On this West Virginia Week, we hit the ground running with stories about the no confidence vote at WVU, flooding clean-up and a hearing that Public Service Commission.
On this West Virginia Week, we hit the ground running with stories about the no confidence vote at WVU, flooding clean-up and a hearing that Public Service Commission. We’ve also shared stories about Olympic volleyball and supernovas and two more installments from our workforce series.
News Director Eric Douglas is our host this week.
West Virginia Week is a web-only podcast that explores the week’s biggest news in the Mountain State. It’s produced with help from Bill Lynch, Briana Heaney, Caroline MacGregor, Chris Schultz, Curtis Tate, Emily Rice, Eric Douglas, Liz McCormick, and Randy Yohe.
Loren Anderson, a professor at the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, is studying the remnants of supernovas to better “understand the properties and dynamics of our galaxy.”
Their lifecycle is in millions of years, but stars in the Milky Way grow, produce heat and light and then they die. Some burn out in a spectacular supernova.
Loren Anderson, a professor at the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, is studying the remnants of those explosions to better “understand the properties and dynamics of our galaxy.”
News Director Eric Douglas, an admitted science and astronomy geek himself, sat down with Anderson to learn more.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: What is a supernova?
Anderson: So stars create energy, the process we know as fusion, where hydrogen atoms are combined into helium atoms, that’s the primary way. However, that process uses up the hydrogen in the stars. And eventually the stars run out. And at the end of their lifetimes, they kind of go on a frantic search for new ways to generate energy. But eventually those methods run out. And what happens is, during fusion, they kind of blow up, you know, the pressure from the generation of energy makes the star that’s present size. And then without that pressure, they collapse inwards and that collapse creates a rebound that leads to a supernova.
Loren Anderson, professor, astronomy, WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.
Credit/West Virginia University
Douglas: So they literally explode, implode, and then explode bigger again.
Anderson: Without that initial explosion, what you said is correct. It’s generating energy, it’s stable. It’s producing the heat and the light that we need, but it’s going to run out and skip some of the very fast evolutionary steps, then it goes. Our sun will go through a different evolutionary path, however, so it’s only the most massive stars that do that explosion.
Douglas: An interesting thing I saw in the description of your research is that we know of about 300 or 400 of these supernovas that have happened. But, statistically, there should be about 1000 of them.
Anderson: Those numbers are only for our own galaxy — within the Milky Way. The supernova remnants, which after the explosion, there’s still some embers glowing, and we call those glowing embers, supernova remnants, but they only last a pretty short amount of time.
A supernova will go off and then it will relatively quickly become undetectable. That’s what leads to the relatively low numbers. They’re kind of hard to find. The fact that there’s many multiples more that should be discoverable, comes from studies of other galaxies, and comes from studying the population of stars that are in our galaxy that should explode to produce these things.
Douglas: Roughly speaking, we know there are X number of stars in our galaxy, compared to a similar-sized galaxy.
Anderson: That’s right. And just to be 100 percent clear, that’s not my research, that number comes from other people. That’s one method that is the strongest evidence for the number, but many people propose different methods and all of them arrive at the same answer that we’ve only found a fraction of what’s out there.
Douglas: Why is that important?
Anderson: It’s important just for understanding the type of galaxy that we live in. And so by mapping out all of these, we can learn about the massive star history of our galaxy over the last tens of thousands of years. We can put our galaxy in context of other galaxies in the universe. And also, there are a lot of interesting physics, none of which I do, but there’s a lot of interesting physics, of studying individual supernova remnants and understanding how that explosion progresses in time, and its interaction with the environment, all of that sort of stuff. Each one that we find is a new little laboratory for study.
Douglas: What’s the process for finding these remnant supernovas?
Anderson: It is surprisingly low tech. Essentially what I do is I bring up an image of a field of the galaxy, so a little part of the sky. And the data that I’m using for that are from the MEERkat telescope in South Africa, which is a 64 telescope array where all 64 telescopes work together to observe a patch of sky. It’s exceedingly powerful. We look at a little patch of the sky. And on that patch of the sky, we identify all the objects that are known to exist. And then I look for things that have a characteristic morphology of a supernova remnant, that are not known to exist yet.
