A satellite image of Cooper Island from June 26, 2019. Image Credit: NASA
A satellite image of Cooper Island from June 26, 2019; George Divoky has spent the last 44 summers here, studying a colony of Mandt’s Black Guillemots. Image Credit: NASA
Even after 44 years, preparing for the field season to study Black Guillemots on Cooper Island is a time of excitement and anticipation as I gather the gear and supplies needed to survive and conduct research for three months on a remote Arctic island. This year the excitement was tempered with a high level of anxiety given last summer’s disastrous breeding season. While the size of the colony has been decreasing since the 1990s, as the guillemots’ sea ice habitat has steadily dwindled, the 2018 breeding season was unique in that 1) the overwinter mortality of breeding birds was three times the long-term average, 2) one third of the returning pairs failed to lay eggs and 3) half of the pairs that did lay eggs abandoned them soon after laying. The result was a colony that in August had only 25 functioning breeding pairs – something hard to observe and process when one has a vivid memory of a 200+ pair colony in the late 1980s.
Back in Seattle I was still processing the data and the implications of the 2018 field season when the U.N. issued a report about the pace of global climate change with a separate report on the Arctic saying a 2-5oC temperature increase was locked in for the region even with major reductions in fossil fuel emissions. While the reports had the positive effect of finally having the media and public focus on the trends in and causes of climate change, along with my findings in 2018 they affected the way I viewed my long-term study. Documenting the pace and magnitude of biological changes in the Arctic seemed all the more important.
I headed north to Utqiaġvik (Barrow) in early June knowing that the guillemots had experienced another year with little sea ice in the traditional wintering area in the Bering Sea and that the Arctic Ocean off northern Alaska adjacent to their breeding colony had unprecedently low sea ice extent for early summer. Conditions like those are bound to pose major difficulties for the Cooper Island Black Guillemots.
While I start the season with concern for the long-term trajectory of the colony, I see the 2019 field season as a unique opportunity to document the resilience and adaptability of one of the Arctic’s sea-ice obligate seabirds. I look forward to providing you updates as the breeding season progresses.
This field report is part of an ongoing series titled Arctic Change centered around George Divoky’s 45th field season studying Black Guillemots, sea ice, and climate change on a remote Arctic island off the coast of Alaska. To donate and support Divoky’s work on Cooper Island, visit the Friends of Cooper Island website.
Research aboard E/V Nautilus may assist in the search for extraterrestrial life, as exploration of hydrothermal vent systems informs the design of future science-focused missions across our solar system! In 2018, the SUBSEA (Systematic Underwater Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog) team launched their first field program, supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, to explore iron-rich hydrothermal vent systems on Lō‘ihi Seamount off Hawai’i.
As the 2018 expedition wrapped up aboard E/V Nautilus, Lead Scientists Dr. Darlene Lim of NASA Ames and Dr. Christopher German of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution shared their insights into the future of ocean worlds research with Lead Science Communication Fellow Jenny Woodman of Proteus Science Communication. Catch up on the team’s findings in this conversation, and learn more about the 2019 SUBSEA expedition to explore Gorda Ridge, an active hydrothermal vent system that departs from the convention of black smoker hydrothermal systems, instead emitting clear fluids from the seafloor.
Much of the ocean remains a mystery, waiting to be explored. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Much of the world’s ocean remains a mystery. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
It is cold and dark. Creatures here have adapted to live and thrive in this environment, but not us. Once you pass the threshold of the aptly-named twilight zone, around 650 feet, there isn’t enough light to fuel photosynthesis. For every 33 feet of depth gained, the pressure increases by 14.5 pounds per square inch or psi; at a certain point, most organisms with gas-filled spaces, like our human lungs, would be crushed. As you continue to travel farther down, the weight of all the water above and around you presses in, making it impossible to pass a certain point without specialized technology. Most humans will never experience these mysterious depths firsthand. With the aid of submersibles, only three people have ever ventured to the deepest point in the ocean, the Mariana Trench, seven miles below the surface. The challenges of reaching this hadalpelagic zone make it one of the least studied locations on Earth.
I’ve talked to experts, visited their labs and research centers, and watched them at work–often under challenging circumstances. I’ve been to sea and shared the joys of science and discovery alongside bouts of seasickness, equipment malfunctions, and precious time away from loved ones. Few things I’ve experienced in 46 years on this planet compare to going someplace no human has ever gone before, to seeing this other world that exists right here at home.
Until we get out there and start poking around, we have no idea what we might find, but, according to NOAA, “More than eighty percent of our ocean is unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored.
I’m a writer and an educator. I’m also lucky to be able to say this: I am an ocean explorer.
Having spent the last two summers at sea, observing a wildlife survey in National Marine Sanctuaries on the NOAA Ship Bell M. Shimada and supporting robotic exploration of the deep sea aboard Robert Ballard’s Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus, this is what I’ve learned: the Earth’s ocean is vast with many secrets waiting to be discovered.
Just a few months ago, in October, while exploring off the coast of California near Monterey, the E/V Nautilus team was moving their robotic explorer or ROV (which stands for remotely operated vehicle) down the flank of a seamount and out of nowhere they happened upon a brooding site with thousands of octopuses in shimmering water that indicated hydrothermal activity of some sort. No one has ever seen anything on this scale before. This real-life octopus garden is just one example of the discoveries waiting for us in our ocean.
