Researchers at Texas A&M University are reconstructing the ancient ship La Belle in an effort that has never been attempted at this scale.

The French ship was part of Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle’s plan to colonize Texas. La Salle gave up the expedition when the ship, one of four he used while exploring the territory, sank in present-day Matagorda Bay. This left Spain free to swoop in and claim Texas. More than 300 years old, the La Belle marks a missed opportunity in history.

The La Belle was first discovered in 1995, buried under 12 feet of water. Excavation work has taken place since: a dam was meticulously constructed around the ship, water was pumped out and workers from the Texas Historical Commission dug through six feet of mud to get to the bottom of the ship. But the reward was high: the 55-foot ship was almost completely intact and several artifacts like cannons, swords, trading beads and the skeleton of a crew member were discovered.

All are on their way to being carefully restored. The ship was disassembled and moved to Bryan Air Force Base in Texas, where a freeze-drying process removed all moisture from the discovered wood. Then, the wood was placed in a chemical solution in a Texas A&M lab, which preserved its solid shape and allowed researchers to make molds of the original wood.

Peter Fix, conservator at the school’s Center for Maritime Archaeology and Conservation, explained that the wood would break down without these steps, “If we were to take any piece of wood, say it’s been in the water for 300 years, and pull it out, it would shrink, crack, warp within a couple of days. The physical stress on wood would essentially cause it to fall apart and crumble and powder into pieces.”

He added, “It’s a slow, controlled process and depending on the thickness of material, over four to six or seven months, we know that timber has lost most of its bound water and it’s safe to bring out.”

When the ship is completely rebuilt, it will become the central attraction for the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas. Jim Bruseth, who led the excavation, said, “It’s just fantastic to see this project reach the point where we’ll actually be reassembling the ship as a permanent installation.”

Putting together the pieces of the ship’s remains will give historians a clue to how France envisioned the new world. The Texas Historical Commission hopes that the find will demonstrate methods of survival for explorers.

If successful, researchers will use the same process in restoring for a much longer medieval ship discovered in 2002 in Newport, South Wales.

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Later this month, the 100th anniversary of one of history’s most tragic events will occur – the sinking of the Titanic – and the question often asked is: Could such a disaster happen again? The answer is not only “yes,” but it has happened many times since and will almost certainly happen again, says a Texas A&M University oceanographer.

Mahlon “Chuck” Kennicutt II, professor of oceanography who has conducted marine research for 30 years, says the Titanic has captured the public’s attention as few ships have ever done. The largest ship afloat at the time, the RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg on her maiden voyage from England to New York City.

The ship carried more than 2,200 people – over 1,300 passengers and about 900 crew. The sinking resulted in the deaths of 1,517 people and is etched in the history books as one of the worst maritime disasters ever.

“We remember the Titanic because of so many odd things associated with it: the ship was called ‘unsinkable’ and it carried many notable people on board, not only were many lives lost but many lives could have been saved if there had been more lifeboats, it ran into an iceberg in the open ocean, it was on its maiden voyage, and on and on,” says Kennicutt.

“It has captured the public’s imagination for decades and spawned dozens of books and films. But many other maritime disasters have occurred since it sank, but they did not garner nearly the attention that theTitanic did.”

The recent capsizing of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia (which carried more than 4,200 passengers and crew) resulted in 30 deaths and has captured worldwide attention, but since the Titanic,there have been numerous other ship tragedies.

He notes that in 1987 in the Philippines, the passenger ferry Dona Paz collided with an oil tanker, igniting more than 8,000 barrels of petroleum products. More than 4,300 people died and later it was shown that the ferry had far exceeded its passenger and cargo limits.

In 2002, another ferry, the Le Joola capsized off the coast of Africa and killed more than 1,800, while in 2006 another ferry had mechanical trouble and coupled with high winds, sank in the Red Sea, killing more than 1,000 people. One highly publicized disaster occurred in 1994 when the cruise-ferry Estonia had faulty locks and it sank in the Baltic Sea, killing 852. There are dozens of other examples.

“The Titanic was the most technologically advanced ship at the time, with the latest in navigation and radio equipment. It even had its own newspaper,” Kennicutt says.

“But as so often the case, sometimes it’s just not enough, especially when humans are involved. There is no such thing as a 100 percent safe or ‘unsinkable’ ship as we learn time and again. The space shuttle, for example, was the most complex machine ever built, with 2.5 million moving parts, but suffered two catastrophic failures ending in tragedy,” pointing to the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia disasters.

Kennicutt says one reason there are bound to be future maritime disasters is the sheer number of ships in the water. It’s been estimated there are about four million commercial fishing vessels in the water at any given moment, not to mention the tens of thousands of military ships, oil tankers, cruise liners and pleasure craft.

“The Gulf of Mexico is a good example,” he points out.

“It has thousands of shrimp and fishing boats, recreational craft, commercial shipping lanes and don’t forget the nearly 4,000 oil and gas platforms that have supply ships constantly departing and arriving.

“The oceans have become a virtual interstate highway system multiplied many times over being critical to global commerce,” he adds. “With that many ships, accidents are bound to happen.

“Despite our best efforts and highly sophisticated technologies, human error is the one major unknown that is difficult to control as we tragically saw in the recent BP oil spill. No matter how advanced we make ships, they are still operated by people. Even highly trained and experienced ship captains make mistakes. As they say …’to err is human.’”

