WEBVTT FILE 1 00:00:00.033 --> 00:00:03.870 Sometimes you can't simulate natural conditions in the lab, 2 00:00:03.870 --> 00:00:07.407 so what you do is you take your lab to see so you can measure 3 00:00:07.407 --> 00:00:10.643 natural communities and natural conditions that you can't get in 4 00:00:10.643 --> 00:00:11.678 the lab. 5 00:00:12.779 --> 00:00:17.150 This project that were doing on the Atlantis is not an isolated 6 00:00:17.150 --> 00:00:17.817 event. 7 00:00:17.817 --> 00:00:20.920 it's part of a much bigger picture. 8 00:00:20.920 --> 00:00:23.590 we have satellites that are involved in this project, we 9 00:00:23.590 --> 00:00:26.826 have to work that's done on this ship, modelers, and it's all the 10 00:00:26.826 --> 00:00:28.995 different components that bring the whole story together. 11 00:00:28.995 --> 00:00:33.833 You can't necessarily do a whole global science project from a 12 00:00:33.833 --> 00:00:34.934 single standpoint. 13 00:00:35.468 --> 00:00:37.670 Every element is critical to coming up with the answers 14 00:00:37.670 --> 00:00:39.105 that you're looking for. 15 00:00:48.081 --> 00:00:50.683 The project were involved in is called NAAMES, as you know. 16 00:00:51.351 --> 00:00:54.621 It involves for field campaigns, not just this one. 17 00:00:54.621 --> 00:00:58.124 Each one is targeting a specific time of year, a specific set of 18 00:00:58.124 --> 00:01:02.462 events in the ocean as well as the atmosphere. 19 00:01:02.462 --> 00:01:04.631 We are leaving a little bit of us behind on each one of these 20 00:01:04.631 --> 00:01:05.298 cruises. 21 00:01:05.298 --> 00:01:09.235 We have what are known as drifters and we deploy those at 22 00:01:09.235 --> 00:01:12.872 different locations in the North Atlantic here and those drifters 23 00:01:12.872 --> 00:01:16.409 will follow a piece of water here for up to two years. 24 00:01:18.144 --> 00:01:22.549 Those give us essentially a breadcrumb trail so we can leave 25 00:01:22.549 --> 00:01:25.418 a spot but essentially keep our eye on it for many months 26 00:01:25.418 --> 00:01:26.119 afterwards. 27 00:01:26.119 --> 00:01:27.487 We do that with the satellites. 28 00:01:28.188 --> 00:01:31.291 The floats are telling us where that water masses moving and the 29 00:01:31.291 --> 00:01:33.326 satellites are telling us what's happening in that water. 30 00:01:36.463 --> 00:01:39.365 We are also deploying what's called floats which, ironically, 31 00:01:39.365 --> 00:01:40.133 sink. 32 00:01:40.133 --> 00:01:43.403 They go up and down through the water column and they can often 33 00:01:43.403 --> 00:01:46.306 stay in a single spot for a couple of years and they take 34 00:01:46.306 --> 00:01:48.475 measurements continuously up and down through the water column 35 00:01:48.475 --> 00:01:51.311 looking at the biology, looking at the chemistry and the optics 36 00:01:51.311 --> 00:01:54.447 and that continues to give us data about what's happening 37 00:01:54.447 --> 00:01:57.016 with those ecosystems that we studied on the ship and the left 38 00:01:57.016 --> 00:01:57.750 behind. 39 00:02:01.187 --> 00:02:03.923 The information that we can get from these robots, as you might 40 00:02:03.923 --> 00:02:07.627 call them, is very limited, and the questions that we're asking 41 00:02:07.627 --> 00:02:11.698 require an lot more detail about how the system is functioning. 42 00:02:11.698 --> 00:02:14.367 The ship goes out and it's really digging into the 43 00:02:14.367 --> 00:02:18.071 mechanisms about how those ecosystems work. 44 00:02:18.071 --> 00:02:21.307 relating those mechanisms to the properties, the limited 45 00:02:21.307 --> 00:02:23.710 properties that we can actually measure with the robots or 46 00:02:23.710 --> 00:02:25.645 measure with the airplane or measure with the satellites. 47 00:02:26.946 --> 00:02:28.481 it's an integrated system. 48 00:02:28.481 --> 00:02:33.386 Your taking the assets you can do remotely and from space and 49 00:02:33.386 --> 00:02:36.923 linking them to mechanisms and processes that we reveal or 50 00:02:36.923 --> 00:02:38.591 uncover on ship measurements. 