But now there might be a better way to put the piles in. Seattle-based Marine Construction Technologies, a spinoff of the University of Washington’s CoMotion startup program, says it has developed a much quieter pile-driving system that could help save aquatic animals’ hearing — and lives.

We landlubbers might not realize it, but noise pollution is a big problem in our oceans. In an environment where a lack of light means it’s hard to see, many marine animals primarily rely on hearing to navigate their world. But according to the new documentary “Sonic Sea,” human sounds below the surface — like the motor of a container ship or military sonar — have doubled every decade over the past 60 years in some areas, and as we create a louder background environment, life becomes increasingly hard for certain species, like our local orca whales.

“The persistence of noise in the aquatic environment is getting to the point that it’s actually interfering with the ability for species to communicate, to forage and to echolocate to find each other or prey sources,” says Julie Hampden, environmental director at Marine Construction Technologies.
While the noise created by piles isn’t as constant as other sources of pollution, it’s among the loudest and thus the most damaging. And the noise is more pervasive than you might think: A project like the ongoing Mukilteo Mulitmodal ferry terminal will use about 600 to 800 piles, each of which will take upwards of 5,000 strikes over several hours to install.

The associated hammering noise is ear piercing even on land, but because water is much denser than air, it doesn’t compress as much, so a sound wave doesn’t attenuate as quickly as it moves through. Meaning, the sound stays louder and travels for much farther under the sea. Each ping from the impact of hammering in a pile is as loud as 200 to 210 decibels. Marine mammals start showing behavioral changes (as in, they become irritated) at as low as 120 decibels. They can suffer permanent injury when the noise gets up to 180 decibels.

And it’s not just the hearing of marine mammals, fish, or diving birds that’s at stake. Think of sound as a pressure wave. As the pile is driven into the sediment, it vibrates back and forth. When the pile bulges against the surrounding water, it compresses those water molecules — but that’s an unstable situation, because there are too many atoms in the same space. So the molecules spread out to occupy the next space, and so on, resulting in the propagation of the high-pressure area through the water. Then, when the pile moves away from the surrounding water, it creates a vacuum of molecules right next to it, sending a low-pressure area through the water.

Eardrums interpret these pressure changes as sound, but the waves move through the rest of an animal’s body as well. “And if you happen to have any gas-filled organs — like lungs, like swimming bladders, like hearing mechanisms — it will compress and expand that organ as it moves through you,” Hampden explains. “You can literally implode those organs.”

There are other pile-driving technologies that help turn the volume down. The most commonly used is called a bubble curtain: a series of rings that goes around the pile that blow bubbles, which break up the pressure wave. The problem with bubble curtains, Hampden explains, is that they don’t consistently work well, especially in moving water or tidally influenced areas, because the water movement can carry the bubbles away from the pile. In addition, the bubbles would only protect noise that’s generated along the length of the pile in the water column, but a lot of the sound can originate in the sediment that the pile is being driven into (and the pressure wave can propagate out of the sediment back into the water). Bubble curtains typically only reduce pile-driving noise by three to 10 decibels.

Marine Construction Technologies’ design, called the “Reinhall Pile” after engineer and company co-founder Per Reinhall, uses two mechanisms to quiet the pile driving. First, the pile that is hammered is placed within another, larger pile. The gap of air between the two pipes provides a buffer that helps to attenuate the sound. Second, the two piles are connected by a special “shoe” at the base of the pile that contains a rubber feature that acts like a spring, buffering the sound in the sediment.
The company has now conducted two full-scale tests of the piles, the latest of which was in December 2015, and has found that the design reduces pile-driving noise by at least 10 to 20 decibels. That might not sound like a lot, but because decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale, that’s actually a difference of orders of magnitude. The technology can bring the noise down below the injury threshold even for animals close to the piles, and the total area of potential impact becomes much smaller.

This could also help developers comply with the sound regulations that are currently in place to protect our local endangered species: The state requires that biologists be on on scene to monitor the water for animals to make sure noise levels are under their damaging thresholds, set by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, when a pile is being driven in. If marbled murrelets are present, construction can only take place during limited hours so as not to interfere with the birds’ crepuscular foraging.

The Reinhall Piles do come with a higher price tag — just the shoe required for each pile would go for around $10,000 apiece. Which could be why they’re not already being used. “It’s a different technology in an environment where there hasn’t been a whole lot of innovation, so I think there’s some concern or perhaps skepticism over whether this technology is worth the additional costs,” Hampden says. But she notes that the Reinhold Piles could reduce the need for bubble curtains, which are expensive and laborious to deploy, and reduce the monitoring costs.
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Hampden says the only thing that’s keeping the Reinhall Piles out of the water is finding a buyer for them. “It’s been vetted, it’s been tested, it’s ready to go,” she says. “It’s just a matter of deploying them and using them.”

Forty-two years later, now in his early 70s, Fuller is still on the job, and is one of the few year-round residents of the park, which was established 44 years before the National Park Service came into existence in 1916. “One of my pet theories is that we are born to bond – to be imprinted – by a landscape,” Fuller explained. That first winter, Yellowstone certainly did imprint upon him; it became the place where he would raise his family, and the place he would make the focal point of his life’s work.

