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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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?