51 00:02:42.795 --> 00:02:44.797 You know, the NAAMES project kind of started from space and 52 00:02:44.797 --> 00:02:46.666 worked its way down to the ocean, which is not often 53 00:02:46.666 --> 00:02:47.667 the case. 54 00:02:48.968 --> 00:02:51.504 One of the reasons, as I mentioned, that the field 55 00:02:51.504 --> 00:02:55.008 research is really important is because it provides a level of detail 56 00:02:55.008 --> 00:02:57.744 that we can't get from robots and from satellites. 57 00:02:57.744 --> 00:02:59.412 There's a lot of detail in there. 58 00:03:00.213 --> 00:03:03.316 The satellite data will kind of kick this off was looking at 59 00:03:03.316 --> 00:03:06.352 the full annual cycle of the plankton, bringing up some ideas 60 00:03:06.352 --> 00:03:09.222 that we was kind of contrary to what we had thought was driving 61 00:03:09.222 --> 00:03:11.224 blooms. 62 00:03:20.266 --> 00:03:22.769 There are elements of it that seem to be reasonably 63 00:03:22.769 --> 00:03:23.670 predictable. 64 00:03:23.670 --> 00:03:26.806 There are elements that seem to be more chaotic. 65 00:03:28.641 --> 00:03:32.278 We have some canonical views of the North Atlantic bloom, 66 00:03:32.278 --> 00:03:32.946 for example. 67 00:03:34.314 --> 00:03:36.616 generally, for example, when you get to the climax, the peak of 68 00:03:36.616 --> 00:03:40.253 the bloom, the biomass tends to be dominated by a specific group 69 00:03:40.253 --> 00:03:41.921 of phytoplankton, called diatoms. 70 00:03:41.921 --> 00:03:46.526 Earlier in the year we think of it being dominated by smaller 71 00:03:46.526 --> 00:03:49.262 organisms—flagellated phytoplankton. 72 00:03:50.096 --> 00:03:53.299 But then sometimes you can come out here and get to the peak and 73 00:03:53.299 --> 00:03:55.034 it's not diatoms. Why was that? 74 00:03:55.034 --> 00:03:59.405 And if you look in shorter timescales, you can see a lot of 75 00:03:59.405 --> 00:04:01.441 variability and shorter timescales. 76 00:04:01.441 --> 00:04:05.345 Things are less predictable, at least with our current sest knowledge 77 00:04:05.345 --> 00:04:06.179 of the system. 78 00:04:06.479 --> 00:04:10.817 Hopefully we can say something more intelligent about that as 79 00:04:10.817 --> 00:04:11.818 we move into the future. 80 00:04:17.290 --> 00:04:22.362 The other thing is that a lot of our kind of canonical statements 81 00:04:22.362 --> 00:04:28.201 about the bloom— if you dig a little deeper they're not 82 00:04:28.201 --> 00:04:29.202 very fulfilling. 83 00:04:30.570 --> 00:04:33.206 In many cases, or in the most years, you might say that 84 00:04:33.640 --> 00:04:39.112 bloom climax is dominated by diatoms but not all diatoms are 85 00:04:39.112 --> 00:04:40.513 in the climax. 86 00:04:40.513 --> 00:04:43.750 So why is it that you started the year in the winter with 87 00:04:43.750 --> 00:04:46.886 hundreds of species of diatoms and only a few end up 88 00:04:46.886 --> 00:04:49.289 dominating? They're all diatoms, so why is that? 89 00:04:49.289 --> 00:04:50.857 How reproducible is that? 90 00:04:50.857 --> 00:04:56.129 There are levels of predictability and apparently, some sort of level of 91 00:04:56.129 --> 00:04:59.499 at least with their current understanding of chaos. 92 00:05:13.513 --> 00:05:17.383 A lot of times we think about what controls phytoplankton 93 00:05:17.383 --> 00:05:23.656 growth in the ocean as being largely driven by light and nutrients 94 00:05:23.656 --> 00:05:27.393 and the things they need to divide, right? 95 00:05:27.393 --> 00:05:31.531 But if you look at the bloom, the actual development of 96 00:05:31.531 --> 00:05:36.235 biomass, there's a very very important term in there that has 97 00:05:36.235 --> 00:05:37.637 nothing to do with light or nutrients. 98 00:05:37.637 --> 00:05:39.072 It's "who's eating them". 