Welcome to the virtual tour of the
U.S. Geological Survey St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center.
First, we'll learn a little bit about our history.
Come on in!
Welcome to the U.S Geological Survey
Come on in. Welcome to the U.S. Geological Survey.
St. Petersburg Coastal & Marine Science Center.
We're standing here in the front lobby of the Studebaker building.
But Studebaker was an automobile company back in the early nineteen hundreds.
This building was built in the early 1920s, sold cars for about five years.
And then we took over in 1988.
It's actually on the National Historic Registry.
So there's a lot of unique history here.
When I first started here 30 years ago, we had maybe 30 people
and now we have over a hundred people.
And our science has expanded from being very focused
on very nearshore coastal research to microbiological work, modeling,
We're continuing to grow and build
on our multidisciplinary research that we do here in St. Pete.
Now we will go tour some of our laboratories.
We'll start off in the coral microbial ecology lab.
Hi, my name is Jim Evans, I'm a postdoc here at the
St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center,
part of the USGS.
We're here in the coral microbiology lab.
And I'm going to show you some of what we do.
I'm working with stony coral tissue loss disease,
which is a new disease that's just broken out on Florida's reefs.
Starting in 2014.
And we don't know what causes this deadly disease that wipes out corals
up and down the reef tract really, really quickly.
And some corals can die just in a matter of weeks.
And so what we're trying to do here is to pinpoint the
exact microbial group that is responsible for causing this disease of corals.
It could be viral.
They think it could be bacterial
if it might be a chemical cause or an environmental cue.
So what I do is I characterize some of the different bacterial groups
is what I'm looking at that are present in that seawater,
so that whether our bacteria are what's causing the disease,
we don't know yet, but we're hoping to be able to narrow
that down a little bit more.
This is our geochemistry lab we have in this lab actually a mixed use
of some coral geochemistry and some ocean acidification work.
This microbalance, which as you can see, is very small.
what they do is they measure out about one hundred micrograms of coral powder.
And we'll see how they collect that coral from the coral slabs in a little bit.
So once that's collected, they take it to this instrument back here
and they put acid in it and then they put it in these vials.
You can see how many racks there are.
So they fill those up with the samples.
And then this needle here comes
in, takes a sample of it and runs it through the instrument.
And what that does is the instrument does
is it actually measures various elements in the coral sample.
And so they look at things like strontium and calcium in the coral skeletons.
So there is some correlation with that ratio of strontium, calcium
to sea surface temperature. And so this instrument produces that data.
And as you can see, it can make a lot of data.
And so we typically have some of the corals that we core
are about three meters long, 10 feet long.
Some of the really big ones.
And so we can have corals that have a neat climate history
that go back three or four hundred years.
And so we can get a really cool picture
of how sea surface temperatures have changed over those years.
One of our climate researchers,
she actually runs this instrument,
which collects mostly water samples for isotopes of oxygen.
And so by looking at the change in oxygen isotopes, they can take a look at how
salinity changes in the ocean as well as temperature.
This is another really useful tool for looking at climate.
So welcome to the Dive Locker here at the USGS.
Since we do a lot of coastal and marine research,
we have a fairly large number of divers.
And so we have lots of places for our our staff to store their dive gear.
We have a lot of our safety gear here, like our PFDs for doing the boat work
and wetsuits and BCs for diving.
Lots of tanks on hand for going out, doing that work.
We have, I think, about 11 boats altogether.
So this is the R/V Halimeda.
This is our oldest boat - built in 1970, but it's primarily used for
doing a lot of the coral reef research. It's got a very nice open deck.
And we can put in a lot of a lot of equipment,
a lot of gear, a lot of scuba gear.
This is the R/V Sallenger.
Sallenger was actually one of our center directors years ago.
And actually our first son, a director for opening up the center.
This boat, as you can see, is mounted with this huge arm on the side.
And inside here gets mounted our multi beam sonar heads.
And those sonar heads send out a very specific frequency of sound.
