Category Archives: Climate Change

October 11: BS3 Mooring

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The BS3 Mooring coming down the Port side of the ship after being released from its anchor

 

After continuing our sampling through the night, it was time to recover the BS3 mooring in the waters northeast of Barrow.  The recovery of the mooring is quite an impressive process.  This mooring was deployed on last year’s cruise and has been taking measurements of the water column for the past year creating an incredible data set that is key to understanding the Arctic shelf ecosystem.  The instruments on the mooring have been collecting various measurements including temperature, salinity, nitrate, pCO2, and pH.

 

Everyone is anxious to get back to the lab to look at the data collected from these instruments and create a picture of what the water column looked like for the past year, from the open water of the fall through the ice-covered winter through the spring and summer melt until now.  The changing ocean conditions affect the measurements tremendously as do currents and upwellings that occur seasonally in this area.  By understanding these variables, the scientists can better understand what will happen when there is less ice in the future due to the warming climate.

 

Preparing the snowy deck for the recovery of the mooring

 

The small boat hooks a line from the boat onto the buoy

 

The first part of the mooring coming on board. The pCO2 censor is on the chain behind.

 

Successful recovery of the mooring!

 

Dr. Jeremy Mathis with his pCO2 censor from the mooring…excited to see the data!

 

The mooring will be re-deployed in the coming days to collect data for the next year.

 

Profile: Jessica Cross

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The key to getting research accomplished both in the field and in the lab is a good team.  Dr. Jeremy Mathis has put together a stellar group of young scientists in his Ocean Acidification Research Center (OARC) at University of Alaska-Fairbanks.  I am having the pleasure of working with and learning from two of his current students while on board, Jessica Cross, a PhD student, and Stacy Reisdorph, a Masters student.  Jessica and I sat down for a little chemistry lesson last night before she went on watch and I learned all about her research and her path to studying ocean chemistry…

 

Jessica takes a water sample after a deep cast

 

The USCGC Healy has become like a second home to Jessica as she has spent, in the past two years, more than 200 days aboard sailing mostly in the Bering Sea in order to collect data for her PhD research.  A few years ago, when Jessica was a freshman at Rhodes College in Tennessee, she would never have imagined herself studying chemistry, let alone oceanography, as her first passions were books and writing.  Now entering her fourth year of her PhD, she can’t imagine doing anything else and shows giddy excitement for ocean chemistry and endless enthusiasm for her work.  Spending all of those days at sea after her initial coursework gave her a thorough understanding of basic oceanographic concepts and she explains how there is no better way to learn than to be at sea with other scientists who are willing to share their knowledge and experience.  In the short time I have been at sea with Jessica, it is clear that she knows how to get work done efficiently and enjoys collecting samples for not just her own research but for the lab as a whole.

Jessica’s work focuses on ocean acidification in the Bering Sea as part of the Bering Ecosystem Study project (BEST).  (Note: GOE participated in a BEST cruise in April/May 2008 in the Bering Sea…see Bering Sea Ice Expedition for more details)  Jessica has been collecting and analyzing water samples from the Bering Sea for Dissolved Organic Carbon (DIC) and Alkalinity in order to determine the pH (measurement of acidity) of the water.  Armed with this knowledge, she then can figure out the carbonate saturation state that is vital to the shell-building animals of the ocean, and in the Bering Sea in particular, the King Crab. The Bering Sea is a particularly interesting system, as is the Arctic Ocean, because of the variety of water mixing from river outflows, deepwater upwelling, surface water and ice melt creating an acidic environment in its natural state of equilibrium due to these various natural inflows of carbon dioxide.  The question for the present and the future, is whether the increased anthropogenic carbon dioxide, and in turn the decreased pH in the Bering Sea, will affect the animals’ ability to adapt to their changing environment?  Jessica seeks to quantify these changes and her excitement for the work is contagious.

