Terrascope group tackles tough issues, treks to Amazon

Michael Fettiplace '06 and colleagues explored the Amazon rain forest starting from the research station at the Impa Tropical Forest Fragmentation Research Center, Brazil. (Photo: Helen McCreery)

Helen McCreery found her ecological niche in the Amazon.

Museum exhibits
        Bras's class, Earth Systems Engineering and Science, was offered for the first time in the spring '03 term. It was intended to create more depth on the yearly topic with a hands-on engineering team experience, in which the students conceptualized, made a preliminary design and final design, then built the project.
        After much brainstorming, the students divided into teams to choose a particular theme to illustrate something they had learned in the first term about the Amazon. Topics included comparing Boston and Manaus, and what lives in the different levels of the forest canopy. They then developed an appropriate museum exhibit aimed at an audience on the level of a junior or senior in high school.
        To get some idea about what constitutes a good museum exhibit, the class met with designers from the New England Aquarium, the Boston Museum of Science, the Worcester Ecotarium, the Franklin Park Zoo and the Children's Museum. The students critiqued the museum exhibits, and sat down with the designers to ask questions. "They learned about the process and about the subject matter. There were some lectures, but largely they did the research on their own," says Bras.
        Of the various criteria for the exhibit, the most important was that it had to be the right level for the target high school viewer. Knowledge had to be presented at different levels of difficulty, and each exhibit needed an interactive element. The students' prototype of the interactive component was tested in the Museum of Science with a real audience, allowing the students to see how people actually reacted and whether the prototypes conveyed the desired idea. "It was fascinating. At the end of the term the groups had built seven extraordinary exhibits, some very ambitious," says Bras.
        To show how researchers might examine a section of Amazon forest, one group constructed a science station from wooden beams, adding realism with a hammock and instruments for specific tasks. "Within that context, they explained some science issues that they were interested in. When you stood inside, it felt as if research was really going on. For the interactive part, students provided soil samples to test for salinity. Depending on where you stuck a measurement probe into the soil, a gauge would show whether the soil was salinized or not. The answer led to a picture which predicted the health of the ecosystems within that level of salinity." The most attractive interactive element in the science station turned out to be the hammock. "Whether you were a kid or an adult, you could lie on the hammock under the mosquito net," notes Bras.
        After students completed their exhibits, they were judged by faculty and by museum experts from all over the region, largely through connections of co teacher Ari Epstein. In his multidisciplinary career, he has assembled and led a number of exhibit-development teams at the New England Aquarium which involved scientists, designers, educators and others.
The projects were displayed either in the open areas of Parsons Lab, or in the Terrascope Room in Bldg. 16. "They transformed the room. As you walked in, you entered the Amazon at Night, where it was completely dark," describes Bras. "The web of life was their interactive display. By pressing buttons, you could eliminate a layer of animals such as snakes, trees, or large cats, and see how it affects the other layers. The lights go off for the group which has been annihilated, and ultimately when you eliminate the whole forest, the whole display goes dark."
        Two full-sized huts housed the Indigenous People exhibit. Inside, visitors could explore several interactive activities, including a computer with an Indian legend narrated by one of the students, questions on the computer, and a place to sit on the floor and experience a religious ritual of initiation.
        "I had more fun in that class designing museum exhibits, mostly because I like working with my hands," recalls McCreery. "Also, it didn't seem like such a daunting task because we were only responsible for our own small group. I didn't really know anything about how museum exhibits go up, so I learned. "My group compared Boston with Manaus, a major city in the rainforest with almost two million people. It was really fun working on how we could present concepts such as food, music, language, and odors. There was a lot of problem solving and a lot of effort, but it was ultimately rewarding."
        Interactive activities for the city comparison included a game to match simple phrases in English with the translation in Brazilian Portuguese. If the correct phrases were touched, a light would shine. Another popular activity was based on scents. "Every morning here, most people drink orange juice. But in Manaus they have passionfruit juice and other juices that I couldn't even identify. We had orange smell and passionfruit smell for people to try to guess, and then they could open a cupboard see a picture to find out if they were right. Some people got the orange right away, but nobody recognized the passionfruit.
        "Boston and Manaus are completely different in some ways, and in some ways they're really similar," assesses McCreery. "Manaus felt like a city; it's crowded with massive marketplaces, and there is a lot of poverty. Like Boston, the city contains many nationalities. The climate obviously is different and affected many phases of life. As is the case with any two cities, people behave differently. All public schools there have uniforms. There's one university, as opposed to the crazy number around Boston. The food was amazing: fried bananas, chicken dishes, and many fruits which we don't have up here."

