about kelvin

Dr. Kelvin Bates is an atmospheric chemist who works at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Kelvin grew up in Seattle and went to The Evergreen School through eighth grade, and then went to Lakeside for high school (where he met and became good friends with Ms. Contreras!). He was a self-described "shy bookworm" until he discovered theater as a sophomore at Lakeside (when he was in a musical with Ms. Estill!) and started performing in as many plays and musicals as he could. However, he still loved his math and science classes (like Organic Chemistry, which he and Ms. Contreras took together), so it was difficult for him to decide what to do with his life. Kelvin chose to go to Davidson College in North Carolina, where he could study science and stay actively involved in theater. When he's not working, Kelvin still likes acting and singing--a few years ago he was in a community theater production of Cabaret (which he was first in as an 11th grader at Lakeside). He also likes hiking in the Rocky Mountains, biking, running, and making maps!

How did he know he wanted to be a scientist?

"I loved my chemistry courses back at Lakeside and throughout college, but I really decided to pursue research as a career when I did an internship with NASA the summer after college. I had previously thought research would keep me cooped up in a lab all day, but I learned there's tons of variety in the role of a scientist -- that summer, we flew planes around Southern California sampling air quality, drove around oil fields collecting air samples, and even took a research ship out into the ocean near Los Angeles to measure gases seeping out of underwater vents. The hands-on, exploratory nature of the job really hooked me!"

In 2021, Kelvin published the results of a study about a chemical called methanol in a region of the atmosphere called the troposphere. The troposphere is the layer of the atmosphere closest to earth, and is where nearly all weather takes place and is the layer humans interact with. Methanol is an organic chemical compound that, in it's liquid form, is toxic to humans and has a variety of industrial uses. Kelvin was interested in methanol in its gas form--it's the second most common organic gas in the atmosphere behind methane, but comparatively little is known about it. Reactions involving methanol in the troposphere influence the amount of ozone and highly reactive chemicals called hydroxyl radicals. Methanol can also react to form carbon monoxide and formaldehyde, both of which are toxic to humans.

Specifically, Kelvin wanted to better understand the sources and sinks of methanol in the troposphere. Sources are things that produce a gas, and sinks are things that remove the gas from the atmosphere. For example--internal combustion engines in cars are a source of carbon dioxide gas, while forests are a sink because plants consume carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. Many studies have been done on atmospheric methanol, and while they all tend to agree on how much methanol there is in the atmosphere, there is a lot of uncertainty around what the sources and sinks are, and how much of a role each plays in adding or removing methanol from the air. To collect data, Kelvin's colleagues flew all around the world in an airplane, collecting air samples as they went. They used computer model of global atmospheric chemistry to analyze their samples.

They showed that, contrary to what previous studies had found, the ocean is not a major source of methanol. Phytoplankton at the ocean's surface does create a fair amount of methanol, but most of it quickly falls back into the water, making the ocean a net sink rather than a source (meaning the amount that the ocean consumes outweighs the amount it creates). Something surprising they found was that, in remote areas of the troposphere (like over the ocean or Antarctica, where human activities aren't influencing things as much), chemical reactions were the largest sources of methanol. Chemicals called methylperoxy radicals react with hydroxyl radicals to form methanol. Both of these chemicals are highly reactive because they're one or more electrons short of being "stable", so they aggressively react with other chemicals to "steal" their electrons. Kelvin and his team found that around 60% of methanol in remote regions came from these reactions, which is an important finding because these reactions hadn't previously been factored into global atmospheric chemistry models. Understanding more about how gasses like methanol behave in the troposphere has important implications for climate change and human health.

You can read more about Kelvin and his work here.