Today, Fuller oversees the maintenance staff at Canyon Village year-round. But when he first began working in the park, he had one primary duty: to clear the snow from the roofs of Canyon Village’s hundred or so summer cabins. Armed with a shovel and a seven-foot saw, he would cut through and push off as much as eight feet of snow that had accumulated into blocks, each one weighing several 100lbs. It was solitary, onerous labour.

“It was a chance to empty your mind… maybe tussle with a question or a problem,” Fuller recalled. “But mostly just to be alone, to be physical – you’re on a high roof, beneath a big sky, and the only company is ravens circling around calling to each other.”
By December, the snow in Yellowstone is so thick that you need skis or snowshoes to set foot outside. But that usually doesn’t keep Fuller. When his daughters were young (he and Angela had a second child in the middle of their second Yellowstone winter), the Fuller family would take cross-country ski adventures to examine the landscapes caught between hot and cold: the tall clumps of frost crystals that form near Yellowstone’s famous geothermal pools, the knobs of ice that form on the ground where a geyser’s spray falls.

They would ice skate on Yellowstone Lake and stand on its banks, listening to the phenomenon known as the “music of the lake”.  When it gets cold enough, -20 to -30F,  the water freezes and expands, causing the pressure to build until the ice begins to break. “You can hear hundreds of cracks running for miles across the ice,” Fuller said. “They make an indescribable sound, like an incredible ping you hear run across the lake.”
With his daughters now grown and he and his wife having separated, Fuller now sometimes goes as long as two winter weeks without seeing anyone else. But it doesn’t bother him. “I’m not a misanthrope in any way; I’d hate for people to think that,” he said. Fuller revels in winter’s relative peace, and the balance it brings to Yellowstone’s hectic summer season. “I think solitude – or quietude – is an increasingly rare commodity.”
In fact, when the outside world reaches Canyon Village via snowplough in March, to Fuller it feels all too soon. Perhaps that’s because the solitude provides Fuller the chance to strengthen his relationship with the place that surrounds him. “Just being connected with the season, and with the weather, and with the animals, and with the rhythms and cycles of the plant world,” Fuller trails off. “It just – it feels like home.”

A lot has happened in the world of oil spill response and prevention since 1985. The epic disasters of Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, both of which were orders of magnitude larger than the Arco Anchorage, spurred policy reforms designed to minimize the chance of a big spill and boost our ability to clean one up if it still happens. In 1990, for example, Congress passed a law requiring oil companies to phase out older tankers and replace them with tankers that have double hulls, which puts more metal between the oil and the sea should a ship run aground.
Still, more than 5 billion gallons of oil are transported by boat and barge to the five refineries located in Puget Sound each year. With so much petroleum moving along our coastlines, accidents are, sadly, almost bound to happen.

The drill was part of a program created by the state legislature in 2011. Prior to that, Washington already had a reputation for taking oil spill response seriously — but the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster convinced lawmakers that the state still needed to up its game.



The law mandates that all oil companies that transfer their products onto or off of vessels on the coast, in Puget Sound or the Columbia River invest in response equipment, submit detailed oil spill contingency plans, and demonstrate those plans to evaluators from the Department of Ecology via a series of drills such as this one.
“When we do a drill like today, we’re testing a plan,” Washington State Department of Ecology Response Manager David Byers said, standing aboard the boat called the Straight Arrow before motoring out to see the action. “We’re testing areas we think may be weak, and we’re making industry prove to us that they can respond.”
The drill scenario: It’s 5:45 a.m., and a boat has just left anchor off the coast of Vendovi Island, located between Lummi Island and Anacortes. But someone’s not paying attention, and so it crashes into another nearby ship. Both vessels are damaged; thick, heavy fuel oil begins to ooze into the water. By the time the crews have secured the leaks, about 2,100 gallons have leaked out of each boat. Now 6:30am, it’s time to launch the response plan.



By the time the Straight Arrow passes the boats from the Marine Spill Response Corporation (MSRC) and the National Response Corporation (NRC) — the companies contracted to clean up oil spills in these waters — at 9 a.m., the spill response is in stage 1. This is the site assessment, when the contractors take stock of the situation at hand, including the current conditions like wind and tides, and determine whether it is safe to work near the site or if there are chemical and explosive hazards. Back during the Arco Anchorage spill, this is when the contracted response team — Arco Marine, Inc. (AMI) – would have noticed that, despite the day’s calm weather, the tides were strong, carrying the spilled oil within and out of the harbor. In the end, oil impacted shoreline areas as far as 15 miles from Port Angeles.
The Straight Arrow continues on to the shores of Vendovi Island, where workboats have deployed booms — fence-like equipment put in the water — to keep the imaginary oil from floating into sensitive coves or toward the beach. This is one of the first priorities of the response teams, as oil that reaches these areas could harm habitat, seabirds and bald eagles. The ARCO Anchorage spill killed more than 4,000 birds, despite the best efforts of more than 2,000 volunteers who turned out to help the oil-drenched wildlife. “Some were hard to distinguish what species they were, they were so saturated with oil,” Arnold Schouten, one of the volunteers who was on the scene, told the Peninsula Daily News.
The Straight Arrow moves on to the next stop: an NRC boat with a drone on board. The drone is a new piece of equipment directly out of the 2011 bill. A man steadies the small plane and throws it into the air. After briefly dipping toward the water, it ascends overhead, relaying video footage of the “spill” so the crew can more effectively see the oil and where it is headed.
Then it’s on to the main cleanup acts. MSRC has deployed a large boom off the stern of one of its boats and a “current buster” — an advanced type of boom that can be dragged through the water more quickly in order to gather the oil. NRC has deployed two boom systems, and a new “skimmer” inside one of them, equipment that pumps the imaginary oil out of the water. Both teams are assisted by two “Vessels of Opportunity” (VOOs), which are local boats that have registered to assist in the event of a big spill, another new program out of the 2011 bill.