 

 

October 8 & 9: 24 hour operations

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Recovering a mooring recording the sounds of the Arctic

 

We are in the middle of the first phase of the cruise which consists of recovering and deploying moorings in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.  Most of these moorings have been on the bottom of the ocean collecting data since being deployed on last year’s cruises.  It is amazing to think about the time series of data that these instruments are collecting.  There are a variety of moorings being deployed and recovered, collecting all kinds of data, from physical oceanography data, to chlorophyll measurements to acoustic data listening for passing mammals.  So much can be learned from these instruments because they are in situ for so long monitoring the changes throughout the year.

Mooring operations must be completed in daylight so we have been doing CTD casts all night and the mooring ops and any necessary transiting during the day.  Ship time is valuable so all minutes and hours of the day must be used efficiently.  We have a few more days of mooring ops to complete before moving on to the second phase of the cruise which will consist of 24 hour a day CTD casts and water sampling!

 

 

October 7: Distributed Biological Observatory

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Shortly after midnight, with the lights of Barrow glowing in the distance, we arrived at our next sampling line, the DBO line.

 

Deploying the CTD rosette with Barrow glowing in the distance

 

The DBO or Distributed Biological Observatory is an Arctic biological time series designed by Dr. Jackie Grebmeier from the University of Maryland (http://arctic.cbl.umces.edu/) to look at core oceanographic parameters such as temperature and nutrients in regional hotspots in the Arctic throughout the year.  This line consists of eight stations in the waters just offshore of Barrow crossing Barrow Canyon.  This time series is based on the cooperation of various research ships from the USA, Canada, Russia, China and Japan, committing to sample this line when they are operating in the Chukchi Sea.  I wanted to make sure to highlight the DBO in the blog because of the magnitude of importance of this kind of multi-national cooperation amongst scientists.  This collaboration and cooperation allows the collection of a tremendous data set that creates an annual and seasonal time series that will be able to quantify the changes to this important Arctic Ocean ecosystem in the face of climate change.

 

Map of DBO Lines (from http://pag.arcticportal.org)

 

 

The Expedition…

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In response to the imminent threat of climate change on the ocean, this expedition, the first National Science Foundation funded of its kind, will head to the Western Arctic Ocean to study ocean acidification. Human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use practices have led to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and uptake of carbon by the ocean. These increased carbon dioxide concentrations lead to a decrease in the average pH of the surface waters of the ocean, a process called ocean acidification. The purpose of this expedition is to directly address questions of how human-induced climate change is affecting ocean chemistry in the Western Arctic Ocean.

The cold waters of the high latitudes are particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification due to increased solubility of carbon dioxide at low temperatures and low carbonate ion concentrations due to mixing patterns. This increased uptake in carbon dioxide along with the loss of sea ice and high rates of primary productivity over the continental shelves lead to increased ocean acidification in the Arctic Ocean and marginal seas. The rapid rates of change facing the high latitudes may have profound impacts on many organisms, particularly calcifying organisms that form calcium carbonate shells and hence need calcium carbonate minerals such as aragonite and calcite. Because of the sensitivity of these high latitude ecosystems to ocean acidification and their accelerated rates of change compared to lower latitudes, they become a real-time laboratory for understanding the changes and impacts of climate change on organisms and their possible cascading effects on the foodweb.

This study will be the first comprehensive assessment of the impacts of physical and biogeochemical processes on carbonate mineral saturation states and ocean acidification in the western Arctic Ocean and provide fundamental data for the understanding of ocean carbon cycle dynamics in the Pacific sector of the Arctic Ocean.

 

 

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Heading to the Arctic!!!

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I am sitting in Anchorage as I write this post having just arrived here this afternoon.  I am on my way to join Dr. Jeremy Mathis of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and a team of scientists aboard the US Coast Guard Cutter Healy on an expedition studying the effects of climate change on ocean chemistry, particularly ocean acidification. I am flying out to Dutch Harbor tomorrow where we will board the ship and head North through the Bering Strait and into the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.  It should be a great expedition!


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