Projects needed continual modifications and group problem solving. These students built a model tropical research station complete with hammock, mosquito nets, and experimental equipment. (Photo: Ari Epstein)

The Amazon trip itself
        As part of the Terrascope experience, and especially for getting some personal experience for designing the museum exhibit, the whole class traveled to the Amazon during spring vacation in March. The party consisted of 40 freshmen, 5 upperclass tutors, a graduate student, Profs. Kip Hodges, Ari Epstein, Bras, and Bras' wife Patricia. Students had already made a preliminary design of their interactive museum display, but after they returned, "they changed everything completely in the week before the project was due," says Bras.
        Getting to the Amazon required more than 24 hours of travel, recounts McCreery, "but it was worth it. We drove to New York, flew south to Saõ Paolo, flew north to Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, and rode a boat about three hours upstream on the Rio Negro to the hotel. When we got off the boat at the hotel, we were exhausted. Immediately a brilliantly colorful parrot flew three feet over my head and almost hit me. It was so amazing, it made me realize, 'Wow, I'm here!' That made me really excited and happy."
        Perched on stilts in the forest canopy, the various parts of the hotel were connected by long covered walkways. "At night it's fascinating. In the forest it's surprising how few animals you see, because they hide and the trees are high. It's not easy to find birds in the canopy. But in the hotel we saw lots of wildlife from the walkways. Some of the monkeys were friendly and some weren't. At other times we saw caimans, alligators, birds, macaws. In the middle of the night when it's pitch dark, you go on the walkways and the sounds are mind boggling," recalls Bras.
        While half of the group explored from the hotel, the other half settled at the Impa Tropical Forest Fragmentation Research Center in the jungle for three days and two nights. "That experience was great. There was just a tin shed and hammocks side by side, close enough so that if you turn over at night, you hit the person next to you," says Bras. "It was truly an unforgettable experience for everyone. I've studied the Amazon for 15 years, and it changes your perspective as you go to different parts. There are vines all over the forest. We saw monkeys and at night we heard the howler monkeys roar like lions. We saw evidence of jaguar having been nearby, but we never saw one."
        With the combination of industrial-strength insect repellant, mosquito net around their cots, and an unusually dry stretch at the beginning of the wet season, the group found the insect population under control. Earlier in the semester students had listened to precautions in the rain forest "to make sure they didn't do something stupid," says Bras. "They were very good, although there were a few incidents where people were careless. Somebody fell asleep in a hammock without insect repellant, and when he woke up, he was completely swollen. However, because of the drought, there were fewer mosquitoes than in my yard in Lexington, MA."
        For McCreery, the highlight of the trip was unquestionably the research center. "It was another long trip, driving for hours in jeeps along dirt roads. It was really secluded. Since we slept in hammocks outside with mosquito netting, and there were only shelters with no walls, we were completely exposed to the whole rainforest. Just hearing the sounds at night was exciting. The camp was set up like a grid with stakes along the paths that gave the coordinates, making it hard to get lost. We took many hikes in big groups, but we could also go off in smaller groups," with the advantage of being quieter and stopping more frequently to poke around. "A large group is fine for some things, but you can't really keep it quiet and observe everything."
        Despite leaving at 5 AM every day for excursions, McCreery never felt tired "because it was so exhilarating. Coming back to the hotel after the research camp was anticlimactic. When we had first arrived, the hotel had been amazing, but it seemed sort of touristy after the research camp." She responded similarly to Manaus, which offered the usual attractions of a large foreign city, along with visits to an Indian native village, and a tribal village. "It's interesting to see their way of life. But being in the Amazon really made me decide to do environmental engineering. At the research camp, I just didn't want to ever leave."
Among the new and amazing sights for McCreery were brilliant blue, shiny butterflies which glinted in the sunlight and were visible from improbably long distances. At night, phosphorescent fungi glowed along the paths and illuminated their way in the intense tropical darkness. "One night we went out and caught bats in a huge wall of nets. We found a massive cockroach which was three or four inches long. While the big animals stayed hidden, we saw a toucan and some monkeys high up in the trees, and poisonous spiders." To her surprise, the rainforest turned out to be shades of green rather than filled with riotous color (aside from blue butterflies). "I was expecting the plants to be really colorful, but mostly it was just a very thick mass of green. One of the only plants that was something other than shades of green had dark red flowers with long, triangular petals on a vertical plane, and tiny white buds in the middle.
        "From far away and just for a split second, we saw pink dolphins in the Amazon. For some reason I was convinced that piranha were tiny, but we fished for them and I found that they're about 6 inches (15 cm). One of the employees from the hotel dove in the river and caught a baby caiman, about 3 ft (0.9 m) long. We all got to hold it and feel how smooth its skin is, like snakeskin. At a fish museum we saw 10-ft (3 m) long fish swimming around in a massive aquarium. There were just so many things I had never imagined before, and so many species which don't exist up here.
        "The trees were so tall that the roots have a buttress system for support. The base of the trunk separates into projections like branches which grow into the soil. Some trees didn't even have a solid trunk, just many little projections spreading out and digging into the soil. At one clearing we could see the wall of trees, and when most of the group was on the other side of the watering hole, we could barely spot the people because the trees were so tall. It looked like a mountain with trees on it, but it was solid trees. It was dark because the trees shut out most of the light."