To get a sense of scale of the discoveries still possible, consider the 2010 Census for Marine life. It took a decade to complete and was conducted by 2,700 scientists from over 80 countries, on 540 scientific expeditions, at a cost of $650 million dollars, U.S. They identified over 6,000 potential new species and published more than 2,600 research papers. The project shed light on a variety of ocean science research–from a white shark cafe in the open ocean to enormous microbial mats, “ranked among Earth’s largest masses of life.”
The census represents a monumental bit of discovery. Yet scientists, like Chris German from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), think we’ve only scratched the surface. While off the coast of Hawaii last summer, German pointed to the Pacific Ocean, noting that it covers half of the planet and is “woefully unexplored.” He’s been studying hydrothermal vent systems just along the mid-ocean ridge for 30 years. The mid-ocean ridge is a ribbon-like mountain range that runs through the entire global ocean; it is about ten miles wide and 37 thousand miles long.
German estimates that the oceanic community has made discoveries at a rate of one new species every two weeks during his 30-year career. Even exploring as fast as they can go, they’ve only been able to explore about 20 percent of the mid-ocean ridge in three decades. He and his colleagues see opportunities to expand our capabilities here on Earth with emerging technologies in development for future space missions. Essentially, our drive to reach outer space and other ocean worlds will unearth much in unexplored regions of our ocean.
The oceanic and space communities have a great deal to offer each other–from technology development to protocols and training for remote work in extreme environments. In fact, scientists like Julie Huber believe it is time for the oceanic community to be more like NASA. Huber is an expert in marine chemistry and geochemistry at WHOI. Her work examines microbial communities in the deep ocean and, in the not-so-distant future, on other planets.
Huber argues: if NASA can land a scientific laboratory on Mars, then we should be able to do the same here on Earth. Sending scientific vessels to sea or space is no small feat. Ship time and space launches are costly and hard to come by. However, advances in marine robotics, such as Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s (MBARI) environmental sample processor (ESP) make it possible to do much more with less. When loaded onto an autonomous underwater vehicle, the ESP is a lab-in-a-can, collecting samples and processing them in situ for near real-time oceanographic monitoring. Huber advocates for developing new technologies, similar to MBARI’s ESP, that would allow for analysis of microbes in extreme environments like the deep ocean.
Huber is part of a program called NASA SUBSEA, which stands for Systematic Underwater Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog. The SUBSEA team members come from NASA, NOAA, the Ocean Exploration Trust, and several academic centers, including WHOI and Idaho State University.
In August and September, I served as the lead science communication fellow on board the E/V Nautilus during the NASA SUBSEA expedition to the Lōi`hi Seamount off the coast of Hawaii. The SUBSEA team is planning for future remote deep-space exploration of Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus as well as crewed missions to Mars and our own moon.
Robotic dives at Lōi`hi offered the opportunity to practice and develop protocols for future missions because today’s ocean explorers work remotely, using tools and methods that will serve space exploration. Someday, when we reach distant ocean worlds, we will deploy robots and explore from the safety of a command center here on Earth, a spaceship, or some other location like a base on the moon or an asteroid.
In order to prepare for those future missions, NASA and their partners gathered a science team at the Inner Space Center at University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography. This team remotely directed our operations on the E/V Nautilus while we were in Hawaii, serving as “mission control” for the expedition. Experiencing time-delays and technical difficulties will enable NASA and their partners to be better prepared for the challenges of deep space exploration.
Conditions at Lōi`hi, which is an active underwater volcano, are similar to what scientists believe exist on these other moons in our solar system.Lōi`hi was selected because the lower temperatures (about 390 degrees F) at these hydrothermal vent sites, called white smokers, are similar to temperatures detected by the Cassini spacecraft at Europa. Using ROVs, we collected rock and water samples so astrobiologists in Huber’s lab at WHOI and geologists from Idaho State could determine what sorts of rock and water interactions are taking place.
In places where sunlight doesn’t reach, there is no photosynthesis for food production. So, organisms like the microbes we observed and collected at Lōi`hi are make a living off of chemical reactions. Scientists are studying these reactions in order to model what could be happening on other planets.
Darlene Lim on board the E/V Nautilus in 2018. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
To Darlene Lim, NASA Geobiologist and principal investigator for the SUBSEA program, the impetus to explore is an insatiable curiosity about what might be waiting out there. Lim has spent the better part of her career running teams and research in extreme environments on Earth, using them as analogs for future exploration elsewhere in our solar system and beyond.
“We have a sample size of one,” said Lim. “We know that this planet is habitable; we know it is full of life, but what else is out there?”
She adds that we have, at our fingertips, the opportunity to go and in situ understand whether or not life is beyond this planet in our solar system. She smiles and becomes animated when she talks about exploration, making her enthusiasm highly contagious. It’s hard not to get excited about answering questions humans have been asking for all of our brief history on Earth. “What an exciting endeavor that I think we should to take the opportunity to stretch out and accomplish,” said Lim.
But what will it be like when we actually get to one of these remote, distant places in our solar system? Will we find life?
Europa Image Credit: NASA
Imagine you’re flying over an ocean world, not Earth but another. Maybe this is Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. It is cold and inhospitable. But, scientists know there is an iron core, a rocky mantle, and a salty ocean. How do they know this?
Take a look at the composite image below. There are plumes of water vapor at about 7 o’clock. To identify these plumes, scientists used Hubble’s imaging spectrograph, an instrument which acts like a prism revealing a sort of wavelength fingerprint of the object being observed; this fingerprint makes identification possible. Using this instrument, they were able to capture the silhouette of Europa as it passed in front of Jupiter and identify these plumes of water vapor, rising over 62 miles above the surface. These data aligned with previous observations from Cassini flyovers of Europa and they indicate the presence of an ocean and geologic activity worthy of exploration.
