in how people talk.

These variations in speech sometimes appear to be quite significant – yet, for the most part, people understand what they’re saying to each other. Pitt and Dilley study how people interpret spoken language. They’re interested in what Pitt calls “acoustic cues” that help the listener understand what’s being said. A listener can usually understand a spoken sentence in its entirety even if it’s spoken quickly. But if the listener only hears a word or two without the rest of the sentence, it’s almost impossible to understand.

Here’s an excerpt of a woman talking from the database: “They have ways of wording those things that you have to read it very carefully to know whether to say yes or no “

The woman slurs the words “carefully to know” so much it comes across as gibberish. But with the whole sentence, the listener can interpret those words, even though isolated, it’s incomprehensible.

Pitt says one major application of the corpus – which is Latin for a body of work – is in developing computers that understand human speech. Cell phones may understand single words like “home,” but full sentences are another story. Because people slur words and talk with different accents, it’s difficult for computers to really know what people are talking about. ut learning how spoken language works will allow scientists to eventually program computers to understand human speech.

Pitt says one of the strengths of this database is it’s available to researchers from around the world in a variety of fields.

He says, “this is valuable for research across multiple disciplines, in psychology, computer science, speech and hearing sciences, and of course linguistics.”

OSU Professor of Linguistics Beth Hume is also affiliated with this project. She uses the corpus to learn what factors influence certain pronunciations of words like butter. Hume wants to know whether things like preceding vowels make people replace a “t” with a “d” and say “budder,” instead of “butter.” But she says this is more than just a neat exercise.

“We’re looking at language to give us a window into human cognition,” she says.

So far, the researchers have received many requests to use the corpus. In some cases, people have requested to use it in unexpected areas. One such person is an English Professor at OSU, David Herman. Herman’s a part of Project Narrative. The project promotes research in what’s called narrative theory – the study of what distinguishes a story from a mere collection of words.

Using scientific tools, he wants to search the database for clues that reveal the nature of storytelling. Herman says narrative research is a great way to build bridges between the arts and sciences.

“I think actually just the existence of the corpus, the fact that I’m in the English Department and came across it and connect with somebody in Psychology in itself the corpus has the potential to create these kinds of bridges and connections. So, I’m pleased to have access to it,” he says.

Scientists say they’ll officially release the second half of the Buckeye Speech Corpus in September.

Marcus Woo, WOSU news.

That was the song of a white-crowned sparrow. The trained ear would also know the song was of a certain dialect, from near Bandon, OR, about 100 miles from the California border. OSU biology professor Douglas Nelson has such a trained ear. He studies songs of white-crowned sparrows. He’s found that, unlike other birds or noise-making animals like frogs, song birds learn their songs over time.

“What makes it interesting to us is that birds learn their songs, so there’s some similarities in that respect to how humans develop their own speech,” Nelson says.

He says this might be the only animal model scientists have for this type of speech learning. The research may have implications for neurobiology.

“There’s a lot of interest from neurobiologists in the brain mechanisms involved in this learning process so that’s a very active area of research and a lot of important discoveries have come out from the bird song research,” says Nelson.

Bird songs have dialects the same way human languages do. Tiny differences in song accumulate over time and become distinct dialects. Two white-crowned sparrows less than 70 miles apart may have different dialects.

Nelson says the white-crowned sparrow is possibly the most well-researched bird. He says the sparrow, which is native to the Pacific Northwest, provides a textbook example of song-learning. The researchers have already found that white-crowned sparrows can distinguish dialects. From playing back song recordings for the birds, they discovered that the sparrows respond more strongly to their own dialects.

A particular dialect is characterized by how a song ends.

“It appears that the main difference between these dialects up and down the Pacific Northwest coast is in the ending of the songs, what we call the trill,” Nelson says.

Nelson says it’s fairly easy for the human ear to identify dialects. One of the dialects of white-crowned sparrows from Puget Sound in Washington has a slower trill. A second, neighboring dialect has a faster trill.

