The Smithsonian Center for Short-Lived Phenomena: Spreading the Word: Right Now!

Abstract

When the Mt. Arenal volcano in Costa Rica erupted in a swath of death and destruction in the summer of 1968, government officials a mere 100 miles away in San Jose had suLch difficulty getting reports from the scene that they sent a radio message to Cambridge, Mass., to keep in touch with the disaster. Jammed local phone lines during the Los Angeles earthquake of Feb. 9, 1971, prompted a radio station there to call across the country to Cambridge to find out what was going on. A newspaper clipping mailed to Cambridge about the underwater eruption in late 1967 of Metis Shoal in the South Pacific which had raged for five weeks, observed only by airline pilots and passengers flying overhead despite its formation of a four-mile-long island of lava, promptly resulted in a scientist being rerouted to the site, two divers to collect submerged rock samples and a commercial airliner rerouted overhead every day for three. weeks to take pictuLres. Despite the numerous universities and other instituLtions in the CambridgeBoston area, it is obviously not the world's only focus of scientific expertise. What it does have, however, is the hub of a unique science communications network called the Smithsonian Institution Center for Short-Lived Phenomena. Rapid communications can make the difference between success and failure to many scientific observations. The aluminum 26 often present in fallen meteorites, for example, is such a fastdecaying isotope that a few days' delay in recovery can result in an almost worthless rock for laboratory analysis. The center's job is quite simply to collect reports of such time-critical happenings and relay them in a hurry to people who might want or need to know about them. The center's quick responses-and growing reputation for them, which attracts prompt alerts in the first place-have resulted in the recovery of at least 15 fresh-fallen meteorites. At the time of Metis Shoal's eruption, the center was not even officially open. It had been conceived four years before by a group of scientists headed by Sidney Galler, then the Smithsonian Institution's assistant secretary for science, who were concerned that the excellent scientific coverage of the birth of the volcanic island of Surtsey might have suLffered greatly had it not been near Iceland-an easy journey for researchers from both America and Eutrope. The Smithsonian was a natural parent for suLch a facility, since it already had 13 separate bureaus conducting international activities. Its Astrophysical Observatory was an obvious location because of its elaborate global communications network, and on Jan. 2, 1968, the center began official operations under the direction of Robert Citron, former manager of an SAO tracking station in Africa. Its facilities at the time, other than those shared with the observatory: one secretary and two phone lines. Today it has a fuLll-time staff of seven, two part-timers, an annual budget of about $150,000, and, when operating synergistically with the observatory, an awesome communications system including a two-way radio station (KCW2l ), seven teletype circuits, nine phone lines and the ulse of the Defense Department's Autovon and Autodin systems for reaching U.S. Government installations anywhere in the world. Citron's eyes light uip like a McLuhanesque communications addict as he shows how, without leaving his desk. he can punch up a six-way, multi-national conference call at a moment's notice. More than 3,000 observers, most of them scientists, in almost 150 countries are on the center's list of official cor-