Image Credit: NASA/ESA/W. Sparks (STScI)/USGS Astrogeology Science Center
When we do get to Europa, there will be no humans on the mission. In the coming years, we are going to overcome incredible engineering obstacles in order to land robotic explorers on a distant icy moon, over 390 million miles from home.
According to German, experts think we can get there by 2033. Then, once we’ve landed on the surface of Europa, it will take another two years to drill ten to fifteen miles through the ice in order to eventually make our way to the ocean floor and transmit images home to Earth–images that these scientists hope will include hydrothermal vents and microbial mats.
Lim said it generally takes 18 to 24 months to be able to draw meaningful conclusions from the fieldwork that took place at Lōi`hi, but she says everything is on track. This means I can’t really tell you exactly what was learned last summer, just yet, but I can attempt to convey why the work is so cool. While we were still at sea, I asked Lim and German why would we should travel 390 million miles to find tiny microbes.
“Any time that humanity has extended itself in that way, along comes other developments. Think social developments–the way we think about ourselves, we organize ourselves, what we think is palatable in terms of the way we treat other people,” said Lim. “It kind of comes hand-in-hand with the ability to think about what is beyond us.”
To German, 390 million miles, when considered alongside the vastness of space, isn’t really that far to travel at all.
“Rather perversely, what’s really exciting about it is only having to go 390 million miles for what we can do is ridiculously close to home,” said German. “And that’s completely new thing in the last decade.”
He goes on to explain that when we thought of looking for life elsewhere in the universe, we traditionally thought about looking for planets with liquid water on the surface and the kind of life forms that we understand from photosynthesis, the dominant form of life on our own planet.
To German, the current generation of ocean exploration work has revolutionized our view of what it takes to make planet habitable. The discovery of seafloor hot springs and cold seeps like those found along the California Borderlands have offered what German describes as a “panoply of different kinds of habitable environments that are often independent of sunlight.”
He’s quick to point out that on our own planet, we know that single-celled life was the only thing in town for the first two to three billion years of our history. “If an alien had ever come searching for life on our planet, there’s a two-to-one chance that all they would have found was an ocean full of microbial life and a barren landscape,” said German.
German believes that we could find microbial life in one or more of about half a dozen candidates in our solar system, in places with an ocean with geologic activity like Europa. German adds with zeal, “It’s closer to home than human-made robots have already been. We don’t even have to go to the limits of human ambition!”
During the 2019 expedition season, the SUBSEA team will be returning to the E/V Nautilus and diving at the Gorda Ridge in late May and early June–you can follow along from home by watching the live-streamed dives. The ridge is another volcanically active area off the coast of Southern Oregon and Northern California with temperatures and conditions similar to Lōi`hi.
The team will do much of the same science–looking at how the rock and water interactions support microbial communities–but they will also introduce communication breaks to simulate planned and unplanned communication drop offs.
It will be wonderful to see what we learn from this work and subsequent projects. To me, what is truly exciting is that ocean exploration here on Earth will eventually give us the tools to visit other ocean worlds. In return, our drive to explore the universe will allow us to better understand our home planet – to locate majestic underwater mountains, identify new medicinal resources, and discover sea creatures that defy imagination. And, after spending time with scientists like Lim, German and the SUBSEA team, I see that the opportunity to extend ourselves beyond the boundaries of what we currently understand about science, technology, engineering, and even ourselves makes a more-than-compelling case for exploration.
Until we get out there and start poking around, who knows what we will find?
Plastic washes up on the beach in Manzanita, Oregon. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Years ago, I sat on a beach in Maremma, Italy, sifting the sand through my fingers — marveling at the multitude of colors. It was ancient mountains reduced to sediment and ferried to the beach. It was terra cotta roof slates and brightly hued ceramic tiles from the Amalfi coast, transformed by salt, wind, and waves into freckles of color in the palm of my hand. I brought a small amount of sand home in a jar, but the magic was lost in transit. Today, I am not confronted with the remnants of beautiful medieval cities here on this western shore in Oregon. There is no lovely evocative name for what crunches beneath my feet: plastic. Carried by currents, it accumulates at the water’s edge.
Beyond the horizon exists a floating gyre, called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by some; others name it the Pacific Trash Vortex. It’s much larger than Texas and has cousins of similar size in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. They are composed mostly of plastic, which floats and flows with the currents, converging where they meet. Ultraviolet light and the ocean environment cause the substance to break down and infiltrate ocean creatures and habitats in ways we have yet to fully understand.
Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
The World Economic Forum says that by 2050, plastic in the ocean will outweigh fish.
I worry and wonder: where will we go when the ocean no longer offers a home and solace for even the smallest of living things? These thoughts propel me on my walk this spring morning, along my favorite beach in Oregon. Then, I spot something else.
ithThe Oregon Coast in the spring of 2016. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
From a distance, it looks as if the beach is covered in litter — like raucous partygoers retreated with the tide, leaving the cleanup for someone else. Intermingled with bits of brightly colored plastic, a closer inspection reveals that the curvy line extending for as far as I can see is a mass stranding of tiny little organisms called Velella velella.
Like the Portuguese man-of-war, but smaller, these hydroids live in large colonies out in the open ocean, drifting en masse along the surface of the water, much like those amorphous plastic gyres, but living. Protected by a deep blue pigment that acts as natural sunscreen, the critters flood the U.S. Coast Guard office with false hazard reports during those spring months when folks mistake the floating, giant blue blob heading toward the beach for an oil spill.
