#EarthDayAtHome with Oceanographers Ivona Cetinic and James Fox

Hi, my name is Ivona, I am an oceanographer at NASA Godard, and, hi, I’m James Fox. I’m an oceanographer at Oregon State University. So both of us kind of work and NASA funded projects that study ocean specifically to do with ocean life and the way to carbon flow is in the ocean. So we kind of met on a project they’re working together it’s called EXPORTS. It’s a large field campaign that’s looking at how does the carbon that exists in the surface of the ocean transported into deeper ocean.

Yeah 00:31 - I mainly study phytoplankton, so those are the kind of small plants that live in the surface of the ocean, and I look at how much photosynthesis they do. You have something awesome to share with people that are home, stuck as we are, but they can use to kind of learn about the carbon cycle, so take it away. What I did is I created a game that people can play that kind of takes you through that journey in a kind of Chutes ‘n 25 00:00:58,500 –> 00:01:02,190 Ladders way. And there are a few different activities that you can do to kind of learn more about the different steps that carbon can take and about the different organisms that are involved in the transport of the carbon. But what we can do today is we can go and of go through ways that you can use this at home and talk them through the different steps of the game and the rules that explain all the different steps and all the different activities are on the second page. So we start here. Yeah, we start with the photic layer.

That’s the part of the 01:37 - ocean that has sunlight, and that’s the part of the ocean that we see from the satellites. And from the biological perspective, you know, for you and me at least it’s the most important part because that’s what the carbon enters into the biological sphere of the ocean. That’s where the phytoplankton, these teeny-tiny algies, the teeny-tiny plants that we’ve you know studied live. And thanks to the process of photosynthesis and the presence of sunlight, they’re capable of converting this carbon dioxide into the organic carbon and then turns into these different portions of the oceanic food web and then they transferred down towards the twilight zone. That kind of like starts us up there in the surface of the ocean.

So if we would 02:21 - jump to Activity One, what would happen there? Okay so Activity One is focused very much on the phytoplankton. So one of the amazing things about phytoplankton is that even though these organisms are microscopic–you really need a microscope to be able to see them because they’re only a few micrometers, a lot of them– they are so abundant in the surface layer of the ocean that we can actually see them from space. So the first activity is a bit more of a discussion activity. I want to talk with the participants about how they think that we can actually see these microscopic organisms from space using satellites, and that’s obviously something that you’re very much involved with. Yeah, and this is actually something cool that people can go and explore if they go on the NASA website and just wander off to the ocean color website.

03:17 - There’s so many activities they can learn about how we see things from space. I mean these are plants, and think about what color the plants are–green. So similar to the plants on land or plants in the ocean, they have this green pigment called chlorophyll, which allows them to convert this carbon dioxide to the organic form. And you know if you add something green in the water, going to start being greener. That’s what we see from space. It’s our first step to seeing things from space just to detect the greenness of the ocean, and from there on we can see how much of these phytoplankton is there in the ocean.

03:49 - Exactly, and to jump back to this other page so one great resource that NASA has put together as part of their promotion for the PACE program, which is a new satellite that will going up soon. It’s a new mission. You can do a quiz online, and you can decide or you can take the quiz and you’ll find out what kind of phytoplankton you are because there are thousands of different phytoplankton in a number of different taxonomic groups and they all have kind of different characteristics. So you can go there and you can learn there, and you can learn what different phytoplankton there are and which one is most like you in terms of its behavior and its characteristics. Okay so the second activity, here we talk about what they need to phytosynthesize. So we’re really interested in photosynthesis, which is a process that I talked about earlier, because that’s where they capture that carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is really important for taking it.

It’s 04:48 - that first step to taking it down into the deep sea. And light is a really, really important component of photosynthesis. We talked about how light will change as you go deeper into the water column. So there are a couple of different ways it will change. It will become–it will start to attenuate, it will start to disappear as you get deeper, and that’s why you move from the photic layer that’s the area of the ocean right the top where there’s lots of sunlight where the phytoplankton live.

05:15 - And down to the Twilight Zone where you have very, very low levels of light. Another thing that Ivona will probably know much more about is the different wavelengths of light and how those will change as they go deeper into the water column. Yeah because it’s not only, just you know, completely it’s not just a disappearance of the amount of white as you go deeper in the ocean but it’s also the type of light, the color of the light starts changing. Certain wavelengths, certain colors, that sunlight is going to disappear. They’re going to be attenuated on the surface of the ocean.

As you go deeper, only some will be 05:48 - penetrating. Mostly blue and red gets attenuated, gets disappeared, disappeared easier in the surface, and then only the green stays down there and lower. There are a number of different boxes that you can land on that, you know, if you remember Chutes ‘n’ Ladders, it will take you to a different part of the board. And some of them basically tell you whether you’re going down in the water column, whether, you know, the organic matter that you’ve become–so organic matter as Ivona explained is once that carbon dioxide has been captured by the phytoplankton, it’s locked away as a kind of solid and material, organic carbon. So once it’s in that state will either go down or go up.

06:31 - But once you get down to here, yeah, there are a couple of different pathways that you can really take. Once you leave the photic zone and you start to enter the twilight zone, if you roll a 1 to 3, is you can take the form of just a particulate, and you start to become this thing called marine snow, which is where lots of particles that stick together. And they form these large aggregates, and if you’ve ever been down into the deep sea or if you’ve seen videos in the deep sea, you see that it’s just this vast blackness with lots of kind of white particles floating down, and we call that marine snow. However, you can also get eaten by tiny animals called zooplankton. And these tiny animals, they have the ability to actually swim hundreds of meters up and down in the water column.

07:19 - And they can kind of give you a bit of a ride deeper down into the water column. From the perspective of some kind of like climate control and stuff like that, we really want as much as the carbon to sink deep down as possible, but the thing is there’s these whole ecosystems, all these obstacles that this carbon meets along the way that are obstructing. Which actually sink deep, deep, deep down, and Twilight Zone is like really very unknown portion of the ocean that’s kind of what EXPORTS is really interested in about. But ultimately, you know, let’s say that you know, just the carbon wants to go down, down, down, down, and let’s say that we went through your game and went through the whole Twilight Zone, survived all the obstacles, and we got to the deep, deep ocean, what happens then? Once the carbon is in the deep ocean, why is that important, I mean, like what is the carbon do down there? That’s important because once it gets down to the deep sea, it’s locked away for hundreds, thousands of years. It would sink down to be to the seafloor or it will become part of a global ocean current that they call the the ocean conveyor belt, and it will then travel basically the entire breadth of the ocean but at the very depth, you know, maybe 3,000 meters.

And eventually after 08:37 - maybe thousands of years, that water, that deep ocean current will eventually upwell. So it will come back up to the surface, and it will come back as refreshed minerals and nutrients and things like that. And then the the cycle starts all over again. What satellites and NASA satellites can see is just the top, the light layer up in light blue, the upper portion up here. Now the other stuff that we don’t see, which are really cool parts, the stuff that we have to go in the ocean and study them from the ships by using robots and things like that because you really want to know what portion of that carbon that was taken by the phytoplankton actually ends up where.

Because if you were 09:17 - running climate models or things like that, the ocean plays a very, very important part in pulling their carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So knowing the rough path that each of these carbon, pretty much, atoms take, it’s really important. That’s kind of what ultimately you and I want to understand. I’m gonna kind of like put together the, you know, what are guys doing together with the story of where the carbon’s going to end up, and which path they would take, and can we predict that in a better way? .