ESEACH HIGHLIGHTS

JANUAY2022
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OUR SHARED FUTURE: RESEARCH HIGLIGHTS

The following stories highlight Smithsonian research that has helped to shape and champion our 

strategic pan-Institutional initiatives including Life on a Sustainable Planet and Solving the Mysteries 

of the Universe. These highlights also show the collaborative nature of the Institution’s research, not 

only across Smithsonian units but in connection with leading research, art, and cultural organizations 

as well as government partners.

FACING CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH ART

The Yale Program on Climate Change 

Communication shows that most American 

adults think global warming is happening (72%), 

but far fewer believe that global warming will 

harm them personally (43%) and fewer yet 

(35%) engage in discussions about global 

warming even occasionally. Perhaps art can 

help?

Presented by the Asia Society and the Helen 

Frankenthaler Foundation, with support from

the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Frankenthaler Climate Art Awards aim to foster 

climate change awareness through the imagination and insights of an upcoming generation of visual 

artists.

The Frankenthaler Climate Change Awards is searching for eligible applicants and collectives to submit 

video artworks (e.g. digital video art, animation, film) or videos about visual artworks (e.g. 

documentation of 2D or 3D artworks, such as sculptures, photos, paintings, installation, or 

performance works) that tackle the climate change emergency.

A shortlist of finalists will be announced in February 2022 and their videos displayed online. Three 

winners will be selected by a jury of leaders from collaborating institutions across the District of 

Columbia and New York, including: Melissa Chiu, Director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture 

Garden; Molly Donovan, Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art; Dorothy Kosinski, 

Vrandenburg Director and CEO of The Phillips Collection; and Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe, Vice 

President for Global Artistic Programs at Asia Society and Director of the Asia Society Museum.

Each winner will receive $15,000 and will be honored in April 2022 at the John F. Kennedy Center for 

the Performing Arts on the occasion of the Asia Society’s COAL + ICE exhibition (March 15-April 22).
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LIVING ON A PRIVATE ISLAND ... OF TRASH

Coastal plants and animals have found a 

new way to survive in the open ocean—by 

colonizing plastic pollution. A new 

commentary published Dec. 2 in Nature 

Communications reports coastal species 

growing on trash hundreds of miles out to 

sea in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, 

more commonly known as the “Great Pacific 

Garbage Patch.”

“The issues of plastic go beyond just 

ingestion and entanglement,” said Linsey 

Haram, lead author of the article and former 

postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian 

Environmental Research Center (“SERC”). 

“It’s creating opportunities for coastal 

species’ biogeography to greatly expand beyond what we 

previously thought was possible.”

Gyres of ocean plastic form when surface currents drive plastic 

pollution from the coasts into regions where rotating currents 

trap the floating objects, which accumulate over time. The 

world has at least five plastic-infested gyres, or “garbage 

patches.” The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, between 

California and Hawai’i, holds the most floating plastic, with an estimated 79,000 metric tons of plastic 

floating in a region over 610,000 square miles.

The authors call these communities neopelagic. “Neo” means new, and “pelagic” refers to the open 

ocean, as opposed to the coast. Scientists first began suspecting coastal species could use plastic to 

survive in the open ocean for long periods after the 2011 Japanese tsunami, when they discovered 

that nearly 300 species had rafted all the way across the Pacific on tsunami debris over the course of 

several years. But until now, confirmed sightings of coastal species on plastic directly in the open ocean 

were rare.

For this discovery, Haram teamed up with Ocean Voyages Institute, a nonprofit that collects plastic 

pollution on sailing expeditions. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ocean Voyages 

Institute team collected a record-breaking 103 tons of plastics and other debris from the North Pacific 

Subtropical Gyre. They shared some of those samples with SERC’s Marine Invasions Lab. There, Haram 

analyzed the species that had colonized them. She found many coastal species—including anemones, 

hydroids, and shrimp-like amphipods—not only surviving, but thriving, on marine plastic.