Nelson and a post-doctoral researcher, Angelika Poesel, have just returned from this season’s field work in Oregon. They’re trying to find just what kind of effects dialects may have on behavior. From March through June, they slept in tents along the Pacific Coast where the sparrows live. They recorded songs, noted behaviors, and took blood samples. They’re in their second year of a four-year study to determine how dialects influence territorial and mating behavior of males.

So we’re interested in whether these dialects or whether having a song that’s similar to what your neighbor is singing whether that’s important to males both in defending territory with other males, and also in the context possibly of mate choice.

Nelson says nearly all songbirds have dialects. But the white-crowned sparrow is easier to study because it only has one type of song. Other songbirds, like the cardinals that are native to Ohio, have six to ten song types.

Nelson is also the Director of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics at OSU. The laboratory has a sound database not only of birds, but also insects, frogs, and toads. They have over 30,000 recordings of over 1400 different animals for scientific and public use.

On the north side of Kinnear Road in Ohio State University’s West Campus, there are wasp traps. Behind some brush, scattered on the ground are about twenty yellow pans, filled with water and dead bugs.

“So here we have the yellow pan traps out in the field, and uh, the bugs are attracted to the color and fly into the water, and there’s a little bit of liquid detergent in the water to break the surface tension, so once the bugs fly in, they can’t get back out,” says Creighton Freeman.

Creighton Freeman is curator for the Charles A. Triplehorn Insect Collection at OSU, and one of his jobs is to check the wasp traps every week. In addition to the yellow pans, there’s also a small mesh tent, called a malaise trap. It collects flying insects and funnels them into a bottle of ethanol, making a sort of soup.

“Yeah, that’s what we call it actually, bug soup,” Freeman says.

OSU Entomology Professor Norman Johnson is the Director of the Insect Collection. He’s an expert on wasps, and leads the effort to collect and document wasps from around the world. In particular, he studies parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in other insects’ eggs. Once the larva hatch inside the host egg, it starts to eat its way out. It emerges as a new adult wasp ready to mate and lay eggs. Other parasitic wasps lay their eggs in the bodies of other insects. Johnson likens it to science-fiction movies like Aliens.

“Just change the scale from this huge alien that’s living inside a human body to insect size – that’s what we’re talking about,” says Johnson.

As pest control, parasitic wasps eliminate reliance on chemicals. In Ohio backyards, they help control populations of horseflies and moths. Johnson says wasps are important in agriculture, forestry, and controlling disease-carrying insects. California uses wasps to protect citrus fruits from insects.

“Control of those pests has been a multi-billion dollar benefit to agriculture in California especially in the citrus industry. It’s one of the shining cases of success,” Johnson says.

Johnson says identifying wasps allows people to use the appropriate specie for specific pests. No one really knows how many wasp species there are, but the number is ever-growing. Johnson says there are over 115,000 known species in the world, and at least thousands of them are in Ohio alone. He’s put the growing database of wasps online for scientists and the public.

“We want to disseminate that information over the internet, so that people all over the world can get free access – well, free access to learn about the plants and animals that live in their own backyard,” Johnson says.

The insect collection at OSU has about 25,000 wasp specimens, half of which are from Ohio. There are nearly four million total specimens in the entire collection, which is one of the country’s largest for a university.

Freeman and Johnson’s students collect wasps year-round from around campus. Right now, Kinnear Road is the only site. Using a net to scoop up the bugs, Freeman puts the specimens in a bag. He stores the insects in freezers back in the lab, which is just across the street. There, the bugs await documentation and mounting. But first, he refills the traps with dishwashing liquid and fresh water.

“So I just put in a couple of drops with the eye-dropper and top the pan off with some water ” he says. He’ll come back the following week to check on the traps again. But for now, he’s done and heads back to the lab.

In the 1960s and 70s, a huge growth of blue-green algae invaded the Great Lakes. The green muck accumulated on shorelines, damaged water quality and kept swimmers away. The cause of those algal blooms was an abundance of phosphorous. Phosphorous is an essential nutrient for algae, which comes from agricultural run-off and laundry detergents. Government regulations in the 70s then limited the amount of phosphorous, and the algae receded.

Now, the algae appear to be back. Ohio State University Biology Professor David Culver studies blue-green algae. He says although the current amount of algae is only half of what it was 40 years ago, its sudden abundance is worrisome.

“Because there’s a lot less phosphorous coming in from the watershed, we’re surprised to see as much and as frequent algal blooms as we have now. And so we’re concerned, and that’s why there’s the fuss,” Culver says.

Culver suspects the arrival of non-native species of mussels might be causing the blooms. In the 1980s, the zebra mussel and its cousin, the quagga mussel, made their way into the Great Lakes. The mussels secrete nutrients that encourage algae growth.

Blue-green algae are actually bacteria, called cyanobacteria, and pose a serious problem.

“Number one, the cyanobacteria in general are not good food for the zooplankton, so they don’t contribute to the food-web that raises up to fish and thus to humans. And number two, many of the cyanobacteria produce toxins,” says Culver.

Currently, the most common toxin produced is called microcystin. It damages the liver and can cause rashes when in contact with skin. In 1996, 52 people died from microcystin in Brazil. They were kidney patients undergoing dialysis with contaminated water.

Partly because it’s shallow and warm, Lake Erie has experienced especially significant algal blooms. Lake Erie also supplies drinking water for Toledo, Cleveland, and much of northern Ohio. OSU Environmental Engineering Professor Hal Walker works on developing technology to treat algae. He says if nothing’s done to monitor and treat the algae, the toxin can easily make its way into tap water. Algal blooms are a huge issue because they occur everywhere there is surface water, which accounts for about half of the general population’s drinking water.

But, technology is available to solve the problem – one of which is activated carbon. Large carbon particles stick to the toxin, and then are filtered out. Most cities use this method. While agreeing it’s a problem, Walker doesn’t think algal blooms are a real crisis.

“No I don’t think it will be a big crisis, but it’ll cost money. With drinking water there are always sort of two issues: one, is technologyt available? And two, can it be implemented in a cost-effective way,” Walker says.

Still, Walker says continuing research is necessary to understand the effects of and treatments for algal toxins.

Perhaps the most significant impact is ecological and economical.

Algae can settle in cold water deep below the surface where it’s dark. Without sunlight, it can’t undergo photosynthesis and replenish the oxygen supply. The result is regions in the lake where there’s little to no oxygen. Scientists have dubbed these regions dead zones.

These dead zones harm the ecology of the lake, and in particular, dead zones destroy fish habitats. Culver says the loss of fish habitats hurts sport fishing, one of Lake Erie’s major industries.

“It’s been shown that there’s a multi-million dollar impact of sport fishing on the people living around the lake, because it’s such a good fishing lake,” says Culver.

Columbus and surrounding areas get their drinking water from nearby reservoirs. Rod Dunn is Supervisor of Water Quality Research at the Water Quality Assurance Lab of Columbus. Dunn says although there are algal blooms in central Ohio reservoirs, toxins like microcystin are not a problem.

“Different times of the year we see blooms, but usually it’s not the kind that produce algal toxins, and those just occur in real low numbers,” he says.

Dunn says the primary problem in Columbus from algae is taste and odor, but that can be treated.

Last month, the Michigan Environmental Council issued a report on the harmful impacts of algal blooms in the Great Lakes. The report also cited phosphorous from fertilizer and dishwasher detergents as reasons for algal blooms.

An atom consists of a nucleus surrounded by a bunch of electrons. When the atom is heated, electrons become more energetic and occupy higher energy levels. It may sound complicated, but electrons are much like small children. Electrons at lower energy levels are napping children. Electrons at higher energy levels are hyperactive children.