Not everything in CEE is done at the touch of a computer button: Catherine Yao and Joey Miler work on a model of how the tawny Solimoes River and dark Rio Negro meet to form the Amazon. The two very distinct bodies of water run side by side for about 10 km before mixing. (Photo: Ari Epstein)

        One of the more striking sights was the confluence of the Rio Negro and what becomes the Amazon when the tributaries join. The two broad rivers begin as completely different colored waters, "one very dark like good tea, and the other filled with yellow sediment, and they retain their characteristic color for about 10 km (6.2 miles), flowing side by side without really mixing," says Bras. "Gazing across the dark Rio Negro from a distance, the yellow tributary looks just like a sand beach rather than another river. We were all just staring at it. It was so counter-intuitive that it was ridiculous!" recalls McCreery. Students were so impressed that they devoted one of their group museum exhibits to this phenomenon.
        Over the year, the students bond through group work, small Terrascope classes, and hanging out in the attractive common room with its kitchen and computer cluster. While some upperclass activities are being planned, such as a Scholars program and a UROP (undergraduate research project), students have also taken their own initiatives. Two students carried out a UROP on the concept of forest-friendly beef, to be marketed at a premium such as organic food. A group of mostly Terrascope alumni is designing a more sustainable and environmentally sustainable refugee camp, which McCreery describes as having sprung from Terrascope. "Our advisor is Prof. Franz-Josef Ulm, but the group is from all different majors. Right now we're mostly doing research to grasp what the problem really is, and it's a huge problem.
        "Before the Amazon trip, I was having a good time with the class, but Terrascope didn't feel like a cohesive group," noticed McCreery. "During the trip, everyone bonded. Even though we broke up into two groups on the trip, and you really bonded with your group, there was still a common experience. Since it was more cohesive after the trip, we wound up accomplishing more. We were more efficient because we worked together better in large groups."
        For a complete change of climate, this year's Terrascope freshmen are working as a team to design the most environmentally correct strategy for oil exploration and extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Then they will perform a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate whether the oil which might be extracted is worth the environmental damage that might result. In March 2004, they will travel to Alaska to see what they have been describing for half a year.
        "This project-oriented program makes the most out of that refreshing innocence of the freshmen. Their minds are open and they're willing to try anything. They may take their time committing, but what they do, they do completely," says Bras.

web links:

http://web.mit.edu/terrascope/www/
everything about terrascope, from admission to last year's jungle expedition

http://web.mit.edu/terrascope/www/web_pages/photo-album-amazon.html shows the students exploring, meeting a bat and a caiman, and being amazed by the rainforest