Meet the scientists and their underwater drones tackling the ‘weirdly complicated’ world of ocean carbon | 24CA News
It’s that rarest of uncommon situations alongside coastal Newfoundland: a lifeless calm day.
By 7 a.m., the crew aboard the fishing boat Belle of the Bay are taking full benefit of it, steaming out of the harbour in Heart’s Content beneath dazzling July sunshine, with their sights set on a prized catch in the course of Trinity Bay.
It’s not fish they’re after. The object awaiting them seems like a mashup between a torpedo, a banana, and a Dash 8 — a sort of underwater drone, referred to as a glider.
“This isn’t the regular kind of job that I would recommend for people that don’t like to be challenged. It’s a mission,” mentioned Nicolai von Oppeln-Bronikowski, the pinnacle of Memorial University’s glider operations.
“I think everybody that works with gliders sees themselves, in one way or the other, on a mission.”
Today’s mission to retrieve that glider — nicknamed Migaloo, after a humpback whale — is a crew effort. It combines the scientific lens of von Oppeln-Bronikowski and analysis assistant Sarik Shaikh-Upadhye, with the fishing father-son duo of Doug and Kyle Piercey, who’ve loaned their boat and experience to Memorial University glider analysis for almost a decade.
“It’s not light,” Doug Piercey says as he and von Oppeln-Bronikowski heave the 1.5 metre-long Migaloo out of the bay. The two test it over, paying specific consideration to a prototype sensor hooked up to it like a little bit scientific backpack.
“This is the pH sensor right there, that the whole fuss is about,” mentioned von Oppeln-Bronikowski.
At first look, Migaloo and its sensor are intact, marking the first milestone in a year-long effort everybody on the boat merely refers to as ACOP: the Atlantic Carbon Observatory Pilot Program.
“ACOP is sort of a small stepping stone in terms of advancing our ability to make more measurements of CO2 [in the ocean],” mentioned von Oppeln-Bronikowski.
‘Where is a lot of the carbon on our planet?’
Those measurements are badly wanted as carbon dioxide emissions within the environment proceed to climb.
“If you ask the question, where is most of the carbon on our planet? The answer is, it’s in the ocean,” mentioned Brad deYoung, a bodily oceanographer at Memorial University and lead researcher with ACOP.
The world’s oceans are an unlimited carbon sink — absorbing anyplace from 1 / 4 to a 3rd of the carbon dioxide we pump into the environment.
Atlantic Voice26:10Migaloo’s Mission
Loads of the carbon dioxide pumped into the environment results in our oceans, notably the North Atlantic. We head out on a Newfoundland expedition utilizing underwater drones attempt to reply urgent scientific questions, like: why is the North Atlantic so good at absorbing carbon, and the way way more can it maintain?
“What that means for us, in a planetary sense is, that the rise that we see of the CO2 in the atmosphere is a lot less than it would otherwise be if there were no ocean. So the ocean plays a big role in mitigating and slowing down the pace of climate change,” mentioned deYoung.
But precisely how a lot carbon the ocean has absorbed — and the place its restrict to take action might lie — are a few of the many unknowns on this space of oceanography,
“Carbon in the ocean is weirdly complicated,” mentioned deYoung.
Unlike issues like temperature, deYoung mentioned, “sensors to measure various aspects of [ocean] carbon are not so easy to build, not so reliable, and just not as well developed. So, the carbon observatory is basically a platform where we can test and and actually use the instruments.”
Migaloo’s pH sensor, taking inventory of acidity, is one such ACOP instrument. Carbon makes the ocean extra acidic, and checking pH is one method to attempt to pinpoint carbon uptake.
The Labrador Sea lung
There’s an worldwide scientific effort wanting into these carbon questions, and ACOP — which includes an array of companions, together with Dalhousie University and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans — is, for now, focusing its consideration on the coastal waters off Newfoundland and Labrador.
Because because it seems, one factor science has pinpointed is that some areas of the world’s oceans are higher at absorbing carbon than others. The North Atlantic is one such spot, with the Labrador Sea — that distant stretch of water between Labrador and Greenland — a specific star, thanks partially to its usually stormy floor appearing as a form of lung.
“Think of the ocean as kind of reaching up to the atmosphere in the Labrador Sea, and breathing and extracting carbon dioxide and oxygen out of the atmosphere,” mentioned deYoung.
DeYoung and his crew want to fly their gliders into the Labrador Sea to gather beneficial ocean carbon knowledge. While that may be collected by scientists aboard ships, there are massive drawbacks to that work.
Research ships are briefly provide in Canada, and getting a spot on a mission that does exit is extraordinarily pricey. Plus, such missions within the Labrador Sea occur principally in the summertime, and ACOP desires to know what’s occurring within the winter, when temperatures plunge, winds rage and waves common 15 metres excessive — and the carbon uptake is considered increased.
“It’s a very challenging place to make measurements … and at the same time, it’s absolutely critical that we make measurements there. It’s a catch-22,” mentioned von Oppeln-Bronikowski.
DeYoung recalled one notorious ship-based winter mission to the Labrador Sea, the place “in 65 days at sea they got one day of useful work. That’s not a very good way to get work done.”
This is the place autonomous automobile know-how, like gliders, turns out to be useful.
“[They’ve] definitely changed the game,” mentioned Uta Passow, a organic oceanographer at MUN and one other member of the ACOP crew.
Gliders do must floor to transmit info again to ready researchers, however they spend nearly all of their time underwater and are in a position to dodge a whole lot of tough waters in a approach ships merely cannot. Plus, they will roam across the ocean, whereas ship-based measurements are confined to 1 spot, at one cut-off date.
“These autonomous vehicles like … gliders or observatories, they will increase our data input by orders of magnitude and will hopefully allow us to make predictions,” mentioned Passow.
“If we want to make predictions that are reliable, we really need to understand how the ocean will respond to climate change, and if it will continue to take up carbon, or take up more carbon in the future, or less carbon. So we really need to understand the carbon cycle and we don’t at the time.”
In an period of local weather nervousness and uncertainty, it is scary to think about that lack of expertise on the highest stage of experience. But for deYoung, hope lies in tasks like ACOP.
“The question now is, should we throw up our hands and say, ‘oh, my gosh, this is just such a big problem,'” mentioned deYoung.
“And that’s not a reasonable response. I think part of what we argue is, let’s document what’s happening, so we understand where the the critical spaces are and how we can perhaps adapt.”
The Atlantic Carbon Observatory Pilot Program runs till mid-2023; its crew hopes {that a} everlasting carbon observatory can come up out of it — one which would come with worldwide teamwork — to proceed to chip away at its ocean carbon questions.
