These days, when you visit a seaside village full of scientists, there’s one obvious question to ask them: What is humanity doing to the oceans – and by extension, to the whole planet?
That question breaks down into a thousand other concerns: How would an unusually intense storm like the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635 affect residents of the East Coast today? How long do the disastrous effects of oil spills really linger? Can we tweak Earth’s own natural systems to scrub the atmosphere of excess carbon dioxide? (Probably not fast enough to keep up with carbon emissions, unfortunately.)
If there was a dominant theme to last week’s KSJ trek to Woods Hole, MA, the challenge of climate change was it. Like so many classes of Knight Fellows before them, the 2014-15 Fellows spent two nights and two days in Woods Hole, visiting the town’s twin giants: the Marine Biological Laboratory and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. (Not to mention Captain Kidd and Landfall.) A parade of top local researchers turned out to talk with the Fellows, including Jerry Melillo, a biogeochemistry researcher at MBL who recently chaired the scientific committee that prepared the third National Climate Assessment for the Obama Administration, and Scott Doney, chair of WHOI’s marine chemistry department, who was lead author of the climate assessment’s chapter on oceans and marine resources.
Melillo told the Fellows that the main message of the climate assessment was four-fold: “Climate change is happening now, much of it is human-driven, it is affecting people and economies, and there are things we can do about it.” Melillo said it’s partly true, as observers like Paul Krugman have been arguing lately, that fighting global warming could turn out to be cheaper than we thought, and perhaps even economically beneficial. But Melillo said “there are also going to be some losers,” such as the miners who will likely lose their jobs if governments act to shutter more coal-burning power plants. “We have to recognize that, make some provision for those losers, and incorporate them into the gains.”
At WHOI, Doney is leading a new Macarthur Foundation-funded project to study the intersecting effects of population growth, human perturbation of the atmosphere, and ocean acidification on coastal communities. He noted that tide gauge records at Woods Hole show that sea levels have already risen by 25 centimeters since 1930. This swelling of the oceans, as the atmosphere warms and ice sheets melt, is only expected to accelerate in coming decades, with effects that aren’t that hard to foresee. “As sea level rises you get a gradual inundation of the land,” Doney said. “Year after year the tides will be a little bit higher and you’ll get a little more flooding. In a hurricane, you get a storm surge: a wall of water, pushed by winds and because of low pressure under the storm. If you increase the base level through sea level rise, it makes [coastal inundation] worse, even if the storms are the same size.”
Doney’s research group is building Web-based tools to help residents and government officials in coastal areas visualize what would happen to their areas if storms like those in 1635 (which caused a 21-foot storm surge), 1938 (11.5 feet) or 1954 (14.5 feet) hit today. It’s also partnering with citizen-scientist groups such as the Buzzards Bay Coalition to collect samples to document the rate of ocean acidification and nitrogen pollution. (About one quarter of the carbon dioxide humans add to the atmosphere is absorbed by seawater, forming carbonic acid, while excess nitrogen from fertilizer or sewage systems leads to algal blooms and a decline in oxygen level.)
The interplay between humans and the oceans wasn’t the only topic of discussion during the Knight Fellows’ visit, of course. One of the strengths that distinguishes the Marine Biological Laboratory, which recently became part of the University of Chicago, is its long history of using marine organisms as models for the study of fundamental biological processes. The Knight Fellows toured MBL’s Marine Resources Center, temporary home to numerous sea creatures such as skates, whose egg cases are used in studies of embryogenesis, as well as the National Xenopus Resource, where MBL maintains a huge variety of frog stocks for use in genetic studies. And they got a direct look at tiny, transparent C. elegans roundworms in a basement lab where Yale researchers Daniel Colon-Ramos and Mark Moyle are using a new type of microscope, designed by their colleague Hari Shroff, to image the development of the worms’ neural circuits at single-cell resolution.
At WHOI, meanwhile, Adam Soule, a volcanologist serving as the institution’s chief scientist for deep submergence, talked about the contrasting styles of exploration enabled by Alvin, WHOI’s flagship human-occupied undersea vehicle, and Jason, its main remotely operated vehicle. Alvin, now 50 years old, is in the midst of a major upgrade that has, so far, resulted in the addition of a larger personnel capsule, improved navigation and imaging systems, and other improvements.
Alvin is expensive to build, maintain, and use, and it’s currently limited to a depth of 4,500 feet, while Jason can explore down to 6,500 feet. That prompts some observers to wonder whether there’s really a need to send humans to great depths. But “Every time we go somewhere we haven’t been, we find things that are unexpected,” such as organisms around thermal vents that don’t depend on photosynthesis for energy, Soule pointed out to the Fellows.
You can see a few photos from our trip, captured by KSJ’s digital media training coordinator Patrick Wellever, here. While the weather wasn’t sufficiently cooperative this year to allow us to shoot much video, you can check out this poetic video picture of activities around MBL shot in March and April 2013 by Pablo Correa, a 2012-13 Knight Fellow from Bogota, Colombia.