Velella velella or by-the-wind sailors. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
They are also called by-the-wind sailors – nicknamed for the tiny sail-like fin on top of the flat disc that forms the organism’s body. One oceanographer says that the angle of the sail is determined by where the velella grows in relation to land, so that it can tack away from shores. Out in the open water, wind gently propels the critters along the ocean’s surface, but spring and early summer winds, especially during El Niño years, blanket coastlines with millions of these wayward sailors.
Velella are always floating, for lack of a more accurate expression, face down with short, sticky tentacles that enable them to catch and feed on other pelagic organisms. When there is no food readily available, the sailors use photosynthesis to grow algae, which their jellyfish-like offspring consume.
I can’t help but think about perspective and what it might be like to have the ocean below you as your world-view – like an astronaut floating in lower Earth orbit looking down on this ever-changing terrain. It might be all right if one weren’t at the mercy of such powerful forces like wind, ocean storms, and the sort of human carelessness that chokes our ocean ecosystems with plastic.
This essay was originally published in IEEE Earthzine; it has been updated and revised.
Jenny Woodman is a writer and educator who would rather be at the Oregon Coast than just about anywhere else. Follow her on Twitter @JennyWoodman
Sea Turtle Nest. Image Credit: Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge
Knitting sea turtles at sea on the E/V Nautilus. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Sea Turtle Nest. Image Credit: Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge
A turtle trail along a scarf. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
A blanket for Dr. Amber Hale. Image Credit: Amber Hale
There’s always one moment when a factoid emerges that endears me to a critter in some silly, but permanent way, propelling me forward on a quest to know more. Discovering otters juggle rocks fueled an ongoing obsession. Learning octopuses are notorious escape artists came with a permanent membership in the cephalopod fan club. An albatross’s roundtrip thousand-plus mile flights to feed their babies, made me a student of seabirds.
When a mamma sea turtle works her way up a beach to lay her eggs, her fins leave this wonderful squiggly pattern in the sand. It’s a straight line from the salty sea to a future where hundreds of little squirming baby sea turtles hatch and return to the ocean about 60 days after mom’s labor is done.
The fact that this squiggly pattern can be recreated with a simple series of repetitive twists and turns in some super-soft yarn is, perhaps, the ultimate bonus for science-loving knitting nerd such as myself. But, before casting on, let’s talk turtle.
Although sea turtles spend most of their lives at sea, female sea turtles come on land to lay their eggs. Image Credit: NOAA
There are seven species of sea turtles in our world ocean; six of them can be found in U.S. waters (green, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, leatherback, loggerhead, and olive ridley).
All six species are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. According to US Fish and Wildlife, a species is listed as endangered if it is at risk of extinction, and it is listed as threatened if it is likely to become endangered.
Like many marine mammals and seabirds, sea turtles are at risk from ship strikes, entanglement, plastic pollution, and climate change.
These air-breathing reptiles have roamed the Earth for over 150 million years. Some species, such as leatherback sea turtles, weigh anywhere from 500 to 2000 pounds and can dive up to 4000 feet deep. Leatherbacks have been known to migrate thousands of miles for jellyfish, their preferred prey, but nibbling on squid, sea urchins, and floating seaweed will serve as a tasty meal too.
We haven’t always known much about their lives because we can only observe what we see on land. As technologies like satellite trackers and accelerometers get smaller and more cost effective, scientists are on a path to learn much more about the mammals and seabirds who spend much of their time out in and over the open ocean waters. In 2016, researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) used specially engineered cameras to capture rare images and oceanographic data of leatherback sea turtles in the wild. This information will help scientists learn what the critters are eating, where they travel, and what hazards they encounter along the way.
If you’re interested in casting on and knitting some sea turtles, I really enjoyed Heather Anderson’s designs. I made her shawl and then modified the pattern to make a baby blanket for a dear friend and a scarf for my mom. She generously offered a coupon to our readers for her Turtle’s Journey Scarf, which you can find here; use PROTEUSTURTLE promo code on Ravelry (a well-known knitting site) and download the pattern for free. The coupon is valid through January 31, 2019.
Jenny Woodman is a writer and educator; she knits a lot. Follow her on Twitter @JennyWoodman
Heather Anderson is an avid knitter who lives not too far from the ocean in New Hampshire. She teaches knitting classes and designs knitting patterns that keep her learning new things all of the time; you can view her pattern collections here.
Free public water fountains and refilling stations help reduce plastic pollution from single use plastic water bottles. Image Credit: NOAA Marine Debris Program
It’s a beautiful day. The sun is out and it’s a perfect, warm temperature outside. With a free afternoon ahead of me, I decide to open up my WeTap app and go hunting for water fountains. The map is empty for a 200 mile radius around me, which I found out last week when I opened the app for the first time since arriving in Arkansas, meaning that either there are absolutely no water fountains to be found or many water fountains and refilling stations remain unmarked in this area. The search becomes a game, like geocaching. It doesn’t take long on my walk around the historic downtown of Rogers to find a public drinking fountain–in fact, I only had to walk two blocks. I take a picture, log the quality, and voila! Now, there is one new fountain on the map.
Marine debris floating near Hawai`i. Image Credit: NOAA Marine Debris Program
WeTap is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving access to clean drinking water via public fountains while reducing dependence on single-use plastic bottles. The founders of the organization created an app for mobile devices that maps public drinking fountains around the United States. With an extensive map already in place, users are able to access the addresses of nearby fountains and map routes to them, making it easy to find free, clean, single-use plastic free water. The fountain profiles within the app include information about the water flow quality, whether there is a dog bowl available, and if there is a water bottle refill station present.
