A ski bum at heart, University of Utah scientist Tom Painter is a two-time college dropout who still managed to figure out how to get paid and engage his mind while exploring the mountains on skis. Instead of running ski lifts, Painter studies snow reflectivity, known as albedo, to determine how pollution and dust deposition speeds snowmelt.
    Painter's research will be the subject Thursday of the opening presentation, titled "When Deserts and Mountains Collide," of this year's "Nature of Things: Exploring Our Place in a Changing World" lecture series. The Utah Museum of Natural History stages the series, which also will feature acclaimed authors Gary Nabhan and Michael Pollan, through April. The lectures will be simulcast on the public radio station KCPW-FM 88.3 and, except for Pollan's lecture, will be free and held at the Salt Lake City Main Library.
    A conservationist and naturalist of international renown, Nabhan is the former director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and a leading advocate for native plant agriculture. His Feb. 21 lecture address ways to bridge the cultural divide between rural and urban America.
    Painter lasted one semester at the U. his freshman year while operating ski lifts, but his experiences at Snowbird in the presence of the resort's legendary snow safety chief Liam Fitzgerald planted the seeds for a career in snow hydrology. He has worked for the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, where he studied snow albedo in the San Juan Mountains and discovered troubling indications that human activity is wreaking havoc with the snowpack, which is disappearing from the mountains much earlier than it should.
    "We've always known that dust and pollutants cause the snow to melt faster, but nobody ever quantified it over the duration of a season to see what impact it is [having] on the snowpack," he said. "Lots of lines of evidence indicate that dust emission has increased dramatically in the West. Seventy percent of the region has been disturbed by grazing and dryland agriculture. It's a very fragile desert surface out there that has been very heavily disturbed."
    Snow dirtied by wind-driven dust melts faster because it absorbs more solar radiation, thereby warming faster in the spring. The early melt-off not only affects mountain ecology, but human interests.
    "You would rather [have] that water stored in those mountains longer. If you could get it to come out less abruptly, water storage and use would be more efficient and hydroelectric generation would be more sustained," Painter said. "By removing the snow cover that much earlier, the ground surface is exposed to the elements and loses soil moisture more rapidly."
    Painter returned to the U. last semester, this time as an assistant professor of geography and to focus his snow-albedo studies on the Wasatch.
    "I plan to spend a lot of time in the snow," he said. "Because of that I feel I'm one of the luckiest people in the planet. I have a job I love."