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Having surveyed all of the drill sites, the Straight Arrow then heads back to the marina. From the outside, it certainly seemed like a well-coordinated response that used state of the art technology. But was this really a “worst-case” scenario?
“They’re well-equipped to handle a 4,000-gallon spill,” Eric Nalder, an investigative journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting on oil transportation, told Crosscut. But while the spill scenario practiced in the drill is certainly far bigger than most of the more than 4,000 oil spills reported to the Department of Ecology every year, it pales in comparison the Arco Anchorage’s 239,000 gallons, which itself is a fraction of the 11 million gallons spilled in the pristine Prince William Sound from the Exxon Valdez in 1989, or the 130 million gallons spilled into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Sure, things have changed since then, but we’re not seeing less oil move through our waters – in fact, a report that came out last year predicts we’ll see 2,000 new oil tankers and barges in the Pacific Northwest, thanks to the expansion of rail-terminals and pipelines. Oil tankers carry as much as 55 million gallons of crude. While barges carry less — at most 14 million gallons — they still carry a lot, and they are far less regulated. A report released this month by Friends of the Earth, written by environmental consultant and recently elected Port of Seattle Commissioner Fred Fellman, highlights the risks associated with the transport of Canadian tar sands oil across the Salish Sea.
Even a spill of half a million gallons in Puget Sound would be devastating, Nalder said, and while we’ve come a long way since 1985, that’s still within the realm of possibility. It would decimate local wildlife and, while cleanup efforts took place, shut down commerce and tourism. “The nature of Puget Sound will change for months and months in a horrendous way,” Nalder said. “Very few people living in this region really understand what that would look like.”
Lets hope we never have to.

The report, released by the nonprofit California Ocean Science Trust and written by a panel of 20 scientists in California, Oregon and Washington, still points to global CO2 emissions as the dominant cause of ocean acidification. The researchers’ top recommendation is for the world to get its collective act together and finally start reducing those emissions.
But they also point out that when we dump nitrogen and carbon into Puget Sound as outflow from municipal wastewater treatment plants, and runoff from farms and lawns, this decreases the pH of our surrounding marine waters, too.
When excess nutrients enter the Sound, it can send marine algae into overdrive, resulting in oxygen-deprived areas at depth when the algae dies. This is because it creates a feeding frenzy by bacteria whose respiration process consumes O2 and produces CO2. More CO2 in the waters means that water becomes even more acidified. 
“Puget Sound is an urbanized estuary,” University of Washington scientists Terrie Klinger and Jan Newton, who sat on the panel, told Crosscut by email. “Estuaries are areas where production is naturally high and as a consequence respiration typically is high. In areas where human inputs are substantial, such as those adjacent to urban areas, some of these inputs add to natural production and respiration. Where this occurs, ocean acidification conditions can be intensified.”

According to the report, “the West Coast of North America will face some of the earliest, most severe changes in ocean carbon chemistry.” This is because ocean currents and upwelling brings to our shores seawater that is already naturally rich in CO2, and is projected to become more and more unnaturally rich in CO2every year thanks to all that pollution that we’re pumping into the air.
Newton and Klinger point out that Puget Sound is even more susceptible to ocean acidification than other West Coast waters, because “we see thecombined effects of upwelled, low pH ocean waters transported into the Sound, plus local inputs (e.g. nutrients, carbon, and perhaps others) that can increase CO2 and decrease oxygen.”
The report sheds light on just how complex ocean acidification is, and why predicting its impacts is a very tricky task.
Ocean acidification has been one of the most studied oceanic phenomena over the past few years. However, even while study after study has demonstrated that ocean acidification is occurring and that more acidic waters can harm marine organisms, some within the scientific community argue that researchers need to approach the topic with a broader perspective, because it is still relatively little-understood, and the impacts will vary widely depending on locale.


The European-based ICES Journal of Marine Science published a special issue on ocean acidification last month. The lead article, written by Editor-in-Chief Howard Browman, calls for more skepticism on the topic. A decade ago, he writes, most of the studies on ocean acidification were carried out in a lab. More recently, studies have looked at acidification in the real world, where it combines with other factors, such as temperature changes, oxygen levels and salinity. “Such studies typically report that the additional driver has a stronger effect than CO2,” Browman says.
The rest of the issue is full of studies of all sorts, including some that found little or no effect of, or mixed effects from, ocean acidification. While it does not question the overriding reality of acidification, it presents the issue as much more complex than the reductive “animal-in-a-bucket” studies.
Because the oceans are so vast and complicated, it can be difficult to know exactly what stressor caused a particular calamitous event. For example, is a particular decline in oysters due to emissions-related acidification, a natural upwelling event, increased nutrients in the water, or a change in temperature? Oftentimes the connections aren’t linear, and it can be difficult to untangle the web.
Which is why the report also calls for reducing “co-occurring stressors” on marine systems, such as increasing temperature and loss of habitat. Other recommendations for local action include removing CO2 from the water by planting seagrass, and revising water quality rules to reduce local contributions to acidification.
The benefits of taking such actions will be greatest in estuaries like Puget Sound, the report says, where local processes dominate over oceanic ones. And it’s something we can change without waiting for the whole world to take action

I got directions to the site from Hempton himself, after driving out from Seattle with my two friends Amy and Sarah to visit him in his yurt near the town Joyce. Walking into his home, I noticed the tidiness of the place, the decorations against the white canvas (a drum in the style of a native northwest tribe, house plants), the books on the shelves (Mark Twain, Yann Martel, John Muir). But Hempton quickly redirected our attention.
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“Let’s take a moment and just listen to my place,” he said. And so we did.