Although the greatest concentration of public water fountains are in cities, fountains exist all over the country. Users can also participate by adding fountains not yet included on the map.
The efforts of this app, and many like it, are to provide resources that make it easy for consumers to reduce their consumption of single-use plastics, a growing environmental problem.
Single use plastics include anything that is made of plastic and used only once before disposal or recycling. The lengthy list of single use items includes household staples such as plastic grocery bags, water bottles, carry-out food containers, straws, cups, utensils, plastic packaging, and plastic wrap.
One of the primary issues surrounding single-use plastics is that they commonly pollute the ocean. It is estimated that 32 percent of plastic packaging worldwide is not properly disposed of; the debris often ends up in our oceans, where much of it remains for thousands of years, slowly degrading into smaller and smaller pieces.
Plastic pollution has an immediate and lasting effect on wildlife; one million marine mammals are killed by marine debris each year. According to NOAA, “Debris ingestion may lead to loss of nutrition, internal injury, intestinal blockage, starvation, and even death.”
Oceanic features can also help trap items in debris accumulation zones, often referred to in the media and marine debris community as “garbage patches.” Image Credit: NOAA Marine Debris Program
The fight against single-use plastics is happening worldwide in the form of public education, fines, and bans.
In 2017, Kenya banned plastic bags, with a $38,000 fine or four years in jail. The U.K. established bans across the country to limit plastic Microbead use in cosmetic and personal care products in January of 2018 and have estimated that the use of plastic bags dropped nearly 9 billion after taxes were introduced in 2015. Seattle is leading the way for cities across the U.S. with bans starting July 1 of this year for both single-use plastic utensils and straws.
With actions such as these, the momentum to limit single-use plastics is increasing around the globe.
Because of the many different plastics and variety of disposal streams, there isn’t one solution to the array of different issues surrounding plastic pollution around the globe. Luckily, there are many ways of approaching the problem, and tools such as WeTap hope to help lead the way.
Malea Saul is the 2018 Science Writing Fellow forProteus. She received her degree in oceanography from the University of Washington last year and has since been exploring the intersection of science, communication, and education. She is especially interested in how film and storytelling can help transform how we see and investigate the many intricacies of our planet. Follow her on Twitter @SaulMalea.
George Divoky at work in the Arctic. Image Credit: Mike Morrison
George and Thomas during 44th field season on Cooper Island. Imager Credit: Mike Morrison
George and Thomas tagging and releasing Black Guillemots. Image Credit: Mike Morrison
For the past four decades, my field seasons on Cooper Island studying Black Guillemots have always begun with high spirits and a feeling of optimism. Experiencing the 24 hours of daylight in early June while documenting the return of individual birds to the island and their nest sites is always uplifting – some of these seabirds have been returning to Cooper Island for decades. Then, the days begin to shorten as nighttime returns to the Arctic. After monitoring the colony’s breeding activity for over three months, the end of the field season in late August lacks the intensity of the start of the season, but until recently, provided the gratification of having a large number of nestlings depart the island – with the hope many will return in the coming years.
The end of my 2018 fieldwork was as atypical and unpredictable as the first part of the season. In June I saw the colony had experienced a major decline in breeding pairs due to unprecedented high overwinter mortality of adult birds and many of the birds that did return failed to either lay eggs or incubate the eggs they did lay.
After those initial indications that many of the adults were in poor condition in late June, I was surprised to find that the chicks had high survival in late July and August – unlike the widespread nestling mortality witnessed in 2017. Last year’s low breeding success, with the younger of the two nestlings dying in almost all nests, was due to an early and major retreat of the pack ice in the Beaufort Sea, making the guillemots’ preferred prey of Arctic Cod unavailable to foraging parents. This past summer’s sea ice retreat was later than last year and atypical in that, although much of the Beaufort was free of ice by late August, a large remnant of sea ice remained near the Alaskan coast keeping the waters near Cooper Island cold enough for Arctic Cod.
A large remnant of sea ice helped keep Arctic Cod in the Black Guillemot’s foraging range this summer. Image Credit: Alaska Ocean Observing System
Our last two weeks on the island were busy. In addition to monitoring the growth and departure of the guillemot fledglings, we spent many hours capturing adult birds and outfitting them with light-sensitive geolocation and activity data loggers. The high mortality during the nonbreeding season of 2017-2018 shows that winter conditions affecting adult survival, rather than the success of the breeding season, may now play the major role in determining the fate of the Cooper Island colony. As part of the SENSEI project, we deployed over 30 data loggers on adults that will provide us with information on their movements, distribution and activities from this fall until they return to the Cooper Island colony next spring.
My field assistants, Thomas Leicester and Mike Morrison, and I did see individual variation in the ability of the guillemot parents to find cod in the ice-free but cold (<4 degrees Celsius) foraging area. While some chicks weighed over 300 grams in their third week in the nest, some nests had young with large variation in daily growth and weights remaining in the low to mid 200 gram range. While it was heartening to see nearly 40 guillemot nestlings fledge this year, due to the number of nonbreeding pairs and those that abandoned eggs, chick production per active nest was well below the one fledging per nest needed to sustain a stable population.
Light-sensitive geolocation and activity data loggers help us learn where the Black Guillemots go during the winter. Image Credit: George Divoky
While I typically use my first week after the field season to slowly transition into an off-island existence, as I adjust to a life with running water, internet access and no polar bears, this year I traveled to Great Britain for the International Seabird Group Conference in Liverpool. I have always felt a kinship with British seabird researchers as my initial interest in conducting a long-term seabird study came from reading the books of Ronald Lockley, who in the early 20th Century decided to live on an uninhabited British island where he could study seabirds.