No fancy algorithms. It’s just me and a computer monitor.
The lower two of these shell-like features are supernova remnants, with SNR G1.0-0.1 on the left and SNR G0.9+0.1 on the right. The uppermost shell is the Sagittarius D HII region, a site of recent star formation. SNR G0.9+0.1 has a pulsar wind nebula at its center, showing a tangled complex of radio emission. Polar outflows from this nebula appear to be distorting the shell of the supernova, particularly towards the north.
Credit/South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO)
Douglas: Just to be clear, MEERkat is a radio telescope. How does it translate into a visual format? I’m not sure how that works.
Anderson: Oh, right. So your standard radio telescope, like the Green Bank Telescope, takes an observation of one location at a time. If you want to make an image, like the pretty images from Hubble or JWST (James Webb Space Telescope), you have to move the telescope to make an observation at each pixel. But an array of telescopes like Meerkat or like the Very Large Array in New Mexico, you can get something just like what Hubble gets. What I’m working with are complete images of little patches of the sky.
Douglas: How long does it take to go through one of these files?
Anderson: The full search, this particular data set that I was working with, covers more than 100 square degrees. And the full search took me probably on the order of four months, fairly dedicated work. That’s not to say that going through one time would not take much time, but there’s a lot of checks afterwards to make sure that something wasn’t discovered yet.
And what I try to do is do the search, and then wait a little while and then do the search again to make sure that what I’m finding is actually able to be repeated. That’s one thing that is not a strength of the eye method in that it’s very dependent on my brain, which is not the same as your brain or anyone else’s. And so what I find could be different from what another researcher finds. Repeatability is important in science and so I do what I can to maximize repeatability.
Douglas: How many galaxies are there? Do we know a rough estimate of how many galaxies there are?
Anderson: We have very rough estimates and it’s certainly more than 100 billion.
Douglas: One hundred billion galaxies? How many stars like ours are in the Milky Way?
Anderson: It’s all kind of nonsense. These are numbers that we don’t deal with in our daily lives. So the Milky Way has about 200 billion stars.
Douglas: Wow!
Anderson: So that’s two times 10 to the 11th. So a 2, followed by 11 zeroes. And I said, there’s at least 100 billion other galaxies. The Milky Way is a little bigger than average. I’d still say conservatively, there’s probably a 1 followed by 22 zeros other stars out there.
Douglas: Yeah, those aren’t numbers that we deal with?
Anderson: No, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I can repeat them to you because I do them academically, but there’s not a lot of context behind that.
It’s something like there’s more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches in the earth, something like that. You could look up the exact quote but it’s a phenomenal number.
Douglas:. What haven’t we talked about?
Anderson: Well, there’s two other parts. So the second half of the research, we’re going to be doing some machine learning. I have a collaborator in South Africa, and she’s going to take the objects that I’ve identified, and use that as – what’s called a training set, basically train the computer to look for similar objects.
It turns out that humans are really, really good at pattern recognition. And this is something that computers are not as good at as they are at other aspects of artificial intelligence. So she has an algorithm that she would like to try this machine learning on. And so we’ll use what I find as a training set to try to classify these objects, and hopefully find new ones. That part of the research is the most exploratory.
Douglas: And you’re also doing some STEM training too.
Anderson: We have this outreach program called SPOT. And in SPOT, the program ambassadors — so college undergraduates give science lectures to the public and to high school students, as a way of training the ambassadors in public speaking and in science communication, and also in engaging the next generation of scientists.
My other collaborator on this project, Catherine Williamson, will be developing a new SPOT module focused on supernova remnants. This will be a talk that the ambassadors can give to their audiences on supernova remnants.
West Virginia University has released the recommendations of its academic program review process. They include the discontinuation of several degree programs, as well as the complete dissolution of the World Languages Department.
West Virginia University (WVU) has released the recommendations of its academic program review process. They include the discontinuation of several degree programs, as well as the complete dissolution of the World Languages Department.
The recommendations from the university’s provost come as part of a restructuring in response to an estimated $45 million budget shortfall for fiscal year 2024. The individual recommendation notifications can be viewed on the provost’s website.
