We know climate change can affect us, but does climate change alter something as vast, deep and mysterious as our oceans? For years, scientists have studied the world's oceans by sending out ships and divers, deploying data-gathering buoys, and by taking aerial measurements from planes. But one of the better ways to understand oceans is to gain an even broader perspective - the view from space. NASA's Earth observing satellites do more than just take pictures of our planet. High-tech sensors gather data, including ocean surface temperature, surface winds, sea level, circulation, and even marine life. Information the satellites obtain help us understand the complex interactions driving the world's oceans today - and gain valuable insight into how the impacts of climate change on oceans might affect us on dry land.
"USC researcher experiments with changing ocean chemistry
Jan. 19, 2011 | Molly Peterson | KPCC
In his lab, USC's Dave Hutchins is simulating possible future atmospheres and temperatures for the Earth. He says he's trying to figure out how tiny organisms that form the base of the food web will react to a more carbon-intense ocean.
Burning fossil fuels doesn't just put more carbon into the atmosphere and help warm the climate. It's also changing the chemistry of sea water. KPCC's Molly Peterson visits a University of Southern California researcher who studies the consequences of a more corrosive ocean.
Tailpipes and refineries and smokestacks as far as the eye can see in Los Angeles symbolize the way people change the planet's climate. They remind Dave Hutchins that the ocean's changing too.
Hutchins teaches marine biology at USC. He says about a third of all the carbon, or CO2, that people have pushed into earth's atmosphere ends up in sea water - "which is a good thing for us because if the ocean hadn't taken up that CO2 the greenhouse effect would be far more advanced than it is." He smiles.
Hutchins says that carbon is probably not so good for the ocean. "The more carbon dioxide that enters the ocean the more acidic the ocean gets."
On the pH scale, smaller numbers represent more acidity. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute estimates we've pumped 500 million tons of carbon into the world's oceans.
Dave Hutchins at USC says that carbon has already lowered the pH value for sea water. "By the end of this century we are going to have increased the amount of acid in the ocean by maybe 200 percent over natural pre-industrial levels," he says. "So we are driving the chemistry of the ocean into new territory - into areas that it has never seen."
Hutchins is one of dozens of scientists who study the ripples of that new chemistry into the marine ecosystem.
Now for an aside. I make bubbly water at home with a soda machine, and to do that, I pump ca
How is global temperature regulated? An experimental representation
- Simple experiments to help pupils understand how different parameters regulate temperature at the Earth's surface.
Interaction at the Air-Water Interface, part 1
- A very simple experiment to demonstrate gas exchange and equilibration at the boundary layer between air and water. Pupils will also observe acidification of water due to CO2 introduced directly in the water.
Interaction at the Air-Water Interface, part 2
- A second set of experiment to demonstrate gas exchange and equilibration at the boundary layer between air and water. Pupils observe a high atmospheric CO2 concentration will produce water acidification.
Uptake of Carbon Dioxide from the Water by Plants
- The following experiments will demonstrate the role of plants in mitigating the acidification caused when CO2 is dissolved in water.
Carbon Dioxide Fertilization of Marine Microalgae (Dunalliela sp.) Cultures: Marine microalgae in different atmospheric CO2 concentration
- An experiment designed to illustrate the impact of carbon dioxide on microalgal growth in the aquatic environment.
Introduction to the principles of climate modelling
- Working with real data in spreadsheets to create a climate model, students discover the global carbon budget and make their own predictions for the next century.
Global carbon budget between 1958 and 2007
- Working with real global carbon budget data, students produce graphs to find the best representation of the data to make predictions about human CO2 emissions for the next century. This activity is also a nice application of percentages.
Estimation of natural carbon sinks
- Working with real global carbon budget data, students estimate how much of the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere as a result of human activities is absorbed naturally each year.
How does temperature affect the solubility of CO2 en the water?
- The following experiments will explore effects of water temperature on sol
The term ocean acidification is used to describe the ongoing decrease in ocean pH caused by human CO2 emissions, such as the burning of fossil fuels. It is the little known consequence of living in a high CO2 world, dubbed at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) as the "evil twin of climate change".
The oceans currently absorb approximately half of the CO2 produced by burning fossil fuel; put simply, climate change would be far worse if it were not for the oceans. However, there is a cost to the oceans - when CO2 dissolves in seawater it forms carbonic acid and as more CO2 is taken up by the oceans surface, the pH decreases, moving towards a less alkaline and therefore more acidic state.
Already ocean pH has decreased by about 30% and if we continue emitting CO2 at the same rate by 2100 ocean acidity will increase by about 150%, a rate that has not been experienced for at least 400,000 years. Such a monumental alteration in basic ocean chemistry is likely to have wide implications for ocean life, especially for those organisms that require calcium carbonate to build shells or skeletons.
Ocean acidification is a relatively new field of research, with most of the studies having been conducted over the last decade. While it is gaining some attention among policy makers, international leaders and the media, scientists find there is still a lack of understanding.
"We present a reference, comprehensive, high-resolution, digital mosaic of ice motion in Antarctica assembled from multiple satellite interferometric synthetic-aperture radar data acquired during the International Polar Year 2007 to 2009. The data reveal widespread, patterned, enhanced flow with tributary glaciers reaching hundreds to thousands of kilometers inland over the entire continent. This view of ice sheet motion emphasizes the importance of basal-slip-dominated tributary flow over deformation-dominated ice sheet flow, redefines our understanding of ice sheet dynamics, and has far-reaching implications for the reconstruction and prediction of ice sheet evolution. "
Video, "ACID TEST: the Global Challenge of Ocean Acificiation," The film originally aired on Discovery Planet Green. narrated by Sigourney Weaver and featuring several very knowledgable scientists. 21 min, 34 sec long\n\nThere is a choice of "high quality or "normal quality," presumably to accommodate your Internet connection speed. There is also a link to a "YouTube" version that has a slightly larger image.
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About the College Board Standards for College Success (CBSCS)
The College Board Standards for College Success (CBSCS) define the knowledge and skills students need to develop and master in English language arts, mathematics and statistics, and science in order to be college and career ready. The CBSCS outline a clear and coherent pathway to Advanced Placement® (AP®) and college readiness with the goal of increasing the number and diversity of students who are prepared not only to enroll in college, but to succeed in college and 21st-century careers. The College Board has published these standards freely to provide a national model of rigorous academic content standards that states, districts, schools and teachers may use to vertically align curriculum, instruction, assessment and professional development to AP and college readiness. These rigorous standards:
provide a model set of comprehensive standards for middle school and high school courses that lead to college and workplace readiness;
reflect 21st-century skills such as problem solving, critical and creative thinking, collaboration, and media and technological literacy;
articulate clear standards and objectives with supporting, in-depth performance expectations to guide instruction and curriculum development;
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"Nitrogen (N2)-fixing microorganisms (diazotrophs) are an important source of biologically available fixed N in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and control the productivity of oligotrophic ocean ecosystems. We found that two major groups of unicellular N2-fixing cyanobacteria (UCYN) have distinct spatial distributions that differ from those of Trichodesmium, the N2-fixing cyanobacterium previously considered to be the most important contributor to open-ocean N2 fixation. The distributions and activity of the two UCYN groups were separated as a function of depth, temperature, and water column density structure along an 8000-kilometer transect in the South Pacific Ocean. UCYN group A can be found at high abundances at substantially higher latitudes and deeper in subsurface ocean waters than Trichodesmium. These findings have implications for the geographic extent and magnitude of basin-scale oceanic N2 fixation rates. "
