Global Study Puts Scholar in the Thick of It

During a trip to China funded by the National Science Foundation last year to study global warming, Yiyi Wong found herself immersed in the raw material she had come to analyze – literally.

"There's a yellow haze in the atmosphere in Beijing," she says. "I was there for three months and there were only two days when I actually saw blue sky."

The haze is made up of dust, smoke, soot and other particulates. Some of it comes from natural sources, like volcanoes and forest fires, but most is the result of human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels in vehicles and factories. As Wong discovered, it's everywhere. 

"You breathe it all day, and then you go home and blow your nose and it's just this black gunk," she says.

Yiyi Wong returns to China in the fall to continue her climate research as a Fulbright Scholar.

Wong, a graduate student in marine science at North Carolina State University, was recently awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to continue her research in China. She heads to Shanghai this fall to work on a global aerosol project in collaboration with students and faculty at East China Normal University.

The purpose of the project is to determine whether the air pollution that's so prevalent in cities like Beijing and Shanghai may actually have a positive impact on global warming because of the way the pollutants interact with marine and coastal waters.

Scientists theorize that carbon molecules in the air may get coated with dust and other particles in heavily polluted areas before settling on the water in lakes, ponds, deltas and oceans, where they are consumed by tiny organisms, like phytoplankton. These hard, coated compounds may not be easily absorbed by the organisms and so may be discharged as waste. If the theory is correct, the carbon compounds sink to the bottom, where they are trapped and where they are harmless to the environment.

"Right now everybody has these lovely models that they've created, but your model is only as good as the numbers you import into it," Wong says. "There's no consensus on it because there hasn't been enough work done on it yet."

Wong is a graduate student at NC State University.

The Fulbright Scholarship program awards grants to thousands of American students, teachers, professionals, and scholars to study, teach, lecture, and conduct research in more than 155 countries. Wong's $19,000 scholarship will fund her research for 10 months. During that time, she'll collect and analyze water samples from the Yangtze River delta and other water sources. In the end, she hopes to have a better understanding of how much carbon is absorbed by marine organisms and how much is passed through their systems and trapped underwater.

For Wong, the scholarship also gives her a chance to connect with her Chinese heritage. Both her parents were born and raised in Shanghai and immigrated to the United States in the 1960s.

"When I was younger, they tried to teach me about China but I wasn't really interested," she says. "Now that I'm older, I care."

During her research trip to China last year, Wong visited her mother's ancestral home, a large estate in Ningbo now owned by the government.

"It was like a palace," she says. "When I saw it, I thought, this is really nice. I wish I lived here."

Ironically, her father's childhood home was demolished to make way for a shopping center catering to tourists. 

Links:

• Fellowship Advising at NC State

• Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences