Solar eclipse 2017: Scientists in Oregon to study 'breath of the land'

CORVALLIS, Ore. — A team of scientists and students from around the world are preparing to measure the “breath” of the land faster than anyone has before from a windswept pasture dotted with cow droppings several miles south of town.

Led by Oregon State University associate professor Chad Higgins, the team has set up 16 positions, each with between two and 10 instruments, over a space larger than two football fields.

During totality of Monday’s solar eclipse, the instruments will measure what Higgins calls the “breath of the land”  — carbon dioxide levels, water vapor, energy and momentum and more.

They want to see how quickly the land itself — including soil, plants and microbes — responds to the darkness, and they had to invent the way to do so.

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“We asked the question, how fast can all this change during an eclipse, and then we had to find a technical solution,” Higgins said.

Usually when these forces are studied, it's done in 30-minute increments, which is too slow to capture the short change during eclipse totality.

But the instruments themselves measure about 20 times per second; the reason the calculations are averaged over 30 minutes is to account for variables.

The solution was to measure the changes over space as well as time, thus the synchronized, large, spread-out array, which should allow the scientists to study changes in sub-minute intervals and still account for variations.

But there are some variables completely out of the team’s control, namely cloud cover and wind direction.

Based on studying the field for a year, Higgins said the wind usually blows north to south, so they’ve set up their tents and parked cars to the south of the instruments so their presence doesn’t upset the devices.

But if the wind starts blowing from another direction, they will have to scramble to move everything before the eclipse starts.

As far as clouds, there isn’t much they can do.

“If it’s a cloudy day, everything is shot. Just like that,” Higgins said.

But what happens then?

“We’ll have a few glasses, and then we’ll pack it up and move on.”

Steve Drake, a consultant and recent PhD graduate from OSU, had a similar laid-back attitude toward the prospect of failure with this experiment.

“It’s OK. It doesn’t have to work," Drake said. "That’s what science is. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

If it doesn’t work, the team will have to wait for the next total solar eclipse to make another attempt. The rapid change brought on by a total solar eclipse — “like the sun going down, but almost immediately,” as Drake put it — is unique, so the data that can be gathered from the phenomenon is also unique.

But it’s not just the science that convinced more than a dozen individuals from as far away as Sweden and Iraq to volunteer for the project

Seeing a solar eclipse totality was a big draw, too.

“I think anyone who says they’re doing it just for the science is lying to you,” said post-doctoral researcher Derek Jensen.

Follow Connor Radnovich on Twitter: @CDRadnovich