But after noticing some faint pitter-patter against the roof, my own quiet was quickly overtaken by my wandering mind, distracted by what my first interview question should be, where we could camp that night, the need to suppress a giggle. I’m sorry, but I was trying to listen to a yurt! Sometimes life is just delightfully wacky. 
When Hempton broke the pause, it was clear he had been much more successful in the exercise. “See, when we listen to rain in a yurt structure, how you can get the information coming in,” he said. “After a few minutes, I really feel the texture of the cloud as well. It’s not just rain starting, but it will begin to pulsate.”
I’d totally missed the clouds. But then, Hempton has more practice at this than I do.
Hempton’s obsession with sound and silence began in the fall of 1980, when he was 27 (coincidentally, the same age I am now). En route from Seattle to Madison, Wisconsin, to begin a graduate program in botany, he pulled off I-90 and lay his bedroll in a cornfield for the night. Then, as he describes in the book One Square Inch of Silence, he had what he now calls an epiphany: 

Hands behind my head and ready for a deep rest, I lay between two rows of stubby, shorn stalks. I heard a wonderful, layered chorus of chanting crickets and began to smell the dampness of an approaching storm. There, on the prairie, the thunder rolled in from far away, signaling rain long before it arrived. Again and again this thunder boomed and echoed, growing ever-louder — magnificent, deep, primordial, soul-shaking sounds. I’d never heard thunder like this before.
Hours later and thoroughly soaked, I thought, “How could I be 27 years old and never truly have listened before?”
The difference between hearing and listening, and the discovery of how to really, wholly lend one’s ear, are revelations Hempton wishes more people could have. “After three days or so in the Hoh Valley or in Olympic Park, you find that all the chatter of the modern world that snuck aboard your backpack with you … loses relevance,” he told us, with sermon-like delivery. “It’s no longer important. What’s important is the beauty of nature.”
But the quiet spaces — defined not by their lack of sound, which could include birdsong and wind rustling leaves, but their lack of manmade noise—are quickly disappearing. By some estimates, noise pollution affects more than 88 percent of the contiguous U.S.
According to Hempton, the slice of forest I visited has less noise pollution than any other spot in the American wilderness, which is why he chose it as the “One Square Inch of Silence” he wants to sonically protect, with a law that would prohibit air traffic overhead.

The notion of protecting silence (which we typically think of as the absence of a thing, rather than a thing itself, like darkness) is still relatively obscure. So part of his plan is to get people to see — er, hear — what it’s all about for themselves. Which is why Hempton makes the “One Square Inch” coordinates publically available on his website, and actively encourages people to visit.
“We don’t have an environmental crisis at all,” he said. “What we have is a spiritual crisis. And our environment is tanking because of the way we’re living and our relationship to the world that supports us. It’s really about falling back in love with the earth.”

Regardless of the respect I feel for spirituality in the lives of others, my non-religious proclivities mean I tend to get squeamish when I sense a preach heading my way.
And Hempton’s rhetoric can certainly veer in that direction: He talks about his “epiphany” in the cornfield, and refers to visits to the Quietest Inch as “pilgrimages” to a “shrine.”
But he’s aware of how this can come across to others. When I tried to reframe silence as an indicator of the health of an ecosystem, he first responded, “Some people have trouble talking about the spiritual importance, or the importance for creativity in how it feeds into business and the economy.”
Still, there is no shortage of studies that link noisy environments to stress, cardiovascular health, and even premature death. And Gordon also heeds the importance of quiet beyond our own species. In fact, it seems his philosophy hinges on bringing humans back into the perspective that we’renot the only ones to inhabit this place.
He starts with the northern spotted owl. Without a background of relative quiet, these birds, many of which make the Hoh Rainforest their home, would not be able to eat. That’s because they use their freakishly good hearing to “see” their prey.
Hunting at night, owls can pinpoint exactly where their target is, even from 50 feet away. But what happens when you add a layer of distant highway noise to that background? “We remove night time feeding, until just a few hours of the morning when traffic gets sparse enough,” Hempton says.
There has been a whole host of studies documenting the effects of noise pollution on birds. Early studies, usually conducted in labs, investigated physiological impacts such as damage to the birds’ ears and their stress response. Later studies looked at changes in bird behavior in noisy environments, but it was still difficult to tell whether population decline near a highway was due to noise from the cars — or the animals getting turned into road kill.
In November 2013, a study out of Boise State University made an unquestionable connection between noise pollution and reduced bird populations for the first time. The researchers hung 15 speakers in Douglas fir trees on a roadless mountain ridge in southeast Idaho, and played real traffic noises they had recorded within Glacier National Park.
By the end of the study, overall bird abundance was cut by a quarter, and some particular species pretty much stopped showing up at all. (Imagine if they had taken their recording from Pike Place Market!)

