Stefan Talke came to Portland two years ago to work with David Jay, a Portland State professor in the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science. Talke is now a senior research associate, and will be teaching one class per term.
Kayla Nguyen/VANGUARD STAFF
Stefan Talke is a new professor at the Maseeh College of Engineering.
Talke’s current class is “Introduction to Fluid Dynamics.”
“It’s not an easy course, because fluids is not easy,” Talke said.
Through his class, he’s hoping to convey to students that the topic is something they have to work on for a while. He admitted that even he is still learning new things about fluids all the time.
Aside from teaching, Talke is working on a number of research programs at PSU. The project with Jay is one that looks at the long term changes to tidal dynamics, or looking at how the tides in rivers change over time.
“It’s been observed that tidal properties are not constant, and in the eastern Pacific—our part of the world—the tidal range and the properties of the tides have been increasing over the past century or so,” Talke said. “[I]t’s not really known why, so there’s this mystery we’re trying to solve.”
Though there are many ways Talke and Jay are looking at this mystery, one thing they’re doing is looking for lost data.
“It turns out that there’s a lost generation of data from the 19th century that’s not on any website—it’s been forgotten, more or less,” Talke said.
But he went on to explain that, though the information is not available online, it can be found in old archives.
Talke and a student researcher recently went to Astoria, Ore., where they found original tide data from 1853–76. These archives contained hundreds of what can basically be called scrolls.
Each scroll is about 60 to 70 feet long and has a pencil trace of the tide over a one month period. This was done for about 25 years.
Talke took photographs of these scrolls, and is now working to digitize them and find uses for the data they contain.
“The hope is that once we have that, we’ll be able to say something about the evolution of tidal properties in the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean,” Talke said.