Sometimes you can't simulate natural conditions in the lab,
so what you do is you take your lab to see so you can measure
natural communities and natural conditions that you can't get in
the lab.
This project that were doing on the Atlantis is not an isolated
event.
it's part of a much bigger picture.
we have satellites that are involved in this project, we
have to work that's done on this ship, modelers, and it's all the
different components that bring the whole story together.
You can't necessarily do a whole global science project from a
single standpoint.
Every element is critical to coming up with the answers
that you're looking for.
The project were involved in is called NAAMES, as you know.
It involves for field campaigns, not just this one.
Each one is targeting a specific time of year, a specific set of
events in the ocean as well as the atmosphere.
We are leaving a little bit of us behind on each one of these
cruises.
We have what are known as drifters and we deploy those at
different locations in the North Atlantic here and those drifters
will follow a piece of water here for up to two years.
Those give us essentially a breadcrumb trail so we can leave
a spot but essentially keep our eye on it for many months
afterwards.
We do that with the satellites.
The floats are telling us where that water masses moving and the
satellites are telling us what's happening in that water.
We are also deploying what's called floats which, ironically,
sink.
They go up and down through the water column and they can often
stay in a single spot for a couple of years and they take
measurements continuously up and down through the water column
looking at the biology, looking at the chemistry and the optics
and that continues to give us data about what's happening
with those ecosystems that we studied on the ship and the left
behind.
The information that we can get from these robots, as you might
call them, is very limited, and the questions that we're asking
require an lot more detail about how the system is functioning.
The ship goes out and it's really digging into the
mechanisms about how those ecosystems work.
relating those mechanisms to the properties, the limited
properties that we can actually measure with the robots or
measure with the airplane or measure with the satellites.
it's an integrated system.
Your taking the assets you can do remotely and from space and
linking them to mechanisms and processes that we reveal or
uncover on ship measurements.
You know, the NAAMES project kind of started from space and
worked its way down to the ocean, which is not often
the case.
One of the reasons, as I mentioned, that the field
research is really important is because it provides a level of detail
that we can't get from robots and from satellites.
There's a lot of detail in there.
The satellite data will kind of kick this off was looking at
the full annual cycle of the plankton, bringing up some ideas
that we was kind of contrary to what we had thought was driving
blooms.
There are elements of it that seem to be reasonably
predictable.
There are elements that seem to be more chaotic.
We have some canonical views of the North Atlantic bloom,
for example.
generally, for example, when you get to the climax, the peak of
the bloom, the biomass tends to be dominated by a specific group
of phytoplankton, called diatoms.
Earlier in the year we think of it being dominated by smaller
organisms—flagellated phytoplankton.
But then sometimes you can come out here and get to the peak and
it's not diatoms. Why was that?
And if you look in shorter timescales, you can see a lot of
variability and shorter timescales.
Things are less predictable, at least with our current sest knowledge
of the system.
Hopefully we can say something more intelligent about that as
we move into the future.
The other thing is that a lot of our kind of canonical statements
about the bloom— if you dig a little deeper they're not
very fulfilling.
In many cases, or in the most years, you might say that
bloom climax is dominated by diatoms but not all diatoms are
in the climax.
So why is it that you started the year in the winter with
hundreds of species of diatoms and only a few end up
dominating? They're all diatoms, so why is that?
How reproducible is that?
There are levels of predictability and apparently, some sort of level of
at least with their current understanding of chaos.
A lot of times we think about what controls phytoplankton
growth in the ocean as being largely driven by light and nutrients
and the things they need to divide, right?
But if you look at the bloom, the actual development of
biomass, there's a very very important term in there that has
nothing to do with light or nutrients.
It's "who's eating them".
If you have viruses or these little animals called
zooplankton targeting a specific type of phytoplankton, they'll
knock them out while some other ones have an of advantage, so
it's the complexities of the ecosystem that probably are very
influential on what appears to be more of a chaotic aspect of
the bloom.
For many years in the history of oceanography, the tools that we
had to look at species diversity were relatively coarse.
There are organisms that look very similar but may be very
different species.
With the explosion of genomics, or the "omics" era, we are
starting to see a level of diversity that we had no sense
of and at this point in time it's becoming just exploratory.
You take another sample and you find new species.
Your question, "have they always been there?": I don't know.
Are they always evolving?
Of course, organisms are always evolving and over long enough
time span of periods
you'll get new species—that's just one of the normal processes
of evolution.
We are in an era of oceanography we're just categorizing the
diversity that's out there because we have these new tools
is kind of where we are at.
Simple questions, tough ones to answer.
One thought that came to mind is that as you saying that move along in a
career you start expanding all of the things you can use, from
microscopic work to satellites.
For me, the most important thing for me to recognize is that I'm
not going to be the expert in most of it.
it's bringing in the people who are the experts and making that
possible. That's why when you look at this ship and its crew we've got
people from NASA centers, we've got people from NOAA, we've got
people from all the different national agencies, and all kinds
of universities, so it's the team that makes this happen, not
a single individual. A single individual can come up with the question,
but answering the question requires a lot of expertise, a lot of different
people, and that is really one of the very exciting parts of
this project, bringing all of these pieces together.
And another aspect of it that's real fun for me is that it's a
very interdisciplinary project.
We're not just bringing in oceanographers who are
biologists, bringing in oceanographers who are physicists.
We have a guy here who's studying white sharks.
We of course have aerosol scientists, and people who link
what's in the ocean to aerosols.
And a piece we haven't talked about is the airplane.
We've got instruments on this airplane and experts in that
type of work who are linking to the ship, so it's a very
exciting mission just in the sense of the
breath of the interdisciplinary work that's being done.