World Languages is the only department under review recommended for full dissolution. Other programs, such as Applied Human Sciences’ School of Education or the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Public Administration program may lose specific degrees.
In a press release, WVU said 32 of the 338 majors offered on the Morgantown campus have been recommended for discontinuation; 12 undergraduate majors and 20 graduate-level majors affecting more than 400 students.
The preliminary recommendations also included faculty reductions, totaling 169 faculty positions.
“While we view these preliminary recommendations for reductions and discontinuations as necessary, we are keenly aware of the people they will affect,” President Gordon Gee said in the press release. “We do not take that lightly. These faculty are our colleagues, our neighbors and our friends. These decisions are difficult to make.”
Gee is further quoted as saying the Board of Governors charged university administrators to focus on what will best serve the needs of our students and the state.
“Students have choices, and if we aim to improve our enrollment numbers and recruit students to our university, we must have the programs and majors that are most relevant to their needs and the future needs of industry,” he said.
The recommendation to shutter World Languages cites a national decline in enrollment and student demand.
Lisa DiBartolomeo, a teaching professor and supervisor of the Russian studies program, said language education is on the chopping block when it is most necessary.
“If we are allegedly equipping our students to go out into the world and not educating them in means of communication with people from other countries and other backgrounds, we are failing them as a university and we’re failing them as a society,” she said. “The United States is already behind the rest of the world in terms of proficiency in a language other than their own language and this is going to exacerbate the problem for students in a state where foreign language education and cultural competency is already a challenge.”
DiBartolomeo said the recommendation has left faculty both in and outside of World Languages shocked.
“It is unthinkable that a university of our size and stature would cease to offer any language and culture programs whatsoever,” she said.
WVU said it is reviewing plans to eliminate the language requirement for all majors, citing similar decisions at universities like Johns Hopkins and George Washington. Recognizing that some students may still have an interest in languages, the university is considering alternative methods of delivery such as a partnership with an online language app or online partnership with a fellow Big 12 university.
DiBartolomeo expressed concern that ending the teaching of world languages at WVU will severely limit these and other opportunities for future students and contribute to the state’s brain drain.
“If you’re a rising senior in the state of West Virginia, and you’re looking at where you’re going to go to college, and you’re going to depend on the Promise scholarship to help you afford to go to college, you don’t have a lot of options if you’re staying in the state of West Virginia,” she said. “If WVU no longer teaches languages, that student has to choose between studying at a university that recognizes that global readiness and intercultural competence matters, or going out of state and going further into debt and being able to do the program that they want. If kids go out of state to college, they’re even less likely to stay in the state afterward.”
The decision comes after what Provost Maryanne Reed calls a holistic process “considering a variety of factors, including the potential for enrollment growth.”
But DiBartolomeo and others are questioning that process. The World Language Department’s own self-study – a part of the program review process – indicated that the department consistently generates a profit of more than $800,000 annually.
“Revenues exceeded our expenses,” DiBartolomeo said. “My department also really contributes deeply to the service mission of the university. We teach a lot of students. And I don’t think that the provost’s office and the administration are fully aware of the ramifications of closing the language program at a university like this.”
Scott Crichlow, associate professor of political science, said that the results of the program review show that the administration’s decisions are not based on educational needs.
“It’s solely based upon things like class sizes and student-teacher ratios, and that’s going to inevitably prioritize certain programs and deprioritize different programs,” he said. “They’re not about the norms of professions. They’re not about skills. They’re not about student needs. It’s just about following spreadsheet data.”
Crichlow and DiBartolomeo both said the announcements have been demoralizing for faculty across the university. Crichlow said although his program was not up for review and discontinuation in this round, he expects it will be soon.
“Part of the whole concern about this entire process is that the rule change that the administration rushed through doesn’t solely eliminate faculty protections and faculty stability for this one crisis here. The rule change makes it possible for all the years to come to make it much easier to fire faculty,” he said. “International Studies will presumably be part of a future round for elimination. If you’re gonna get rid of all of the world languages, I don’t see how you have an International Studies program going forward.”
