Lees' work erupts on television

The three-foot-tall poster on the back wall of Jonathan Lees' office is dominated by Tungurahua, a massive rocky volcano that dwarfs a comparatively miniscule village below. The active vent billows smoke into the blue sky, threatening the people living 6,000 feet down in its shadow.

A recent Discovery Channel documentary starred two geophysicists, Pete Hall and Patty Mothes, and focused on their study of Tungurahua in Ecuador. As a world-renowned seismologist, Lees, an associate professor in geological sciences at Carolina, assisted them by recording tremors inside the volcano and measuring acoustic waves caused by explosions -- and he was featured in several scenes of the documentary.

Where did this all take place? Lees pointed to a spot on the poster less than 1,000 feet from the peak and the billowing smoke. "We were right here."

The documentary, which premiered Jan. 20, was what Lees called a "dramatic" representation of the work geologists do: recording seismological data, measuring the severity of explosions and attempting to forecast major eruptions.

In the case of Tungurahua, the people of Banos, the town at its base, were evacuated in 1999. They fled based on the advice of Hall and Mothes -- in anticipation of a major natural disaster that never occurred. The residents returned to their homes three months later despite the fact that the volcano remains active to this day.

The documentary this story inspired focused on these scientists' efforts to monitor Tungurahua and use their data for more practical problems -- such as the safety of the Banos residents. Lees took part in the data-gathering at the site of the volcano and left others to interpret the numbers and make recommendations to the people in the area.

"As a scientist, I'm interested in the physics and the dynamics of the volcano, so I don't concern myself generally with hazard reduction or hazard mitigation," he said. "There are people who are experts at that and they do that. But they use the information that we provide them about the conditions of the volcano to help them decide on those aspects of it."

Lees has traveled to volcanoes around the world, including Russia, Japan and Italy, since he began recording data on the dynamics of explosions in 1996. When he worked in Italy, in the summer of 2001, several Carolina students accompanied him and experienced practical seismology firsthand.

The Discovery Channel paid for Lees' trip to Ecuador, so he was obligated first to perform his role in the documentary and second to collect useful data. One of the few major explosions of the volcano during his three days on Tungurahua came as the team was climbing the mountain. Lees quickly unpacked his instruments to record tremors from any subsequent explosions, but the mountain fell silent. Because of his short stay on the peak, he was unable to collect enough data to be useful at that time.

He would often set up his equipment but have to wait in the rain "for the photographers to change their lenses or to change the film or to get the right lighting or whatever," he said. "In the meantime, I'm recording my data. It was hard work to do that."

Many important scenes, in Lees' opinion, were left out of the film while less important -- but more dramatic -- scenes were included or taken out of context in the final documentary. The purpose of the film, he felt, became less about its scientific value and more about entertainment. The average viewer, the Discovery Channel seemed to assume, would not understand or be interested in the technical aspects of the data collection.

Lees plans to use his experience in Ecuador and the documentary for a discussion with his colleagues about truth in scientific television. The "Hollywood clichés" and scene-shuffling left Lees a little disappointed with the final product.

"That's sometimes disconcerting for a scientist because as scientists, we have a very strong allegiance to what we think of as the truth," he said. "And when you distort that by taking sequences out of context and inserting them elsewhere in order to get a dramatic effect, that seems somewhat dishonest."