As for northern spotted owls, we know that while they once lived all over the Pacific Northwest, their numbers have been reduced bymore than 60 percent over the last 190 years, and the population of spotted owls worldwide continues to shrink by an average of 2.9 percent each year. The Olympic Peninsula contains what is perhaps the last stable population. Are they there for the quiet? What would happen to the bird if, like so much of the world, that soundscape also became polluted?
This isn’t a hypothetical question. According to Hempton, the interval between manmade noises from air traffic in Olympic National Park has shrunk from one hour to only twenty minutes over the last ten years. And given the rate at which air traffic is growing — not to mention the U.S. Navy’s ongoing proposal to expand its operations on the Olympic Peninsula — Hempton believes that, without intervention, we have every reason to believe that noise interval will continue to shrink.
Before we left his home, Hempton handed me a printout of detailed directions to the Quietest Inch, and a small, naturally red stone. “Anybody that reaches one square inch of silence can bring a small red stone … take the stone that’s there now and put that one down,” he explained. “There’s nothing magic about the stone, but symbols do count … the fact that it’s not just a stone, but a stone that has been at the quietest, least noise-polluted destination of any national park in the lower 48 — it gives a certain specialness, and that quiet is quieting.”

About three miles down the Hoh River Trail the next day, we’re on the lookout for a sitka spruce.
Afraid I’m going to miss it, I walk very slowly, pausing at nearly every tree to inspect it as the possible landmark. But when we finally reach it, it’s so obvious it’s the one: a big, stilted trunk with a portal-like opening through which you can walk. On the other side, we navigate around a couple of felled trees to a faint elk trail. After following it for a few hundred yards, we reach a mossy log – with a red stone, about the size of a golf ball, laid on its end.
My friends and I disperse, each claiming a slice of forest to hunker down. Assuming position, my internal questioning immediately take control. Why here and not, say, two miles further? How much of this is a gimmick? Does that matter? How long should we stay here? Are Sarah and Amy getting bored? What the heck am I going to write for this story?

I try to listen harder. My breath gets weird and shallow as I try to control it. There’s the river. An occasional bird call. Water drops sifting through leaves. I try to imagine what’s going on beneath the moss and the dirt, the whole ecosystem of fungus, worms, even microbes right beneath where I sit. What does that sound like?
I feel a sense of frustration, like I’m so close to being able to open myself up to what it mean to really listen, but I just can’t quite get there.
I think about a hike I took on a solo trip to southern Utah the month before. The first person to make the trek at least since the last storm the week before, I had broken trail through snow for four and a half miles to a pinnacle overlooking the barren desert, its intricate nooks and crannies, valleys and mesas stretching as far as I could see.

Well beyond the reach of any other human’s ear, I let out a howl. Looking back on it now, I guess I ruined a perfectly good piece of silence. But when I did, I was overcome with a sense of euphoria, a sense of wanting to to do better for the world, because I was so lucky to be in it.
What was that feeling?
My thumb strokes the red rock in my hand. Like the sounds surrounding me that I can’t hear but know are there, it might be beyond my left-brained analysis. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an experience worth safeguarding — and not just for the owls. For ourselves, too.

Moz hit the national political spotlight after Jill Biden visited Seattle to speak with our business leaders and employees about strategies to promote a healthy work-life balance. Of the companies the second lady visited, Moz was one of the ones Biden felt most impressed by – so much so, that afterwards Biden asked Bird to share Moz’s workplace practices at the White House Summit for Working Families in June 2014.

And for good reason: with benefits such as four months of maternity or paternity leave, nursing rooms at their downtown office, “no meeting Fridays,” and paid-paid vacation (as in, Mozzers not only get paid while on vacation, but a stipend of $3000 a year to pay for that vacation), the company has made it a priority to make its employees feel like they can have both a family and a career. Bird emphasizes she wants to enable both mothers and fathers to be good parents – but, of course, historically it has been women that are most impacted by the modern-day expectations and struggles to “have it all.”

From the outside, it appears Bird, 37, has actually made this happen. Walking through the large Moz office in downtown Seattle when I visited last month, she seamlessly moved through conversation topics like keeping up with email, her recent vacation to Disney World with her husband and son, and half-marathon training (all while cheerfully greeting her employees). But Bird recognizes she has largely been able to achieve this because she is one of the lucky ones.

When looking back on the arc of her own career, Bird hasn’t personally felt affected by sexism – to the contrary, she feels that being a woman in her field has been a boon.

“When I go to a tech conference … and I’m the only woman in the room or one of the only women in the room, I feel a sense of relief in their eyes. Because they don’t want to be seen as anti-women. So there’s an overwhelming sense of like, ‘how can I help you, I’m glad you’re here,’” Bird told Crosscut. “It helps me in business because you do sort of stick out more … people remember me more than they would an average mid-30s CEO of a tech company.”

But Bird knows having these people cheering for her and helping her succeed throughout her career is an advantage many women do not have access to – especially when you look at gender equity through an intersectional lens. The problem of getting more women and diverse candidates into tech jobs in the first place is not an easy fix.

“This is not a problem that you could flip a switch on, when everyone wants to. It’s a big problem, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything about it,” Bird said. “I’m a firm believer that those of us like myself who have privilege and power have an obligation – a moral obligation – to intercede on behalf of those who don’t.”