After the conference I traveled to the Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé where I am collaborating with Christophe Barbraud and others who, as part of the SENSEI project, are analyzing the 44 years of demographic data obtained on Cooper Island.
In spite of the highs and lows of the past three months, I am glad to have completed another field season of our long-term study. The unexpected findings of this past summer show that our work has never been more important as we continue to monitor a rapidly changing Arctic. I look forward to 2019 and hope things improve for the Black Guillemot colony in the 45th year of our fieldwork.
This is the last field report from Cooper Island for 2018; it is part of an ongoing series titled Arctic Change centered around George Divoky’s 44th field season studying Black Guillemots, sea ice, and climate change on a remote Arctic island off the coast of Alaska. To donate and support Divoky’s work on Cooper Island, visit the Friends of Cooper Island website.
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Arctic Change, a Proteus Plumb Line Series featuring articles and field reports
18 members of the E/V Nautilus Lōʻihi Seamount's 31-person science team are women. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
This photo essay-letter was created on board the Exploration Vessel Nautilus during the 2018 Lōihi Seamount Expedition, a joint project between Ocean Exploration Trust, NASA, NOAA, and a number of academic institutions. The mission used this underwater volcano off the coast of Hawai`i as an analog for future space exploration to distant ocean worlds. Click on photo captions to scroll through the images and read more detailed bios of these phenomenal women working in science, technology, engineering, arts, and math fields.
Dr. Zara Mirmalek and Mary Nichols on the social deck. Zara is an ethnographer studying communication, and work practices among scientists and engineers conducting science and exploration in the ocean (with remotely operated and autonomous robots) and in planetary analogs (for future human and robotic planetary exploration). Mary is a video engineer and professor emeritus at Middle Tennessee State University. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Martynas Graban is the first officer on the Nautilus where she has served for two years. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Basia Marcks is an ocean science intern on the Nautilus and a PhD candidate at University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. Her research focuses on the interactions between biology, geology, and chemistry in past periods of climate change. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Proteus Executive Director and Lead Science Communication Fellow for the E/V Nautilus Jenny Woodman. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Dear 2nd Graders,
I really enjoyed speaking with your class this morning. It is always fun to tell people about the work we are doing on board the Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus, a 211-foot science vessel outfitted for exploring the ocean floor with robots and studying what is happening in our planet’s ocean.
After we ended our talk with you, one of your comments stuck with me. Your teacher asked me to speak about what girls do on our ship, adding that you all thought only boys could be engineers and that made me a little sad.
As a matter of fact, I couldn’t sleep for quite some time even though it was 4:30 in the morning here off the coast of Hawai`i. But, I woke up with a plan: I’d gather all the girls on our ship (there are a lot of us) and take a photo for you. I thought maybe if you saw how many girls are out here doing exciting work, you might start to see how many important things get done by both boys and girls.
But there was one really big problem…
Jess and Antonella prepare Hercules for his next dive to an underwater volcano off the coast of Hawai’i. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Jessica Sandoval is an Argus pilot on the Nautilus and a Ph.D. student at at the University of California, San Diego. She works on bio-inspired robotics and bio-materials. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Antonella Wilby is a Ph.D. student at the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego, where she builds robots to explore extreme environments, in particular, ocean environments. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Wendy Snyder repairing Argus’s frame. Wendy is a graduate student at University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography; she is working on low power inertial navigation systems for glider type underwater autonomous vehicles (AUVs).
All the girls working on the Nautilus are very, very busy. Eighteen members of the 31-person science team on the Nautilus are women. We serve in all roles — from engineering to communications, from the very highest leadership position down to our student interns. There is no place on the Nautilus where women do not work incredibly hard.
I went to the back deck of the ship where Wendy, Jess, and Antonella were busy repairing our robots, Hercules and Argus. Without these robots, (we also call them remotely operated vehicles or ROVs) we wouldn’t be able to travel to the ocean floor to learn about volcanoes, octopuses, sharks, and creatures no one has ever seen before. As ROV pilots, a big part of their job is maintaining and fixing the ROVs – Wendy, Jess, and Antonella are engineers, so they are really good at what they do!
I ducked around the corner and up the stairs, following Mary and Nicole, but it turned out they were busy too. A camera needed fixing, and as video engineers, they needed to tackle the job. Cameras are very important to the work happening on the Nautilus; they are like eyes on the robots and they help the pilots to safely move around; cameras also record all the amazing images from places humans can’t safely go. As a retired journalist and video engineer, Mary has lots of experience to help guide and train Nicole who just graduated from college.
Dr. Leigh Marsh is a deep sea ecologist who specializes in the acquisition, processing, and analysis of ROV and AUV imagery and remote sensing data for vulnerable ecosystems in the deep ocean. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
One sample from the ocean floor is divided up into many samples for scientists all over the country. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Repairing a camera housing — Nicole Gottschalk, video engineering intern, and Mary Nichols. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Leigh Marsh and Megan Lubertkin in the Nautilus lounge. Megan is a graduate student at University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Brianna Alanis is a graduate student at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her work focuses on creating autonomous proxies for primary production measurements using dissolved oxygen. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Our science data team — Leigh and Megan were also quite busy. They spent part of the afternoon brainstorming how to manage the thousands of images and samples being gathered with each dive, and they met with expedition leaders to share their ideas about how to do even more with the limited space available for so many scientists on the ship.
