Recently in General Category

Since my beginning as a Post-Doc at the University of Maine's EML, I had several opportunities to travel to the west coast... not just to brag about how much more quaint and authentic New-England is, but mostly to share and do my work...  Today I'm back west once again, staying in the Friday Harbor Labs of the University of Washington.  This time is my first participation to a more focused and high-level workshop with seasoned oceanographers under the theme "Global Ocean Ecosystems and Climate".

But before the hardcore science begins, it's time for a short follow-up on a previous blog entry from Andy, while he was traveling this area a year ago.  Andy took an air-borne picture of the northwest part of San Juan Island (Henry Island's shape is unmistakable), and the actual route taken by my own ferry.  Andy is an accomplished oceanographer (and incidentally my boss), so please praise with me his instinctive analysis, in which he correctly guessed that the difference in surface waters' reflectance was caused by oily algae products.

The first picture below shows the intricate smooth and rough surface water features he talked about from a ferry's deck point of view.

The second, though a little blurred, shows what's in the slicks: algae washed off from the shore!

Add these two blog entries and you get the idea behind modern oceanography. Just replace the iPhone shot from a plane by a few $M satellite sensor and a couple of unreliable Canon PowerShot pictures with a few $100K scientific sampling cruise. Now you know how oceanographic knowledge is acquired and validated.  Next step, integrate everything and fill the gaps with models... Hey, that's what we happen to do in the EML!

 

Stay tuned for daily updates on this workshop (that's my resolve, for now...).

 

Here's a quick video of a few Atlantic white-sides escorting us into casco bay last weekend.

Darkstar dolphins from peter stetson on Vimeo.

One of water's great features is its ability to absorb many kinds of radiation.  For example, ultraviolet light, the kind of light that gives your a sunburn and tries really hard to destroy your DNA, can only penetrate a few centimeters below the ocean's surface.  Visible light fares better than UV, but visibility in clear water is limited to only about 100m.  While water's ability to absorb radiation allowed life to evolve on our planet (thanks water!), it also means that mammals like us who rely on visual cues are limited in the water.

My last post was all about the distances that I'd travelled being an oceanographer.
Well, I've now left the lab in Maine, and I'm on a research cruise in the Bering
Sea. We left Dutch Harbor (of Deadliest Catch fame) on the 16th July, and we'll be
out here for a month. Dutch is very much like Portland - a working waterfront, heavy
on the fishing. The big difference, apart from the cold, is that they don't really
have any seagulls. They have things a lot bigger...

I'll post later with some details about what the hell I'm doing up here, and also to
put more cool pictures up.

Well, I thought that I could get away with it, but I was wrong. I've been here since the end of March, and I've avoided writing in the EML blog. Not intentionally, I hasten to add... well, maybe a bit. Doesn't mean I haven't been reading it though!

I've been here on a short term contract, working on the sea surface photogrammetry project. But it's not the project that I decided to write about. Based on a comment made by Andy in my presentation yesterday, I wanted to write a bit more about the size of oceans. Andy (here) and Pete (here) both recently wrote about sizes, and what they compared to, so I figured that I'd join in.

I've been lucky enough to travel to most corners of the world for my work. I started in Bangor (North Wales, not Maine) where I did my undergrad, and then headed to Dunedin, New Zealand for my Masters. Total separation: 11889 miles, or in keeping with weird comparative measurements from previous posts, 382662 Olympic Swimming Pools (OSPs), 174369 American Football Fields (AFFs), or my favourite, 1.12415 x 10^7 Smoots, plus or minus one ear. If you think that is the longest distance travelled by an oceanographer, keep reading!

After New Zealand, I headed to Bermuda (a mere 9411 miles, 302902 OSPs, 138024 AFFs, or 8.89842 x 10^6 Smoots) where I worked on the BATS project for several years. That's the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study. Nothing to do with flying, squeaking furry mammals. That was a multi-disciplinary project that studied the full ocean depth just off Bermuda. Full ocean depth was 4200m, or 2 and a bit miles, or half the height of Mt Everest. The project had run for over 20 years, and in that time the various ships had travelled the equivalent distance of once round the world at the equator, or about 25,500 miles!

The coolest thing about studying there was when I found out that water can be given an age depending on its depth. At 4200m, the water hasn't been on the surface for nearly 1000 years! It just gives you an idea of how much information the deep ocean can give us. BATS was only one point in the ocean. We actually know more about the far side of the moon than we know about the deep ocean.

Anyway, enough digressing to small distances. Not satisfied with 3 continents, I moved on to my fourth. I worked for a year in Brazil, which was 4046 miles, 130219 OSPs, 59337 AFFs or 3.82547 x 10^6 Smoots from Bermuda. The work there was for an oil company, and we used scientific equipment to look at currents and density changes, helping to plan the locations of pipelines. Not quite as deep as BATS; we only studied to 2200m.

Staying with oil, but moving to just the surface, I came to the EMLab at GMRI (4916 miles, 158238 OSPs, 72105 AFFs, or 4.64860 x 10^6 Smoots), which brings us back to the beginning of the blog post. There's still one more step for me though. I leave here tomorrow, 11 June, and I'll be heading cross country to Alaska to start my Ph.D. I've got a 12 day drive to look forward to, where I'll be covering at least 103072 OSPs, 46967 AFFs, 3.02798 x 10^6 Smoots, or in plain English, about 3202 miles as the crow flies.

I got in to oceanography for the chance to travel. In the ten years since I started at University, I've been to 4 continents and travelled the equivalent distance of 1.1 million Olympic swimming pools, nearly half a million American Football Fields, or 31.6 million times the height of poor Oliver Smoot. Hm? In English? I've gone about 33,500 miles in ten years, which is half as much again as the BATS ships managed in 20 years.

