HONG YANG, a professor of science and technology and vice president for international affairs at Bryant University, was recently elected as a 2019 fellow of the Geological Society of America. The society works to advance geoscience research and discovery, service to society, stewardship of Earth and the geosciences profession.
You, along with fellow professor Qin Leng, recently received a $471,370 award from the National Science Foundation to look into climate change. What is the focus of your investigation and what do you hope to better understand about how the climate is altering? As geobiologists, we have been looking into the interaction between environment and organisms, specifically past climate change and ancient plants. … This NSF project is focused on short-term CO2 emission by volcanic activities related to the Columbia River Basalt in the Pacific Northwest around 16 million years ago and its impact on the ecosystem. The project is highly relevant to our understanding of the climate scenario that we will likely encounter in the near future: how long the current anthropogenic CO2 will likely be consumed through natural process, how short-term CO2 changes influence temperature change and what are the long-term consequences.
What do you feel are significant contributors affecting climate change? While several factors have been proposed to drive the natural cycles of climate change, there is little doubt that it is the rapid accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, [particularly] CO2, generated through the consumption of fossil fuels in the past couple of centuries that contributes to the unprecedented rate of global temperature increase that we are currently experiencing. This year, the atmospheric CO2 has its concentration reaching to the record high of 415 ppm [parts per million], the highest ever recorded throughout the entire period of human history.
What do you feel can be done to limit the impact of climate change for the future? The rate of current global climate change poses an urgent threat to the peace and prosperity of human society as we know it. Thus, it demands the world’s most eminent thinkers, including scientists, technologists and industrialists, to come up with ideas and feasible solutions not only to reduce current carbon emission and capture the increasing carbon in the atmosphere, but also to securely store them and economically utilize them to benefit the human society.
What is your favorite thing about working with and training young scientists? As an educator, I always feel privileged to work with young minds to pursue interesting scientific questions together. Whether they are students, visiting scholars, or research collaborators, an enjoyable thing for me is going through the “science journey” with them: to explore the frontiers of science.