For marine scientists, the very existence of this “new open ocean” community is a paradigm shift. “The 

open ocean has not been habitable for coastal organisms until now,” said SERC senior scientist Greg 

Ruiz, who heads the Marine Invasions Lab. “Partly because of habitat limitation—there wasn’t plastic 

there in the past—and partly, we thought, because it was a food desert.”

Anika Albrecht of Ocean Voyages 

Institute, on a 2020 expedition 

collecting plastic in the North 

Pacific Subtropical Gyre, where 

she served as Chief Mate. (Photo 

courtesy of Ocean Voyages 

Institute 2020 Gyre Expedition)
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The new discovery shows that both ideas do not always hold true. Plastic is providing the habitat. And 

somehow, coastal rafters are finding food. Ruiz said scientists are still speculating exactly how—

whether they drift into existing hot spots of productivity in the gyre, or because the plastic itself acts 

like a reef attracting more food sources.

Now, scientists have another shift to wrestle with: How these coastal rafters could shake up the 

environment. The open ocean has plenty of its own native species, which also colonize floating debris. 

The arrival of new coastal neighbors could disrupt ocean ecosystems that have remained undisturbed 

for millennia.
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TONGA VOLCANO: EIGHT MINUTES SEND RIPPLES OF WORLDWIDE EFFECTS

On January 14, 2022, a very 

large eruption on Hunga Tonga–Hunga 

Haʻapai, an uninhabited volcanic island of 

the Tongan archipelago in the South 

Pacific Ocean, began. Hunga Tonga is 

65 km (40 mi) north of Tongatapu, the 

country's main island. The volcanic 

eruption continued throughout the day 

with satellite imagery indicating a 5km 

wide plume of ash, steam, and gas rising 

into the air 20km above the volcano. The 

eruption was one of the biggest in Tonga 

in the past 30 years. During the initial 

eight minutes, it was so violent it could 

be heard as "loud thunder sounds" in Fiji, more than 

800km away. The eruption caused tsunamis in Tonga, 

Fiji, American Samoa, Vanuatu, and along the rim of the 

Pacific Ocean, including damaging tsunamis in New 

Zealand, Japan, the United States, the Russian Far East, 

Chile, and Peru.

Scientists are trying to better understand the global effects of the eruption. They already know the 

answer to one crucial question: Although it appeared to be the largest eruption in the world in three 

decades, the explosion of the Hunga volcano will very likely not have a temporary cooling effect on the 

global climate, as some past enormous eruptions have.

Scientists are racing to understand a puzzling series of massive ripples in Earth’s atmosphere triggered 

by the eruption of the Tongan volcano. Satellite data shows that the event provoked an unusual 

pattern of atmospheric gravity waves. Previous volcanic eruptions have not produced such a signal, 

leaving experts stumped. The discovery was made in images collected by the Atmospheric Infrared 

Sounder (“AIRS”), mounted on NASA’s Aqua satellite, in the hours after the eruption. They show 

dozens of concentric circles, each representing a fast-moving wave in the gases of the atmosphere, 

stretching for more than 16,000 km. The waves reached from the ocean surface to the ionosphere, and 

researchers think that they probably passed around the globe several times.

The Global Volcanism Program at the National Museum of Natural History took to Twitter 

(@SmithsonianGVP) to provide context, historical information, and educational opportunities about 

impacts from previous volcanic activity. The Global Volcanism Program (“GVP”) is the hub of an 

international network for monitoring, reporting, and maintaining data related to volcanic activity 

around the world. GVP plays a leadership role in global volcano information—tracking events as they 

happen, building the database of critical information, and using these resources both for our own 

forefront research projects and for answering questions about volcanology from other scientists, the 

media, and the public. The large and growing database contains the geographic, historic, and 

volcanological characteristics of nearly 3,000 active volcanoes from around the world. Monthly reports 

concerning on-going eruptive activity are published in the Global Volcanism Network Bulletin. GVP 

works in close collaboration with non-SI scientists and organizations concerned with volcano hazards, 

airline safety, geothermal energy, and global climate change (USGS, DOE, NASA, NOAA, and FAA).