Become an oceanographer. See the world. No really, you will.

The Smoot - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot

A fun part of being a grad student, is making bonds beyond the regular "have-to-share-the-same-open-area-office" friendship. The challenges to overcome are so tough, the emotions shared are so strong than you can never break those bonds. So last week was emotional for me, as I assisted to the Ph.D. thesis defence of my last two buddies from my grad school modeling lab.

Both worked on the Hudson Bay system, a very exciting environment to work on. It's the southernmost Arctic sea, a transition zone between the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean at the forefront of the impacts of the current global warming.

Pierre St-Laurent defended brilliantly the 17th of May his thesis entitled "Variabilité saisonnière et interannuelle des eaux douces dans les mers Arctiques : Le cas de la baie d'Hudson".

Pierre showed the audience how the fresh-water budget is regulated in the Hudson Bay. He tackled both liquid and solid (seasonal sea-ice) aspects of it. As an example of how great a tool is modeling in a well formed scientific mind, he first studied this issue with a realistic high resolution sea-ice / ocean 3-D circulation model of the Hudson Bay, developed in the numerical modeling lab of ISMER in Rimouski.

He then constructed an idealized system to sort out the relative importance of the various hydrological, atmospheric and oceanic forcing.

This allowed him to demonstrate for the first time the role of changing wind regimes in the periodic retention/expulsion of fresh water from the Hudson Bay towards the North-West Atlantic.

Pierre will soon lend his brain as a post-doc to the Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA

(He's too modest to agree for me to tell you that there is a tenure track position attached at the end of his 3 years as post-doc).

Virginie Sibert defended not less brilliantly the 20th of May her thesis entitled "Modélisation de la variabilité saisonnière et de la sensibilité au climat des productions glacielle et pélagique de la baie d'Hudson".

Virginie managed to build a model of primary and secondary production within the sea-ice in Hudson Bay.

She coupled this to the ice compartment of the same high-resolution 3-D circulation model than Pierre. After characterizing the spatio-temporal patterns of this system, she coupled it further with an NPZD pelagic production model to have a complete picture of the primary production in the system.

View image

After a rigorous validation process which guaranteed a good confidence in the model results, she finally tested one of the IPCC scenario of climate change (A2) for the Hudson Bay system.

A nice outcome of her work is that the Hudson Bay system would not, for its most part, pass a tipping point yet. Primary production of both ice algea and phytoplankton would increase, even if their respective blooms would occur sooner in the season.

Virginie has already brought her talent and charm as a post-doc in the IFREMER lab of Brest, France.

A video of the past 5 days of construction on our bulkhead:

Bulkhead Construction, May 10-14 from Nicholas Record on Vimeo.

I want to quickly share a couple of snapshots from my trip to Halifax last week.

The main purpose of the trip was a day with Brooke Ocean / Odim / Rolls-Royce -- the maker of our LOPC (that's LASER optical plankton counter; see previous posts).  Our instrument was under repair/upgrading.  I had a very nice visit, and a productive day.  They greeted me with Timbits and showed me around the facility.  Then we went to work on the LOPC.  Here is a picture of the guts of one:



Ours was opened up like a surgery patient.  By the end of the day, we got everything smoothly working.  Let's hope we have the same luck when we're bobbing at sea.  Hijinks to follow later this summer.

While I was in Halifax, I stopped by the Bedford Institute of Oceanography.  I had a very productive day there as well--some great jam sessions with other scientists.  It's good to get out of my bubble and add some new sparks to ideas that are starting to go into dormancy.  One of the best parts of visiting a DFO building is touring the labs.  Here are a couple of snapshots.

Today, I just turned 31.

I was born in a world where the ratio of our Ecological Footprint (EF) to the Biocapacity (BC) of the planet was still below one, around 0.9 (Niccolucci et al. 2009). This simple metric means that I was born in a world where the total demand of humanity remained within the regenerative capacity of the Earth. The economic metaphor is probably timely nowadays: in 1979, we could still live on the dividends in the form of renewable flows of ecological resources and services, without touching the ecological capital. This is not the case anymore. Today, we are in a situation of serious ecological debt. This debt built up as the exponentially increasing human population and standard of life since the end of WWII consumed more and more natural resources which could not be compensated by the natural capacity of production of the ecosystems (I'm not even talking about non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels).

This situation of chronic ecological deficit led from the mid 80's to a depletion of the ecological capital, hampering its recuperation. For example, if some fish stocks are overexploited, the following year the marine ecosystems will be able to produce less fish, from which however it is still expected to replenish the stocks while sustaining our fisheries. Unfortunately, contrary to its economic counterpart, an ecological debt cannot be bailed out until we find another habitable planet.

So what do we do? Because humans are swarming and agitating more and more every day, we should agitate in the right direction. One out of several promising avenues has its roots in the very functioning of ecosystems. What if we get rid of the concept of waste ? Simple and feasible, according to the American designer McDonough and the German chemist Michael Braungart who elaborated a complete economic philosophy around the concept of "cradle to cradle", first put forth in the 70's. The idea is to design from the conception products that will circle again and again in the production lines. Out the plastic clips, in the stainless steel screws.

Use the type on the left (a great canadian design...), and not the incredibly dumb one-way head on the right, please !

Today, I enjoyed my birthday party with my two children. They were born at a time when the ecological debt we created was steadily increasing. Incidentally, we watched together "Happy Feet". It's a sign, when a popular kids movie depicts humans as aliens pillaging the ecosystem of Antarctica... My wish this year is to begin the journey toward a future where my kids will witness the ending of this movie coming true (Just watch it, it's a fair animated musical...).