For more news about Texas A&M University, go to http://tamutimes.tamu.edu.

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To contradict Shakespeare, 2012 was not the winter of discontent — it may go down as the year without a winter at all in many parts of the country, and you can blame —  or praise — the jet stream, says a Texas A&M University climate expert.

John Nielsen-Gammon, professor atmospheric sciences who also serves as state climatologist, says upper level dynamics this year were unusual and the resulting change in the jet stream — a river of air that influences weather patterns — is the likely culprit.

“The jet stream follows a different average course each year, and the end results this time were warmer temperatures,” he explains.

“This is a La Nina year (when water temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean are lower than normal), but the atmosphere did not respond to La Nina in the normal way,” adds the Texas A&M professor who has studied weather patterns for years. Nielsen-Gammon points to another, less well-known factor, the North Atlantic Oscillation, as an important cause of the unusual weather.

“The jet stream in the North Atlantic often gets locked into either a southern route or a northern route,” Nielsen-Gammon explains. “The last two winters, it was the southern route. This year, it was the northern route, bringing the central and eastern United States warm air masses as the air traveled from south to north.”

One key question might be: Does this mean we should expect another warmer- than- normal summer?

“Not necessarily,” Nielsen-Gammon reports.

“Right now, the Climate Prediction Center’s outlooks show a tendency towards a warmer than usual summer across much of the United States, but a lot depends on the rain between now and then. More rain would mean cooler weather because the moisture keeps temperatures lower. We should know more about the summer outlook in the next few weeks. Certainly March has already had some very warm temperatures all over the country.”

Last week, more than 1,700 records were set for high temperatures from coast to coast, with many cities, such as Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C., posting readings almost 20 degrees above normal.

“The good news locally is that rains in central and eastern Texas have eased the drought situation considerably, and lakes and reservoirs and filling back up,” the Texas A&M researcher reports. “More and more of the state is getting out of extreme drought status. But there are still large parts of west and southTexas that are very dry.”

The bad news is that the warmer weather means many people are suffering from allergies sooner than ever because pollen from plants and trees is out sooner, and there is more of it, he adds. Also, the warmer weather could mean more insects in the weeks to come.

“But I think it’s worth all that just to get to experience the beauty of Texas wildflowers,” says Nielsen-Gammon.

For more news about Texas A&M University, go to http://tamutimes.tamu.edu.

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The 50-year-old herbicide atrazine, renowned for controlling weeds, is instrumental to conservation as well, according to a new study. University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Paul D. Mitchell, Ph.D., found the use of atrazine helps farmers reduce aggregate soil erosion by up to 85 million tons per year — enough to fill more than 3 million dump trucks.

Mitchell will present the findings of his paper, “Estimating soil erosion and fuel use changes and their monetary values with AGSIM: A case study for triazine herbicides,” Jan. 10, 2012, at the Wisconsin Crop Management Conference in Madison, Wisc.

The study’s other key findings include:

• Atrazine and sister triazine herbicides, simazine and propazine, benefit U.S. society by up to $350 million in soil erosion costs per year.

• By encouraging conservation tillage and no-till farming, atrazine and the other triazines reduce soil erosion, decrease fuel use and improve water quality.

• Increased farmer adoption of conservation tillage and related practices, made possible in part by popular herbicides such as atrazine, led to a 43-percent decrease in soil erosion from U.S. farmland over the past three decades.

• Because atrazine increases corn and sorghum yields, farmers use less land for crops. This allows as many as 875,000 acres to remain in the Conservation Reserve Program, where it generates environmental benefits for everyone, including wildlife habitat and reduced soil erosion.

Mitchell also will discuss a second paper he authored, “Economic assessment of the benefits of chloro-s-triazine herbicides to U.S. corn, sorghum, and sugar cane producers.” This study demonstrates that atrazine and chloro-s-triazines simazine and propazine benefit U.S. corn, sorghum and sugar cane farmers up to $3.3 billion in value annually.

“We are just beginning to understand the full environmental economic impact atrazine has on the agriculture industry and global food markets in this new agricultural economy,” said Mitchell. “Atrazine effectively controls weeds and significantly increases corn, sorghum, and sugar cane yields. But it also supports conservation tillage and no-till farming, which are critical to protecting the environment and providing food and clean water to our world’s population.”

Findings from the two studies show atrazine and its sister triazines generate a $4.4 billion consumer surplus annually. Combining the consumer surplus estimates with the soil erosion benefits, atrazine’s value to the U.S. economy totals up to $4.8 billion, with most of these benefits going directly to consumers.

Mitchell, an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, grew up on his family’s farm in Iowa and received his doctorate from Iowa State University. Before joining University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M University. His current research and outreach programs focus on the farm-level economics of crop production, emphasizing pest management, risk management and specialty crop economics.

Syngenta, the principal registrant for atrazine, provided resources and support for Mitchell’s research. His papers are part of a broad assessment by Syngenta to examine the value of atrazine in today’s agricultural economy. Other papers include:

• “A biological analysis of the use and benefits of chloro-s-triazine herbicides in U.S. corn and sorghum production,” David C. Bridges, Ph.D.

• “The importance of atrazine in the integrated management of herbicide-resistance weeds,” Micheal D. K. Owen, Ph.D.

• “Efficacy of best management practices for reducing runoff of chloro-s-triazine herbicides to surface water: A review,” Richard S. Fawcett, Ph.D.

For more information about atrazine, visit www.atrazine.com.

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