Popular Media Science Reporting and Science Research Articles: Exploring the Relationship

1. Wording used in popular science articles:

•   The University of Colorado executed a research about…
•  The WWF reported significant statistics about…
•  The results of the experiment executed by SalvaNATURA’s scientists revealed that…
•  Hundreds of fires are burning across Central America according to NASA satellite images

2. Find a popular magazine, web site, or newspaper article

Amazon Rain Forest, Last of the Amazon

Scott Wallace, 2007. Amazon Rain Forest, Last of the Amazon. National Geographic. [Internet]. Available from: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/01/amazon-rain-forest/wallace-text

3. Find a popular article related to you country’s ecology

Forest fires burn in Central America

The article is about the fires in several countries in Central America such as Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Farmers implement fires in the dry season to prepare the land for agriculture the next season. But these fires are likely to get out of control and expand to other properties including adjacent forested areas. Fires are one cause of deforestation and loss of biodiversity. The UN points out that Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador present the highest deforestation rates in the region, losing 1.26 percent of forest annually from 1990 to 2005. A remarkable example in this article refers about a fire that burned a section of Tikal National Park in Guatemala in 2006. Many other Maya Biosphere Reserves in Guatemala have been affected by fires.  I am interested in this article because I have seen examples of fires near my community. In El Picacho Mountain, every dry season farmers start fires to prepare the land for the next season, but this fires end up out of control burning hectares of forest and grassland that can last for several days. I realized that this is a regional environmental issue that threatens the forests and biodiversity of the neotropics.

Source:

Rhett A. Butler, April 10 2006. Forest fires burn in Central America. Mongabay.com [Internet]. Available from: http://news.mongabay.com/2006/0410-central_america.html

4. Find a peered reviewed article of a similar topic than the popular article to your country’s ecology

Did the Ilopango TBJ Eruption Cause the AD 536 Event?

This article explains the evidence that the eruption of the volcano Ilopango TBJ (a caldera lake located in El Salvador) caused a significant decrease in the temperatures in the northern hemisphere in AD 536. A dust veil covered the Earth surface and caused a drop in temperatures during the summer in the northern hemisphere and affected crops in China and the Mediterranean. The scientist Robert Dull from the University of Texas traveled to El Salvador to find the geological evidence by drilling tephra samples (ash layers underground) and a carbonized tree trunk. These samples were tested with Radiocarbon dating to estimate the age of the eruption. The result of the experiment found that the eruption of the Ilopango volcano was in AD 535 but the sample of the carbonized trunk “cannot be unequivocally associated with the 536 AD event.” The conclusion of the research remarks that “the eruption alone probably cannot explain the entire +14 year cold period observed in the northern hemisphere tree rings record from AD 536, but it seem now the best candidate for the cause of the AD 536 mystery cloud and a major contributor to the cold temperatures that followed.

Source:

Robert Dull, 2012. Did the Ilopango TBJ Eruption Cause the AD 536 Event? University of Texas, Austin. [Internet]. Available from: http://www.fundar.org.sv/referencias/dull_et_al_2010_AGU.pdf