And then the sound bounces off the sea floor and comes back up
and we can get a very precise picture of what the sea floor looks like.
And so that picture turns into what looks like an elevation map.
So we can see, you know,
the smallest of little sand ripples on the sea floor to big, big structures.
We also do other things,
towing instruments that look underneath the sea floor.
And so those are sub-bottom acoustic
profilers. And so we get a profile
of what the geology looks like underneath the sea floor.
But we usually tow that off in the distance behind the boat.
And then all of the equipment
all the electronics and computers are all housed inside.
Typically, a bunch of monitors and the techs are looking at
pictures of the sea floor as we're collecting that data
for some of the more nearshore work we have the Twin Vee here, which
we usually access the local sites here in Tampa Bay or within the estuaries
where we do work. And we can do some diving off of this.
It's got some deck space, but mostly for going out,
collecting water samples, servicing instruments within the bay.
We also use personal watercraft, also known as jet skis,
to collect bathymetry data in shallow water or hard to reach areas.
These methods work by sending sound waves
from the vessel down to the bottom of the ocean.
Our instruments measure two-way travel time
or how long it takes for sound to reach the bottom of the ocean and back.
This is then converted into distance to the bottom or depth.
These depth measurements are used to create bathymetry maps of the ocean floor.
The jet skis are actually outfitted with a single beam bathymetry system,
and they can actually get almost right up onto the beach.
So we collect the beach profile, the the bathymetry of the sea floor
in that area where the waves typically break.
And so they can get in through those waves and turn around and get back offshore.
And they can do that a lot of times.
And they can get that information about the sea floor topography
and then they can stitch all that information
and blend it in with the data that comes off the multibeam.
Let's see what's going on in some of our other labs
on the way we pass through the library, which houses hundreds
of scientific journals, books, and maps
from the U.S. Geological Survey.
We also have several beautiful stained glass art pieces in our office.
dedicated to people who have helped the center grow to what it is today.
So this is the core archive lab.
It has various saws,
like this tabletop saw, which is used for cutting sediment cores
that are collected in long aluminum barrels.
There's a couple of blades inside that just cut the outside of the aluminum.
And then the scientists take a piece of piano wire and run it down.
And then they can open up the core to look at the delaminations--the layers
in the sediments.
Dr. Dan Ciarletta and his team recently
collected sediment cores from barrier islands right here in Pinellas County.
Today they are examining a core from Caladesi Island, which is near Dunedin, Florida,
and comparing it to a core taken from Lake George, a freshwater Florida lake.
These clays probably all settled out into the water column,
but then at some point,
you know, maybe a piece of wood or,
a piece of plant matter of some sort, very concentrated, fell down here and that decayed.
And that's what created this layer here
and up here, even there seems to be some shells.
Maybe they're a bit dissolved
because they've been sitting in this core for a while.
probably some like freshwater mussels
or something like this.
The sediment in each core looks very different.
The lake core is much shorter with darker, finer grained sediment
and some chunks of wood stuck inside.
the beach core is much longer
and contains light colored, coarser sediments.
Here's the unconsolidated sand.
So you have like, you know, plants and critters
that burrow into it, you know, up near the surface.
Down here, not so much.
I mean, this is probably more like an active like beach face down here.
And actually, if you look closely at that's what I think is really cool, is
you can actually see [Nancy] What makes you think that? The cleaner sand?
[Dan] Not just that but also the rhythmic bedding in too, right? There’s relatively clean sand but you also get
very concentrated layers of shell hash.
[Nancy] You mean these little guys?
[Dan] Yeah, exactly. So those are probably like, you know, storms coming through and
winnowing out some sand and then new sand gets deposited on top of it.
[Nancy] And there's a nice big shell that helps, too.
[Dan] Yeah, which we got lucky coring through because we pretty much went right through it!
So one of the questions that Dan's trying to find out is how how old these are.