More energetic electrons will tend to fall to a lower energy level – even the most hyper child will eventually calm down. But in order for the child to calm down, the child first releases a lot of energy by running around and making a lot of noise. Likewise, an electron can only fall to a lower energy level by releasing energy. And it does so in the form of light.

Each chemical used in fireworks displays has a unique set of energy levels. The unique set of energy levels means electrons must release different amounts of energy, corresponding to different frequencies. And different frequencies of light are just different colors.

Ohio State University Professor of Physics Frank De Lucia helps run the fireworks show in Worthington. He says heating materials at different temperatures results in different colors.

“Depending on how hot you get the material, you excite different energy levels and so you at some level can tune the color you get out by determining how hot you get these different elements,” says De Lucia.

De Lucia’s show starts at around 10 PM on Tuesday.

On Ohio State University’s campus, there’s a giant freezer, kept at minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. The freezer contains several racks. They hold rows of silver canisters about three feet long and four inches in diameter. Inside the canisters is glacial ice from the tops of mountains.

Professor of Geological Sciences Lonnie Thompson uses the ice to study global climate change.

In this week’s issue of the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Thompson and his team published a paper compiling 30 years of ice studies.

They’ve drilled for ice from mountains in the tropics, having gone to places like the Himalayas, Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and the mountains of Peru.

This week’s paper argues the evidence from ice around the world paints a consistent picture of rising global temperatures and abrupt, dramatic impacts. Thompson hopes that this paper will provide a global story on climate change for policy-makers.

“What they want to see is the big picture, the composite of what’s happening globally. And to me, that’s what this paper does. And it does it for a part of the world where we have very few records, and certainly none with the time resolution that the ice core provides,” Thompson said.

The ice cores record everything from temperatures and greenhouse gases to other forces that affect climate, like volcanic eruptions. The paper highlights annual records that go back 400 years, and other records that go back as far as 2000 years. Thompson says that some ice cores can trace back 650,000 years.

He says these records consistently indicate the last 50 years show a warming trend unique to the Earth’s climate history.

Perhaps the most dramatic indicator of global warming is the melting of the ice itself. Melting ice in Peru has uncovered perfectly preserved plants dating back 5000 years. This means that the temperatures there are now the warmest they’ve been in those 5000 years. Thompson believes the glaciers on Mt. Kilimanjaro will disappear within 10 years.

The scientists say that what is even more important is the fact that records show precipitation to be at around average levels. This discredits the argument that less snowfall is the cause of retreating glaciers. University of California Berkeley Professor, John Harte, is a leading expert on climate change. Earlier this week, he gave a public lecture at OSU entitled Why The Skeptics Are Wrong.

Harte studies how ecosystems interact with changes in climate. For the past 16 years, he’s been doing an experiment in a high-altitude meadow in Colorado. Using electric heaters, he gently warms patches of land by just a few degrees. This simulates conditions that would exist in 50 years, when carbon dioxide concentrations would’ve doubled.

“What we’re finding is that in fact these warmer ecosystems do release greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide,” said Harte.

He says this release of carbon dioxide will further warm the earth, exacerbating the problem. This is an example of a positive feedback, where warming causes even more warming.

But, there is a small minority of scientists who dispute the dangers of positive feedbacks and global warming. One doubting scientist is Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Lindzen. Although he agrees with the basic facts of global warming, he does not believe it’s a cause for alarm. Lindzen warns against merely citing consensus as a reason for the dangers of climate change. He also says the Earth is more stable than climate models predict.

“So far we’re finding that nature is better designed than the models. That in the models, whatever CO2 does, the main greenhouse gases, which are water vapor and clouds, act to make it much, much worse. As you know, I mean, any well designed piece of equipment has negative feedbacks that try and resist change,” Lindzen said. Harte, on the other hand, counters every relevant paper published in a refereed scientific journal show positive feedbacks are by far the dominating factor. Along with the majority of scientists, Harte believes global warming is a serious problem.