99 00:05:39.072 --> 00:05:44.344 If you have viruses or these little animals called 100 00:05:44.344 --> 00:05:47.880 zooplankton targeting a specific type of phytoplankton, they'll 101 00:05:47.880 --> 00:05:51.050 knock them out while some other ones have an of advantage, so 102 00:05:51.050 --> 00:05:55.188 it's the complexities of the ecosystem that probably are very 103 00:05:55.188 --> 00:05:58.925 influential on what appears to be more of a chaotic aspect of 104 00:05:58.925 --> 00:05:59.759 the bloom. 105 00:06:09.902 --> 00:06:14.073 For many years in the history of oceanography, the tools that we 106 00:06:14.073 --> 00:06:17.477 had to look at species diversity were relatively coarse. 107 00:06:17.477 --> 00:06:20.913 There are organisms that look very similar but may be very 108 00:06:20.913 --> 00:06:22.048 different species. 109 00:06:22.048 --> 00:06:26.953 With the explosion of genomics, or the "omics" era, we are 110 00:06:26.953 --> 00:06:30.156 starting to see a level of diversity that we had no sense 111 00:06:30.156 --> 00:06:33.860 of and at this point in time it's becoming just exploratory. 112 00:06:33.860 --> 00:06:36.162 You take another sample and you find new species. 113 00:06:36.162 --> 00:06:39.065 Your question, "have they always been there?": I don't know. 114 00:06:39.065 --> 00:06:41.667 Are they always evolving? 115 00:06:41.667 --> 00:06:44.604 Of course, organisms are always evolving and over long enough 116 00:06:44.604 --> 00:06:46.205 time span of periods 117 00:06:46.205 --> 00:06:49.075 you'll get new species—that's just one of the normal processes 118 00:06:49.075 --> 00:06:49.942 of evolution. 119 00:06:49.942 --> 00:06:54.914 We are in an era of oceanography we're just categorizing the 120 00:06:54.914 --> 00:06:58.217 diversity that's out there because we have these new tools 121 00:06:58.217 --> 00:07:00.086 is kind of where we are at. 122 00:07:09.228 --> 00:07:11.397 Simple questions, tough ones to answer. 123 00:07:11.397 --> 00:07:16.903 One thought that came to mind is that as you saying that move along in a 124 00:07:16.903 --> 00:07:20.306 career you start expanding all of the things you can use, from 125 00:07:20.306 --> 00:07:22.775 microscopic work to satellites. 126 00:07:22.775 --> 00:07:29.649 For me, the most important thing for me to recognize is that I'm 127 00:07:29.649 --> 00:07:30.883 not going to be the expert in most of it. 128 00:07:30.883 --> 00:07:34.320 it's bringing in the people who are the experts and making that 129 00:07:34.320 --> 00:07:37.590 possible. That's why when you look at this ship and its crew we've got 130 00:07:37.590 --> 00:07:40.893 people from NASA centers, we've got people from NOAA, we've got 131 00:07:40.893 --> 00:07:44.197 people from all the different national agencies, and all kinds 132 00:07:44.197 --> 00:07:48.267 of universities, so it's the team that makes this happen, not 133 00:07:48.267 --> 00:07:51.737 a single individual. A single individual can come up with the question, 134 00:07:51.737 --> 00:07:56.442 but answering the question requires a lot of expertise, a lot of different 135 00:07:56.442 --> 00:07:59.045 people, and that is really one of the very exciting parts of 136 00:07:59.045 --> 00:08:01.214 this project, bringing all of these pieces together. 137 00:08:01.214 --> 00:08:05.251 And another aspect of it that's real fun for me is that it's a 138 00:08:05.251 --> 00:08:06.953 very interdisciplinary project. 139 00:08:06.953 --> 00:08:09.555 We're not just bringing in oceanographers who are 140 00:08:09.555 --> 00:08:11.991 biologists, bringing in oceanographers who are physicists. 141 00:08:11.991 --> 00:08:13.626 We have a guy here who's studying white sharks. 142 00:08:13.626 --> 00:08:16.796 We of course have aerosol scientists, and people who link 143 00:08:16.796 --> 00:08:19.298 what's in the ocean to aerosols. 144 00:08:19.298 --> 00:08:21.300 And a piece we haven't talked about is the airplane. 145 00:08:21.300 --> 00:08:25.805 We've got instruments on this airplane and experts in that 146 00:08:25.805 --> 00:08:29.542 type of work who are linking to the ship, so it's a very 147 00:08:29.542 --> 00:08:31.677 exciting mission just in the sense of the 148 00:08:31.677 --> 00:08:34.514 breath of the interdisciplinary work that's being done.