So the length of a core doesn't always correspond directly to
the age of the core.
this length of clay could literally be like a thousand years,
whereas this could literally just be like a hundred
like an order of magnitude different.
Like the island this came off of, Caladesi,
all those islands over in that area, around Dunedin, Anclote, Honeymoon...
Some of these islands have like doubled,
tripled in size in just the last hundred years.
So they're very, very active.
Another island up there, Three Rooker,
That island didn't exist like 60 years ago.
That coastline there is constantly changing. Its very dynamic.
But again, it's an archive room.
so we archive a lot of the sediments, some of the cores.
But we also have in addition to the sediment cores,
we have some of the rock cores.
And this is actually quite the collection that dates back to the early 70s.
Let’s see if I can pull one out.
So these are coral cores.
This one was collected in Puerto Rico back in ‘91.
These are the cores that I was mentioning that we cut on that big saw over there
and then we get these little slabs that come out.
And so then we can look at
drilling along those those slabs, or we can actually X-ray the corals
and look at how old they are.
So we have quite the collection here in St. Pete.
We actually have them online so you can actually search and see what we have.
So one of the other really unique things about our center
is our ability to develop new systems or equipment.
And so we actually have
a pretty substantial shop that we can do just about anything.
We've got a CNC machine, which is all computer controlled.
You can go and you program it.
It does whatever you tell it to do and drills holes and edges
and cuts out pieces of metal.
It's really neat.
Lance here is one of our electronic techs.
It's really neat.
There's lots of electronics, lots of wiring, like the multibeam systems.
There's a lot of things that aren’t off-the-shelf that we have to develop
and put together.
Some of the navigational pieces have to get integrated with the data
that's coming off the multibeam.
So those sorts of things have to get worked on here.
So having somebody with electrical knowledge
is very important.
Now we're in the sediment lab, or sedimentology lab.
This lab has multiple purposes.
Most of it dealing with sediment types of sampling.
This is actually a freeze dryer.
Some of our paleoclimate people look at little things called foraminifera
in the deep ocean.
And so they actually freeze dry the samples and then they can go through and pick out
the individual forams, and that way the shells are well-preserved.
We also have things like ovens where we dry the samples
or furnaces where we actually cook the samples and we cook them
because sometimes we want to burn off all the organic materials.
So if like they're from a marsh
and we want to look
and see what kind of inorganic material is in there, we can burn off all the organics
and just look at what's left.
And you know when they're cooking,
because there's a smell in here.
and sometimes you can tell where the mud is from based on the smell,
because like mud from the Everglades is different mud from Louisiana.
So they all have their own aromas.
Sophie is an intern doing research with us for the summer.
She studies geology at Eckerd College.
Today, she is using a microdrill
to extract fine powder from the calcium carbonate skeletons created by corals.
She uses the computer to set up the places she'd like to sample
She then starts the microdrill, which drills small holes in the coral skeleton.
The powder extracted from these holes will be analyzed
using some of the instruments in the geochemistry lab
to measure the ratio of the elements strontium and calcium.
The ratio of these elements helps scientists determine what sea surface
temperatures were in the past.
Understanding how sea surface temperatures have changed in the past
will help scientists better understand how climate will change in the future.
These corals are actually
taken from an actual coral head,
so you can see the actual coral,
taken from an actual coral head, so you can see the actual coral.
the corallies, each one of those is the individual coral.
We take the bigger corals and you can see it actually has some labels on it of dates.
You can see where
Sophie's been drilling, collecting the powders annually.
You can X-ray them
and you can see the white bands, dark bands, light bands kind of like tree rings,
that represents about one year.
So you can see how how much they grow each year.
So this one goes back probably to around 1900 or so.
That's typically the kind of coral that we sample to get the long historical
sea surface temperature records.
Doing some of the smaller ones
too is providing some really unique information as well.
Thank you for joining us today on a virtual tour of the USGS
St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center.
We hope you can come visit us in person one day.
Until then, feel free to contact us, and we would love to help answer any
questions you may have.