Which is why Bird recently advocated for increased pay transparency before state legislature, which would help close the wage gap. It’s why she supports local programs geared toward addressing tech’s famous “pipeline problem.” Moz regularly works with four programs: Ada Developers Academy, which teaches women how to code; Return to Work, which helps both men and women who have left the industry return to tech; Year Up, which teaches young adults who haven’t gone to college how to code, and, most recently, President Obama’s new TechHire initiative to train women and people of color in computer science.

Moz is dedicated to hiring interns and staff from each of these programs every year. “It’s investing in a future that may never help us right here, right now,” Bird said. “But it helps at large.”
Bird has, in part, been able to dedicate time and resources to the gender gap issue because Moz ‘s company culture, established in the early days as it transitioned from marketing to tech firm. This culture is defined by what Mozzers call the TAGFEE code: Transparent, Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, and Exceptional.

According to Moz Director of Communications Angela Cherry, TAGFEE comes up at the company on a daily basis, and is referred to by employees when making decisions during meetings. They also use the acronym as a “cheat-sheet” when it comes to making decisions of who to hire, and who to let go. “I do think it helps us find a fit – find people who want to work the way we want to work,” Bird said.
These measures usually don’t encompass metrics of social impact. But the regular reminder to step back and take the broader perspective may have helped Bird prioritize using her position to advocate for gender equity in the wider world of tech.

“I decided and got clean with myself several years ago that I don’t want to be successful any other way than TAGFEE,” Bird said at a panel on inclusivity in tech last summer. “If it ever came down to that … to succeed we have to ditch TAGFEE, I would rather fail. I will only be happy and proud of myself to have run this business this way.”
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Her fight against tech’s gender inequality is “already eating into sleeping hours,” Bird said. But she also leaves little doubt that she’ll be a voice on these issues for as long as she must.

That’s why the Seattle-based company VICIS is trying to make football safer by redesigning the piece of equipment that’s supposed to be protecting athletes’ brains in the first place: the helmet.
Our brains are actually relatively well-protected even without a helmet. They are surrounded by a built-in cushion, called cerebrospinal fluid, which usually keeps the soft organ from hitting the hard skull when your head gets jostled.

But a football tackle can put as much as a full ton of force on a player’s head: a factor of the player’s (usually hefty) mass, and the acceleration of the body as a result of the collision. All too often this force is enough to outdo the brain’s natural protection, sending the tissue crashing through that fluid and smacking against the skull.

An incident like this can cause a change in brain function; when this happens, even if its temporary, it’s considered a concussion. When this happens again and again over the course of a football player’s career, it can result in Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a condition of a progressively deteriorating brain that can result in behavioral change (including rage and impulsivity), depression and even dementia.

To make matters worse, the CTE diagnosis usually can’t be made until after the patient has already died, when autopsy reveals a deformed, brittle, visibly eroded brain with an unusual amount of tau protein. Some of this protein, which stabilizes microtubules in the brain, is necessary and healthy. Why this protein accumulates when someone develops CTE remains a mystery.
The padding in football helmets helps absorb some of the force the brain would otherwise feel, but it’s clearly not enough.

“If you look at the state of helmet technology, it really hasn’t evolved since the ’70s,” Samuel Browd, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Seattle Children’s Hospital and co-founder of VICIS said at a forum on concussions held by the Northwest Science Writers Association in Wallingford in February. And that helmet technology wasn’t developed with concussions or repetitive head trauma in mind, but rather more visually obvious injuries such as skull fractures.

So VICIS, a UW-affiliated startup of neuroscientists and engineers, threw the current helmet templates out the window and started from scratch.

The main thing that makes VICIS’s helmet, called the Zero1, different from a standard helmet is its ability to absorb the forces of collision from all directions. Today’s helmets reduce the force by slowing down only the “linear acceleration.” As in, the helmet gets bonked head-on and its cushioning compresses in a straight line. But concussions are often caused by “rotational acceleration” as well. For example, when the helmet gets bonked from the side there can be more impact in the twisting direction than in the head-on one.

The Zero1 helmets are comprised of not one but four distinct layers to absorb force, including an outer shell that deforms on impact and a layer of memory foam against the player’s head, which is surrounded by a layer of plastic. The nut of the redesign, however, rests in its “core layer.” It is a band inside the helmet of cushiony columns that can compress and twist, thus absorbing some of the force from rotational acceleration. The concept isn’t anything new: It has been used in aerospace and car engineering for decades. In fact, VICIS says it’s based on principles first described by Swiss physicist Leonhard Euler in the 1700s. It seems fairly simple. But it’s the first time it has been applied to football.

A big chunk of VICIS’s funding came from the Head Health Initiative, a contest funded by General Electric, Under Armour and the NFL itself. It’s not hard to see why the NFL would feel motivated to buck up the cash: despite their history of denying the issue, the league clearly has incentives to address the repetitive head trauma associated with the game, and getting behind a helmet like Zero1 is a relatively easy way for them to do it.

But while the new helmet technology is promising, there’s still a lot we don’t know about   our brains, and how they respond to the battering they get on the gridiron. Exactly how much force is needed to cause a concussion? How many times does a head have to get whacked before a person develops CTE? How does a young brain handle brain trauma differently than an adult one?

“We don’t know a lot about the science,” Browd acknowledged. “We’re just at the beginning of learning about it.”