Then, I went to the wet lab, but another member of the science data team, Brianna, was busy organizing the equipment the science team uses after Hercules collects those samples and brings them back to the ship; one of her jobs is to prepare those specimens for scientists all over the country to study back on dry land.
Dr. Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert is a member of the Nautilus’s science/data team. She is doing post-doctoral work at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where she studies the microorganisms that live in environments where sunlight (or products of sunlight) cannot be used for energy.
Samples from the ocean floor must be divided up, preserved, and prepared for delivery to many scientists around the country. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Vice President of Exploration and Science Operations and Expedition Lead Nicole Raineault and Sam Wishnak, digital media coordinator for Ocean Exploration Trust. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
As the Vice President of Exploration and Science Operations for the Trust, Dr. Nicole Raineault works with the Nautilus team’s extended network of scientists to organize and plan the science objectives of the cruises. As an Expedition Leader she facilitates seeing those plans through on board the vessel. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
I ran over to the social deck, just in time to see Elizabeth rushing off to her lab. She had to place a bottle of seawater in an incubator, which is like a small oven. She wanted to test how long it will take her to process the samples Hercules will bring up to the ship from the volcano.
I was sure I’d be able to wrangle Sam and Nicole, but as part of the leadership responsible for the success of this and future expeditions, they were busy coordinating the hundreds of items that need addressing each day.
First Officer Martyna Graban helps survey the ship’s hull. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Ariel and Mugdha work on telling the story of this Nautilus expedition. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Science Communication Fellow Mugdha Flores is a marine biologist and informal educator; she loves teaching students about the ocean and aim to inspire them to become stewards of our ocean. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Thais Drummond da Silva is the third officer on the ship who stands watch on the bridge and is in charge of keeping everyone safe. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Speaking of the people who help this ship run smoothly, Thais and Martyna are officers in charge of running the ship so all this amazing science can happen. Today, Martyna took a crew out on a small boat to inspect the hull, and Thais makes sure everyone on the ship is safe at all times.
My friends Ariel and Mugdha were also busy, shooting video to help tell the story of science, ocean exploration, and marvelous feats of engineering.
Even I had to stop and take a break from writing this letter to you; Amy and I were needed in the studio where you saw us this morning. We had to talk to a group of people gathered at a museum in San Francisco – we showed them pictures and answered their questions just as we answered yours.
Dr. Darlene Lim is the principle investigator for this NASA SUBSEA project; she’s based at the NASA Ames Research Center where she is actively involved in the development of operational concepts for human scientific exploration of our solar system. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Darlene Lim in the wetlab with Jeff Seewald. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Amy Smith and Jenny Woodman in the television studio speaking to a group gathered at a museum in San Francisco. Dr. Smith is an astrobiologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute; she studies where microbiology, astrobiology, and the origin of life meet. She seeks answers to whether life could exist on other worlds in our solar system and beyond. Image Credit: Sam Wishnak
Science Communication Fellow Ariel Waldman is the founder of Space Hack and serves as an adviser to NASA. Image Credit: Ariel Waldman
My last stop on this adventure was the lounge where Darlene was sitting at her laptop on a big leather sofa. As principle investigator for this project, her days are really long – she’s working even when she looks like she might be relaxing. When I found her, she was getting ready to go on NASA TV and talk about the work we are doing; two million people tuned in to watch her today!
I’m writing this letter because I’d hate to think that there are any young girls in your class who think it isn’t cool or possible for them to build robots or rockets, and I’d hate to think that there are boys who think they shouldn’t do the thing they dream about doing, whatever it may be.
Following science out to sea has taken me to some pretty extraordinary places. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
And, if you don’t want to be a scientist or engineer, but you love the sea creatures — if you dream about what it might be like explore the ocean, I have a secret for you: not everyone involved studying the ocean is a scientist or engineer. I’m a writer. My job is telling true stories about this work so people can better understand the world we live in. Folks like me — anthropologists, painters, teachers, filmmakers, chefs, and all sorts of people play a big part, making amazing things happen every day for organizations like the Nautilus!
Thanks for asking us such smart questions. I hope you will stay curious, have fun and keep exploring!
Jenny
Jenny Woodman, Proteus founder and executive director, is a science writer and educator living in the Pacific Northwest; she is a 2018 lead science communication fellow on board the Exploration Vessel Nautilus. In 2016, she wrote her masters thesis on women in STEAM and continues to explore this topic in her work. Follow her on Twitter @JennyWoodman.
This image of Jupiter’s Europa moon was captured by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s; scientists are studying deep sea volcanoes on Earth in preparation for future exploration to places like Europa where they expect to find oceans and hydrothermal activity beneath the moon’s surface. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute
On August 21, a team of scientists, engineers, and students arrived in waves, loaded with personal gear and equipment for deep sea exploration off the coast of Hawaii. The mission, a joint project with NASA, NOAA, Ocean Exploration Trust and a number of academic institutions, is to explore the Lōihi Seamount with remotely operated vehicles, or robots.
Conditions at this underwater volcano are similar to what scientists believe exist on moons in the outer regions of our solar system. Experts from NASA’s Systematic Underwater Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog (SUBSEA) team think it is likely that oceans and hydrothermal activity exist beneath an icy crust on Saturn’s Enceladus and Jupiter’s Europa.
Robotic dives at Lōihi also offer the opportunity to practice and develop protocols for future missions. Someday, when we reach distant ocean worlds, it is unlikely that humans will be able to enter into these hostile environments; it is more likely that they will deploy robots and explore from the safety of their ship or some other location, much like ocean explorers do today.
