First ocean acidifcation cruise in European waters
7th June 2011
The
first research cruise specifically to study ocean acidification in
European waters left Liverpool recently for 1 month until 11th
July 2011. Twenty four scientists from eight different UK
institutes will carry out the science, as part of the UKOA
programme, and will sail across the northwest European seas,
circumnavigate the British Isles then visit the
territorial waters of seven different nations.
Aboard the cruise, led by the the National Oceanography
Centre Southampton, researchers will study the impact of the
changing chemistry on marine organisms and ecosystems, the cycling
of carbon and nutrients in the sea and how the sea interacts with
the atmosphere to influence climate. Their first approach will be
to look at how the microscopic organisms living in surface waters
vary between places where the chemistry of seawater is naturally
more acidic or alkaline. By contrasting the observations over a
range of different conditions, they hope to improve understanding
of how acidification affects organisms living in their natural
environment; where natural selection and adaptation have had time
to play out.
Their second approach will be to conduct
experiments using tanks of natural seawater collected from the
surface of the sea and brought into a controlled deck laboratory.
The natural seawater (and the microbes it contains) will then be
subjected to various levels of CO2 that may occur
in the future. This cruise will conduct the largest ever experiment
to examine the effects of changing CO2 levels on real
world samples out at sea as opposed to laboratory-based
experiments.
Professor Eric Achterberg, from the
University of Southampton’s School of Ocean and Earth Science
(SOES), is Principal Scientist on the research cruise.
He said: “We are especially interested in how the high
CO2 conditions predicted for the future will affect the
seawater and the organisms that live in it. Our ship-board studies
will give a glimpse into what may happen to the sea as a whole as
atmospheric CO2 continues to rise.”
In a third approach, researchers will be
studying how ocean acidification may affect deep-sea corals. Unlike
tropical corals, these cold-water species thrive deep in chilly
waters and researchers will carefully sample this reef to collect
live corals to run a series of experiments on board to monitor
coral growth and physiology. Following this a long-term experiment
will be set up to grow these corals under predicted future
climate scenarios at Heriot-Watt’s new cold-water coral research
laboratory in Edinburgh.
“Patience is the name of the game in this work
– cold-water corals grow slowly and it will take the best part of
two years to complete the experiments,” said Dr Murray Roberts of
Heriot-Watt University.
The participating institutes are the
University of Southampton, National Oceanography Centre,
Southampton and Liverpool, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Heriot-Watt
University, University of East Anglia, University of Essex, Marine
Biological Association and the University of Oxford.
You can follow the research cruise blog
here.