In fact, some on the panel argued that helmets make the problem of concussions worse, because the athletes feel as though their brains are protected and can go for that tackle full-force.
“When it comes to head trauma, the NFL will always do only what it has to do,”Sports Illustrated writer Doug Farrar said. “And always stop short of what it needs to do.”

Yet anyone who has ever watched a Seahawks game knows that the the sport isn’t going to fizzle away anytime soon. “I think [football is] here for awhile,” Browd said.

“Is there a cure for concussions? No. There’s no such thing,” Browd continued. But can a better, smarter helmet make the game safer? “I think so.”
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In the meantime, football will remain everyone’s favorite guilty pleasure. As Sean Pamphilion, director of the documentary The United States of Football, said, “It’s a level of willful blindness that we all engage in.”

At high altitude there is much less oxygen available than at sea level, which makes even the act of putting one foot in front of the other extremely difficult. Because of this, most people who venture to heights above 8,000 meters (about 26,000 feet) do so with the aid of supplemental oxygen. Did you ever consider using supplemental oxygen to climb an 8,000-meter peak?

From the very beginning I decided to climb without bottled oxygen or a high-altitude porter. It was always clear to me that had it become impossible for me to continue climbing so high without bottled oxygen, I would have stopped and chosen smaller mountains. However, I was lucky and with my very intense acclimatization it worked and I have been able to scale all 8,000-meter peaks without bottled oxygen—something I am very grateful for.

You also seem to prefer to climb as part of a small team (or sometimes even on your own). Is independence in the mountains important to you?

Climbing in a small team has disadvantages, such as having less manpower to break trail or work together to open the route. However, it also has many advantages. In a small team you are much more flexible; many things are easier to handle, such as making decisions, and it gives me a free and happy feeling.

What do you consider in determining who to climb with?

The most important thing for me is to know your expedition partner very well and to be familiar with his or her strong and weak points. Another important point is to be honest to each other and have a healthy amount of self-responsibility. For me, honesty, trust, friendship, self-responsibility, and self-sufficiency are a good base for a good expedition team.

There are so many wild cards in mountaineering … things like altitude sickness or bad weather can come on very suddenly. How do you plan for the unexpected?

I usually plan my expeditions very carefully, however, one is never prepared for the unexpected—and that is certainly part of an expedition. Despite excellent weather forecast [technology] these days, the weather and the general conditions on the mountain can change very quickly.

It is important to stay calm in situations that sometimes seem hopeless. Spreading panic just wastes precious energy, which is needed on the mountain. So I try to prepare for the unexpected—as far as that is possible. For this reason I always carry a very small light tent and other light equipment. I usually do not set up fixed high camps, as I want to remain flexible. If you set a camp in a certain place, it is difficult to move again. By carrying my own light tent I can set up the camp as I go along. I also carry my gear while acclimatizing up and down the mountain.

How do you maintain that calm? There are so many intense highs and lows in mountaineering—how do you maintain the focus needed to stay safe?

At home it is not always easy to maintain the focus [laughs]. In the mountains, while ascending or climbing in difficult sections, I am naturally completely focused. But before descending after I have reached the top, I always make myself insistently aware to keep again the focus 'till I am safe down at base camp. The summit starts at the highest point of the mountain and ends only once I am back at base camp.

Another important skill needed for mountaineering is having a good gut or instinct, in order to be able distinguish between the discomfort that inevitably comes from pushing your body so hard from something more serious, or to make judgment calls about the weather. How did you develop, and learn to trust in, your instincts in the mountains?

Already in my childhood I often tried to follow my gut feeling. Of course, whenever I climbed with older and more experienced people, I let them make the decisions, as they were in charge. However, I also consulted my own gut feeling and asked myself how I would have decided. It was only later, when I was more experienced, that I had the courage to tell others about my thoughts and feelings. However, at the beginning, these thoughts and feelings were not always accepted.
Later in my life I l also learned that if I stay calm for a moment, without thinking about anything but just listening to my feelings inside, there will be a moment when I get an impulse of what to do next. It comes automatically, with complete inner silence ... and it does not take a long time.
One important thing: Everybody can avoid high altitude sickness when they really listen to their body! Your body knows if something is wrong and usually sends a signal on time. If you experience symptoms like headache, vertigo, then you should act accordingly—meaning to climb or hike down immediately. This is the only solution! Staying at altitude and taking lots of medicines does not solve the problem and will probably end in serious high altitude sickness.

You had a career in nursing before you became a professional mountaineer. Do you think that background has enabled you to be a better climber?

I won't say I am a better mountaineer—every professional mountaineer has his or her strong sides and also weak points. But my nursing career helped me in many points: listening to my body for example, or being patient and working very precisely and focused. However, what has been a great advantage of my medical knowledge is that I have been able to help other people medically on the mountain. I think this is a very nice "left-over" from my career as a nurse, and I would not want to miss it.

In your book, Mountains in my Heart, you briefly discuss how nursing in part shaped your relationship with death—and helped you cope with death when you encountered it the mountains. How so?

Working as a nurse and having to cope with illness and death every day has given me the opportunity to be better prepared for death and what it means to lose someone. During my nursing career, I also visited some special seminars on end-of-life care, which was very helpful and has certainly made it easier for me to cope with death in the mountains. Those experiences and my belief have helped me accept and process mortality. But despite all this preparation, I think losing someone who is close to you is still difficult to cope with.

How did your relationship to mountaineering change after becoming a pro?