In order to develop protocols to guide those future missions, NASA and their partners have gathered a science team at the Inner Space Center at Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography; this team will remotely oversee and direct operations on the Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus here in Hawaii. The work will serve as an analog for expeditions where astronauts will communicate across great distances. Experiencing delays and possible technical difficulties first-hand on Earth will enable NASA and their partners to be better prepared for the challenges of deep space exploration.
Back on board the Nautilus last Monday, there were hugs and laughs as those who had sailed on the ship reunited and newcomers were introduced. We were eager to get going, but Hurricane Lane had other plans. The storm intensified and the Coast Guard ordered all ships over a certain size out of the port of Honolulu. Nicole Raineault, vice president of exploration and science operations for the Ocean Exploration Trust shared the news that expedition leaders and the ship’s captain, Pavel Chubar, didn’t feel the science team would be safe on board the ship during the storm. The Nautilus was going to ride out the weather in safer waters north of Maui, but the seas would be rough nonetheless – it was not going to be a place for non-professional mariners.
On Wednesday August 22, we repacked our gear, secured science equipment on the ship, and offloaded in Honolulu. As stores and restaurants closed all over Waikiki where we were staying, it was surreal to see the images of an immense storm heading our way while tourists poured in and out of the shops. The island chain is no stranger to powerful storms, but the last major hurricane occurred in 1992; Hurricane Iniki caused $3.1 billion in damage.
Hurricane Lane from the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA
Lane was expected to hit Hawaii on Friday or Saturday, so we stocked up on food and water in case the storm disrupted power and transportation. (Experts recommend your family’s disaster supplies include one gallon of water per person, per day as well as enough food, medicine, and creature comforts like activities for little ones to last at least two weeks. For more on how to prepare your family for disaster visit here and here.)
The slow-moving storm never made landfall on O’ahu, but caused catastrophic flooding to the Big Island, dumping over 50 inches of rain in just a few days.
On August 26, we were transported to the Nautilus via water taxi and immediately set off as teams worked to prepare equipment for operations on Monday morning. The seas weren’t quite as calm as most would like and many napped and stared at the horizon in an effort to quell uneasy stomachs. Most over the counter motion sickness medicines cause drowsiness (and mine was no exception — although the box was labeled “less-drowsy,” it would be more apt if it read “may cause light coma”).
The E/V Nautilus underway, heading towards the Kilauea lava flow. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
We’re now our way to the Kilauea lava flow, a slow-moving eruption that has caused extensive damage to the Big Island since early spring. Data from the previous Nautilus expedition, Mapping Pacific Seamounts, included signals that look like little bubbles, which they’d never seen before.
Chris German is a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and leader of the science data team for this expedition. “It is a process we’ve not had the chance to study previously,” German added as he explained that they are returning to the same spot in order to see if those mysterious bubbles are still present.
He and his team are eager to determine an ideal location future dives. The Nautilus team uses sonar mapping technology to both enhance our understanding of the processes occurring on the ocean floor and to accurately identify where to deploy the robots for exploration. “This may be another kind of hydrothermal system nobody’s ever seen before,” German added with a grin.
We expect to be able to see the flow area from a distance after breakfast Monday morning, and we’re looking forward to launching our first dive operation on the Lōihi Seamount at midnight (HTC) Tuesday morning. Whenever the robots are deployed, the video feed is live-streamed to viewers all over the world at www.nautiluslive.org.
Jenny Woodman, Proteus founder and executive director, is a science writer and educator living in the Pacific Northwest; she is a 2018 lead science communication fellow on board the Exploration Vessel Nautilus. Follower her on Twitter @JennyWoodman.
A pair of Cooper Island Black Guillemots. Image Credit: George Divoky
A pair of Cooper Island Black Guillemots. Image Credit: George Divoky
In a breeding season and field season that has been a tough one for both the Black Guillemots on Cooper Island and the investigators studying them, today was a day of celebration as morning nest checks revealed that the oldest nestling on the island had departed for the sea during the night.
The first fledge of the year is always exciting since it is an important benchmark in our field season, which begins with recording the owners of nest sites and continues with observing the dates of egg laying and monitoring the hatching and subsequent growth of nestlings. While it is the parent birds who get all of the credit for a successful nesting season, we cannot help but feel some satisfaction having monitored daily the details of their three-month reproductive cycle. Additionally, and certainly now with the recent decline in the size of the colony, a fledged chick provides hope for the future. With sufficient luck, in three years the chick that fledged last night will return to Cooper to join the breeding population.
So we congratulate the proud parents White-Black-Gray, a bird fledged from Cooper Island in 1995 who has bred here since 2000, and Blue-Blue-Yellow, an immigrant (likely from one of the large Russian colonies) who had been breeding on the island for the past twelve years.
We are hoping that in the next few days their now independent fledgling will be joined by its sibling and a good number of the 50 birds that remain in nest sites.
This field report is part of an ongoing series titled Arctic Change centered around George Divoky’s 44th field season studying Black Guillemots, sea ice, and climate change on a remote Arctic island off the coast of Alaska. To donate and support Divoky’s work on Cooper Island, visit the Friends of Cooper Island website.
I can’t help but think about perspective and what it might be like to have the ocean below you as your world-view – like an astronaut floating in lower Earth orbit looking down on this ever-changing terrain. It might be all right if one weren’t at the mercy of such powerful forces like wind, ocean storms, and the sort of human carelessness that chokes our ocean ecosystems with plastic.
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