Maxar satellite imagery of homes and 

buildings in Tonga before the volcanic 

eruption and tsunami (left) and after, 

coated in ash (right). SATELLITE IMAGE 

(C) 2022 MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES
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ANTS HEAL WOUNDED TREES

Cue Carole King: When you're down 

and troubled, and you need some lovin' 

care ...

It seems trees have a friend in ants.

Ants have been seen healing wounded 

trees in Panama—behavior that is 

believed to have never been observed 

before.

One afternoon, during the early days 

of the COVID-19 pandemic in Panama, 

a bored teenager with a slingshot and

a clay ball accidentally shot entry and 

exit holes in a Cecropia tree trunk. 

These are “ant-plant” trees, which famously cooperate with 

fierce Azteca ants; the trees provide shelter and food to the ants, and 

in exchange the ants defend their leaves against herbivores. The next 

morning, to his surprise, the Azteca alfari ants living within 

the Cecropia trunk had patched up the wound.

This unexpected occurrence drove five curious high school students, 

with time on their hands, to participate in the Smithsonian Tropical 

Research Institute’s (“STRI”) volunteer program, and they enlisted 

STRI scientist William T. Wcislo’s help in devising their experiment. 

Despite significant movement restrictions during the first wave of the pandemic, they roamed their 

neighborhood drilling holes into Cecropia trees and documenting the ants’ responses to the damage.

They found that as soon as the plants had holes drilled into them, the ants ran to the wound area and 

began patching it up. Within 2.5 hours, the size of the hole had been significantly reduced and it was 

often completely repaired within 24 hours.

Details of this newly discovered behavior were published in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research. 

Azteca alfari ants and Cecropia trees are known to have a symbiotic relationship, with the ants using 

the trees as their homes.

Their experiment also left them with new questions, since not all of the ant colonies repaired the 

damage to their host plants. Understanding what factors influence the ants to take action could be the 

subject of future research for these budding scientists, although perhaps to be addressed after 

graduating from high school.

During the pandemic, five 

curious high school 

students accidentally 

discovered how Azteca 

alfari ants respond to 

damage to their Cecropia 

host trees. Credit: Donna 

Conlon.
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STARS BORN IN A BUBBLE 

Are stars born in a bubble? This isn’t a 

celebrity gossip story, but rather a 

compelling new origins discovery.

Astronomers from the Center for 

Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

(“CfA”) and the Space Telescope 

Science Institute (“STScI”) 

reconstructed the evolutionary history 

of Earth’s galactic neighborhood, 

showing how a chain of events 

beginning 14 million years ago led to 

the creation of a vast bubble that is 

responsible for the formation of all the 

young stars nearby. Their research was 

published January 12 in Nature.

Using a trove of new data and data science techniques including 3D spacetime animation, the scientists 

showed how a series of supernovae that first went off 14 million years ago pushed interstellar gas 

outwards, creating a bubble-like structure with a surface that’s ripe for star formation. The oddly 

shaped bubble is not dormant and continues to slowly grow.

“This is an incredible detective story, driven by both data and theory,” said Harvard professor and 

Center for Astrophysics astronomer Alyssa Goodman, a study co-author and founder of glue, data 

visualization software that enabled the discovery. “We can piece together the history of star formation 

around us using a wide variety of independent clues: supernova models, stellar motions, and exquisite 

new 3D maps of the material surrounding the Local Bubble.”

Next, the team, including co-author and Harvard doctoral student Michael Foley, plans to map out 

more interstellar bubbles to get a full 3D view of their locations, shapes, and sizes. Charting out 

bubbles, and their relationship to each other, will ultimately allow astronomers to understand the role 

played by dying stars in giving birth to new ones, and in the structure and evolution of galaxies like the 

Milky Way.

The articles, analyzed data (on the Harvard Dataverse) and interactive figures and videos are all freely 

available to everyone through a dedicated website.

Artist's illustration of the Local Bubble with star 

formation occurring on the bubble's surface. Credit: Leah 

Hustak (STScI)