Deans and faculty of all affected programs have until Aug. 18 to file an appeal.
Six years have passed since the 2016 flood in southern West Virginia that killed 23 people and ravaged communities like White Sulphur Springs and Rainelle. Despite that, researchers say the state does not have a long-term flood recovery plan.
Six years have passed since the 2016 flood in southern West Virginia that killed 23 people and ravaged communities like White Sulphur Springs and Rainelle. Despite that, researchers say the state does not have a long-term flood recovery plan.
Reporter Shepherd Snyder spoke with WVU researcher and assistant professor of geography Jamie Shinn on her project studying how residents of Greenbrier County recovered from the flood, and how the results could shape more effective flood responses both at the state and national levels in the future.
Snyder: Getting started, I was wondering if you could tell me about this research project and what the research process will look like.
Shinn: We’ll be focusing on two towns within Greenbrier County: Rainelle and White Sulphur Springs. And we’ll be engaging with community members through a variety of tools. So we’ll do a countywide survey that any resident over the age of 18 is welcome to take, we’ll do some more targeted focus groups with people who were involved in both the response and recovery to the flood as well as impacted by the flood. And then we’ll take some interviews with people at regional, state and national levels who were involved or represent organizations that were involved in flood response and recovery. And our goal in doing that is to answer three research questions.
We’re now several years out from the flood. And yet we know that communities are continuing to deal with the lingering impacts in the recovery process. What we’ve been told by people on the ground is that we have yet to systematically document the lessons learned from the flood, how response in recovery went, what went well, what could have gone better, so that we can better prepare for future floods. And we only need to look as far as Eastern Kentucky in recent months to know that these types of things are likely to happen again in the region. And so we have kind of three overarching goals with the stage one project. The first is to identify gaps in organizational capacity that we can fill to create a more robust flood response and long term recovery. So what do local first responders need to be equipped to respond as quickly and as effectively as possible? What do community and county level groups need? And what do national level groups need? How can we make sure that every group at every scale has the best capacity possible to respond? And then what is the cross-organizational capacity building and coordination that we can do between these groups?
So for instance, in the 2016 flood, we know that all sorts of actors responded, we had voluntary first responders, trained first responders, National Guard, FEMA, Red Cross but also a huge amount of volunteers coming in and faith based organizations. We have the Appalachian service project, we have the Mennonite disaster committee, who spent years in these communities helping to rebuild and respond. Our question is, is there a better way, we can in advance coordinate among these groups to make sure that our response and recovery is as effective and efficient as possible in the future?
The third question that we’re trying to answer is, what knowledge do people need that they don’t have access to, to best plan for these events? And so for that, we’re working with our partners at the West Virginia GIS Technical Center, which is a state organization that’s housed here at WVU, to do a participatory GIS mapping exercise, where these GIS experts are going to present and also build new flood risk tools. So these might look like flood risk maps, or 3D imaging of what a particular part of town will look like under different flood scenarios. We would bring these to the community focus groups and ask people to respond to them (with questions like): “Are they useful? Do they contain the information they need? Are they user friendly?” And then come back to the drawing board and re-create these tools with that feedback in mind.
So the stage two vision that we’ll propose to the National Science Foundation in the spring is to use whatever we learned in stage one through these different methods. So from the survey from the focus groups, from interviews, from the mapping, to build out what we’re calling the West Virginia Flood Resilience Framework. And the vision for the framework is that it will be an online toolkit accessible to anybody to use. This could be for residents, but it could also be for local government agencies, nonprofits or the state resilience office.
Snyder: Can you give me some context for why this project is needed? And why is it getting off the ground now?How are state and local communities currently responding to these types of disasters?
Shinn: I think it’s so place dependent. One thing we’re fairly cautious of in this project is that this will not be a one-solution-fits-all kind of thing. No county, no town is going to respond the same as another because of the particular context of that place. However, we also know that there are broad lessons that we hope we can apply right across the board. One of the reasons we’ve selected both Rainelle and White Sulphur Springs is because they’ve had really different experiences with flood recovery. Arguably, White Sulphur Springs has recovered at a faster and maybe more complete rate than Rainelle. And largely, we think that’s because White Sulphur Springs has a different socioeconomic context. The presence of the Greenbrier and longer term histories of engagement with the tourism economy has made it so that Rainelle was in a more vulnerable position before the flood than White Sulphur Springs was. And so our hypothesis is that that made it harder for Rainelle to recover.