“Science of global warming is really firm, convincing, sound, and while there are remaining uncertainties, the major criticisms by scientific skeptics that the science is shoddy just don’t stand up to scrutiny,” said Harte.

More than 150 people listened to Harte’s public lecture. He carried the optimistic message that solutions to global warming are feasible.

OSU Geology Professor Ellen Mosley-Thompson is Thompson’s partner in studying ice cores and climate change. She’s wary of stressing doomsday scenarios for global warming. But, like most scientists, she believes immediate action is critical.

“The sooner we delay, then either the greater the action we’ll have to take, or the greater the likelihood of even worse consequences,” Mosley-Thompson said.

Last week, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report supporting an earlier study from 1998 that the Earth is the hottest it has been for the last 400 years.

Ohioans generally don’t have to worry too much about earthquakes. But recently, earthquakes have become almost commonplace in northeastern Ohio. Of the 10 earthquakes in Ohio this year, nine of them happened around the same general region around Lake Erie. The most recent quake occurred Tuesday about 40 miles east of Cleveland. It was centered in Lake Erie, just three miles from the village of North Perry. It was a minor quake that did not result in any reported damage.

The earth shook at around four o’clock.

“There definitely was a rumbling that scared me,” said Perry, OH florist Sharon Redlin. She was napping in her home.

“I was laying on the couch almost snoozing, and I actually felt movement, and it was kind of a loud rumbling sound was what I heard.”

At first, Redlin thought it might’ve been the noise of nearby construction work.

It’s still unknown what this recent increase in seismic activity may mean. The Ohio Seismic Network monitors seismic activity throughout the state. Network Coordinator Michael Hansen says there’s a sense of complacency in Ohio about earthquakes because they are relatively rare. Big, damaging quakes in the Midwest may be separated by decades, centuries, or even thousands of years. But Hansen also notes there have been about 200 earthquakes in Ohio since 1776, when people first began recording them.

Only within the past few years have scientists begun to really learn about Ohio’s subterranean rumblings.

“This is the first time we’ve had state-wide monitoring of earthquakes and we’re not only recording more earthquakes, but we’re really beginning to learn a great deal about what is beneath us,” Hansen says.

The first seismic monitor was installed in 1999, when funding first became available to monitor state-wide activity. With each earthquake, scientists can map fault lines that run through the state. They cannot predict when an earthquake might occur. But Hansen says once they collect more data about fault lines, they might be able to predict how big an earthquake could be.

Still, Ohioans won’t have to worry as much as people who live in places like the west coast, where there are frequent and severe earthquakes.

Places with a lot of seismic activity are where separate tectonic plates meet. Tectonic plates make up the Earth’s surface, and when they move and rub against each other, they cause earthquakes. The boundary of the tectonic plates forms a deep cut into the Earth’s surface. Hansen says these sorts of deep geological cuts once existed in Ohio about a billion years ago. Now, all that remains are scars. And it’s these ancient scars that are the current cause of seismic activity in Ohio.

“These are ancient features that are buried deep beneath us. Limestone and shale and so on cover these things over. But these are zones of weakness, and as the Atlantic ocean gets wider along the mid-Atlantic ridge, it’s pushing the North American continent westward so those stresses are accumulating in the continent and they’re relieved along these ancient zones of weakness,” Hansen says.

He says the accumulating stress can cause slippage of the rocks, leading to earthquakes. Although we probably don’t need to worry about a massive earthquake in the near future, we don’t know anything for sure. “There probably is a low probability of a damaging earthquake in the state, but it certainly isn’t a zero probability,” says Hansen.

The largest earthquake recorded in Ohio occurred in 1937 near the western Ohio town of Anna. It had a magnitude of 5.4, damaging chimneys, and cracking walls and foundations.