I had more time to intensify my training. I could also focus more on my regeneration. So without having to earn my living with a nine-to-five job, I actually had more time for everything. At the beginning I woke up every morning feeling grateful for having turned my life into my passion and to this very day I very much appreciate the opportunities I was given to become a professional mountaineer.

In your book, you also discuss forming a relationship with the mountain—that you need to feel connected to it before you go for the summit. How does that relationship form, and what does that connection feel like to you?

Yes, forming a relationship with the mountain I am about to climb is a very important part of an expedition for me. It starts with the walk to base camp. When trekking to base camp, I get the chance to get to know the area and meet the local people of the region. It is often the case that the mountain means a lot to them and it is good to find out a little bit about it.

Once at base camp I often just sit and observe the mountain—check out the route and familiarize myself with the climb. I look at the difficult sections, plan where I could put the high camps, and try to imagine what it is like to be up there. Before I go for the summit I have usually climbed the mountain in my mind beforehand. This gives me the chance to prepare myself well for the climb.
And yes, I talk to the mountain I am intending to climb. I usually don’t expect an answer, but it gives me the feeling that I am less of an intruder on its slopes. I have to get to know the mountain, and the mountain has to get to know me. We have to work together to be successful. For me it is not about “conquering” a mountain—it is achieving this goal together, and I am always very grateful if the mountain accepts me and allows me to stand on its summit.

Climbing the 14 8,000-meter peaks was a huge part of your life for nearly two decades. You must get the “what’s next” question all the time—how do you respond to it?

Climbing the 14 8,000-meter peaks was for a long time part of my life—but it was not my goal from the very beginning. It happened gradually. At the beginning I went to the high mountains because I enjoyed it and I loved being on expedition. And of course, I noticed that I did well at high altitude, but the desire to stand on top of all 14 8,000 meter-peaks only came later. However, I climbed every mountain for the mountains they are, and it was never a “package” for me.

​K2 was the last of my 8,000-meter peaks, however, when I reached the top I did not feel “relieved” that I had finally reached the summit of my 14th 8,000-meter peak. I was so happy to have reached the top of K2. Again, it was not the package but the mountain. K2 meant a lot to me. I made several attempts, and every time the mountain taught me something. When I finally reached the summit I finally felt that we have achieved this together.
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Yes, people ask me about my next goal, which has not formed completely yet. I have closed the chapter of the 8,000-meter peaks, but I have some ideas in my head what I would like to do. I have been on some smaller expeditions since I summited K2. For example Nuptse, Denali, and an expedition to Carstenz Pyramid—which was fascinating, especially the wild trek to base camp. But at the moment I enjoy being in the Alps climbing and ski touring—and it is actually nice to spend spring, a season that I love, in Europe. But of course, once you have the travel and expedition bug it is hard to stop, and I am still far from it.

About 10 years ago, the octopus’s carnivorous behavior made headlines when one of the Seattle Aquarium’s own was filmedkilling a shark. That’s pretty fierce, sure, but resorting to cannibalism seems like a whole new level of murderous behavior. How does the aquarium know which animals are good candidates for their annual matchmaking services, and which ones might munch a potential lover? I spoke with Tim Carpenter, the Seattle Aquarium’s curator of fish and invertebrates, and here’s what I learned.

It turns out that octopuses are generally taciturn beings that spend most of their lives alone. For most of the year, if the aquarium has two octopuses on display they are kept separate, divided by a thick sheet of Plexiglas. It is only toward the end of an octopus’s life, at 3 to 4 years old, that he or she goes looking for company, and sex, for the first – and only – time. Octopuses are “terminal breeders”: Both males and females die shortly after the deed is done, although the females live just long enough to see her eggs hatch.

When the aquarists are searching for blind-date contenders, which they collect from central Puget Sound, the biggest thing they look for is size. Octopuses grow throughout their lives, usually reaching a peak of 30 to 110 pounds (the record is a whopping 600 pounds). “We’ve never seen an animal that was ready to mate that was smaller than 35 pounds,” Carpenter said. “Beyond that, we won’t even bother.”

This year, they did find a fitting bachelor: a 70-pound giant they named Kong. But while they found plenty of female octopuses, none of them were large enough. “Even if we put a 30- or 45-pound female out there, there’s a chance he would see her as food,” Carpenter explained. “We were looking for an animal of at least 60, 65 pounds.”

If they had found a good match, there would still be no guarantee that the two animals would hit it off. “A blind date is a blind date, and you never know how it’s going to go,” Carpenter said.
Some years, the two creatures hardly notice each other. Other years they embrace within minutes, arms intertwined, skin flushed as the male sticks his “special arm” (seriously, it’s called a hectocotylus) into what looks like the female’s head (but is actually her mantle, where her organs are). “Sometimes they’ll ‘hang out’ with each other for an hour,” Carpenter said. “Sometimes it’s 12 hours.”

​This year, in lieu of watching two octopuses get it on, you can wander down to the aquarium and watch Kong swim around with a diver in the big Window on Washington Waters tank. The show starts at noon on Sunday, Valentine’s Day.
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Sorry, Kong, probably not what you were hoping for. But you may still have a chance to get lucky later in the week, after you’re returned to your home in Puget Sound. Or maybe you’ll just slide back into bachelorhood, having spent your stint in the aquarium learning about the hazards of octopus love. Sure, it might have been a great Valentine’s Day, but it would have been your last.