Other work that I’ve done in Rainelle, one thing I’m hearing from people is that while flood recovery was ongoing since 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic came and further slowed that down. So one question that we’re asking is, how do these compounding disasters work together to keep people from making a full and complete recovery, whether that’s Rainelle or a town elsewhere?
Going back to your first part of your question, the project really grows out of some long term research that I’ve been doing in these two towns. I first started to do some research in both of these towns in 2017, just under a year after the flood. And what really struck me coming out of that research was, in many ways, these towns held some very stereotypical story about a vulnerable Appalachian place that we often hear about; vulnerable before the flood, high rates of unemployment, all of the things I think people think they know about this place. But what stood out to me was not that – though those are very real issues of vulnerability, what stood out to me were also the real sources of resilience that I saw in these communities. So the ways in which neighbors came together, through processes of mutual aid, from rescuing each other from their attic, to mucking out a neighbor’s home before they mucking out their own, to people pouring in from surrounding towns and counties to assist strangers, that these stories were born out of hardship, but were quite beautiful. And then also people’s sense of place – their deep ties to their community, and to the place in which they live, and the desire to rebuild these towns that they’re so attached to. And I think those represent real sources of resiliency that we don’t often talk about when we talk about these places.
And so one question I have is: can we leverage these sources of resiliency into our disaster planning? We know that neighbors are going to help each other, we know that people have a deep commitment to their communities and places despite the hardships, despite the vulnerabilities. And how can we craft a response that kind of honors and recognizes that about these places? That’s been a long term question of mine from working in this area since just after the flood, and something that I’ve seen kind of reappear as well throughout the pandemic and ways in which people have responded to that.
Snyder: You specialize in researching social vulnerability and climate change adaptation. How does that perspective affect this research project in particular?
Shinn: Well, we know from climate models that we expect West Virginia to get wetter, we know broadly that we expect more frequent intensity in precipitation events leading to flooding. And so while we hope there’s never a flood, like the one in 2016, we know that statistically, it’s very likely that there will be. So how can we plan ahead for that? How can we work under that reality?
One thing that the West Virginia GIS Technical Center is doing with this project is using those models to think through risk. So you may have been flooded in 2016 and you may have raised your home in accordance with FEMA regulations. And yet, is that enough to protect you from the flood scenarios that we’re seeing from the climate models that we have access to? And in some cases, the answer is yes. But in some cases, the answer is no. And so that’s exactly the type of knowledge we want to give to communities so that they can start to plan for the response to what we think is inevitable increased intensity and frequency of flooding as a result of climate change. And West Virginia is no stranger to flooding, right? This is not a new story. But we expect that this story will become more common in the future.
Snyder: What is the end goal of this project? What are you and your team hoping to achieve? And how do you think this could affect how we prepare for flooding, both in the state, as well as, you mentioned earlier, both local and even national communities in the future?
Shinn: I hope what it does is show us the resources we already have available and how to use them most effectively. And that it shows us the gaps that we need to fill to be able to respond holistically to long term flood response and recovery. And that isn’t just about what happens on the day of a flood or the months that follow the flood. It has to do with making communities more resilient in advance of the flood. One of our key partners on the ground is the metal River Valley Association. And they’re a group that arose out of the 2016 flood and the recovery efforts, but are really geared at building development, economic resiliency in these communities. Because we know that if a community has resiliency in advance of a natural disaster, whether it’s a flood, or a landslide, or a fire or whatever it might be, we know that their capacity to recover from that is higher. And so I think this project will give us very specific information about what the gaps are, and my hope is then that the tools we create out of this will help people to fill those gaps and think through how to do this. And again, in a way that can be very specific to towns and to the state of West Virginia, but I think we’ll have broad relevance as people start to think about disaster response across the country, regardless of what that disaster is.
