 Not the Recording in Progress, this is Susan Roberts, the Director of the Ocean Studies Board, and I wanted to welcome everyone to our 101st meeting of the board. To get started this morning, I thought especially since we do have so many people online, it would be useful to have just quick introductions of the board members, so you know who's on the board and where they're from. So I'm going to start with our board chair, Claudia. Go ahead. Good morning everyone. I'm so excited everyone is here. My name is Claudia Benitez-Nelson. I'm the Chair of the Ocean Studies Board. I'm Marine Biogia Chemist from the University of South Carolina. I'm Lynn Talley. I'm a member of the U.S. National Committee for the Ocean Decade. I'm from Scripps Institutional Oceanography and I'm a physical oceanographer. Hi, I'm Scott Glenn, Professor of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University. Thank you. Good morning everyone. Tom Miller, I'm a Fisher's Ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Chesapeake Biological Lab, and I'm a member of the Ocean Studies Board. Hi, this is Mark Spaulding. I'm the President of the Ocean Foundation, former faculty at UC San Diego in the International Relations Department. Marcia? Hi, I'm Marcia Isaacson. I'm the Director of the Signal Information Sciences Lab at Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the Ocean Studies Board. Kelly? Hi everyone. Kelly Oskbeg, I'm a Senior Program Officer for the Ocean Studies Board. Tony? Tony MacDonald, I'm the Director of the Urban Coast Institute at Marmouth University in New Jersey and I am also a member of the U.S. National Committee on the Decade. Leigh Ann? Hi, I'm Leigh Ann Martin, an Associate Program Officer on the Ocean Studies Board. Dan? Hi, I'm Dan Costa, a Study of Physiology and Ecology of Upper Tropic Levels. I'm a Professor and Director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz. And Daryl? Hi, I'm Daryl Acker Carter. I am a Research Associate with the Ocean Studies Board. And Stacey? Hi, Stacey Karas, I'm a Senior Program Officer with the Ocean Studies Board. And now we're going to move to our online members. John, Delaney? Hello, I'm John Delaney from the University of Washington. I'm a retired marine geologist studying underwater volcanoes. Paul Williams? Hi, I'm Paul Williams with the Suquamish Tribe. And if you just sound Washington, I'm a Policy Coordinator on the Ocean Studies Board. OK, thanks, Paul. Mark Abbott? Yeah, I'm Mark Abbott, President Emeritus, Woods Hole Ocean and Graphic Institution, a member of the OSB. And Lisa Campbell? I'm Lisa Campbell. I'm a Professor at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort, North Carolina and a Social Scientist and member of the OSB. Rosie, are you still there? Sorry, I can't see all my names. Let's see, do we have any other board members online who have had a chance to introduce themselves yet? Oh, Tom Chance. Yeah, Thomas, go ahead. Sure, I'm Thomas Chance. I am Founder and Former CEO of CNC Technologies and Founder and Former CEO of ASV Global. And I'm a member of the OSB. OK, and have we caught all of the OSB members now? Hi, Sue, it's Amy. Oh, Amy. Sorry, I just stepped in a few minutes late. I'm sorry. Yeah, we're doing introductions. Yes. OK, yeah, so Amy Bauer and I'm a member of the OSB and a Senior Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Physical Oceanography. Thank you, Amy. And thank you, everyone, for joining today. We really appreciate it. We're looking forward to some really interesting sessions this morning and this afternoon. And the first one that we have today is to really talk about COP 28. And Kelly Osvig has been leading the OSB on the staff side with planning for COP. But I know several other members are also planning to go. And so I certainly encourage you to chime in. So Kelly? Yeah, thank you. Can you enable me to share my screen? Just got a couple of slides. OK, so, well, there we go. So the National Academies is again attending COP this year. So that's the UN Conference of Parties. It's the Climate Change Conference. Last year was the first year that they had an ocean pavilion at the conference. So the ocean really got a lot of attention in these very important conversations. And it was really fantastic to be a part of that last year. So this year, we again are helping out with that. We are one of the many sponsors of the pavilion. And with that comes the ability to reserve a meeting room, to submit abstracts for presentations and sessions and things like that, and just to learn a ton and meet a lot of folks while we're there. So this is just kind of the schedule for the entire COP. And so it's November 30 through December 12 this year. And it will be held in Dubai. And then the ocean pavilion, they've got some really great marketing. They will be putting together a program as well. And so basically, when you say a pavilion, I know not everyone has been to a COP. Last year was my first. There's just a sea of pavilions. So a sea of large areas where they have a stage. They have different various seating arrangements. They've got a place for sitting down at tables and talking with folks. They've got private rooms. And they're all different, depending on how much money you're prepared to give. But the ocean pavilion, it was beautiful. They did a great job, and it was a lot of fun to be a part of. So there's a little photo there of where we held our sessions, the stage there. And then this slide, as of maybe last Friday, those are the partners that are part of it. And it's growing every day. So those are the folks that are attending the pavilion. And supporting it. The pavilion has several tracks that they named. And this kind of goes along with the tracks of the larger conference. The three main tracks are changing ocean climate consequences and the future ocean. And there's a lot of intersections between all of them, as you can imagine. And then within these, you basically apply that anyone attending or sponsoring can apply to have sessions within these topics. So I don't need to read them all, but the Ocean Studies Board has worked in almost every one of these areas. These are all areas that they're extremely important in terms of the climate and moving forward in that way. So we are personally, we submitted three abstracts. And they're in the process right now of sorting through everything. And they'll probably ask some folks to work together and things like that. So for us, we submitted three. One is really to do with our Ocean CDR report that was released a few years ago. And then we're kind of coupling that with the Coastal, which was in the Negative Emissions Technologies Report that was released in 2019. So really talking about coastal and ocean climate intervention strategies. And then we submitted another one on, oops. I've screen blacked out, on an inclusive and equitable ocean. So that's kind of in line with some work we've got going on with a workshop of Atlanta's leading and also with this diversity study that we've just started this month. And then I also threw in a third, a heated case for sustained ocean observations. And there's a lot of words there, but I kind of just made that up. So I'm hoping that some of what we talk about today could feed into that session and we'll further refine it. So we should find out in the next week. I think someone has their one second. So in terms of our involvement, so we'll have our sessions. We hope to work with others on sessions. And we're trying to get a better feeling for who's attending and how to best organize some meetings there and kind of make the most of it. So for those listening, if you plan on attending, please let us know. We may be able to use you in one of these sessions or we may just want to say hello. So do reach out to us and let us know. And I'm also here with Tony McDonald who's attending. And I don't know, did you want to add anything? Yeah, this is Tony McDonald from the Urban Coast Institute. Again, I have been participating in the COPS both as an observer for my institution but also in partnership with a group called the Global Ocean Forum, which some of you may know, Billy Anna Sansansane started that group a while back to really elevate oceans in the climate dialogues. And so I guess I have three kind of quick comments. One is the ocean science community being more highly represented at the COPS would be a really good thing because it really is dominated as you might imagine by the diplomatic and the policy agendas. There have been many groups stood up to advocate policy outcomes within the COP but there's an increasing focus in the COP on the substance of scientific inputs and also the global stock take and other assessments of progress. So I feel like my as a lawyer who sort of hangs out with all of you all scientists, I actually think your voices should be a little bit more prominent in the dialogues. And so having OSB there I think is a very good opportunity. I would say very explicitly the opportunity we took advantage of last year with Kelly was as I'm also a member of the National Decade Committee. So we did meet with Sarah Kaepnick from ANOA and also the Vladimir and others from IU. So I do think the National Committee engagement there will be an opportunity that we might want to be a little bit more proactive in thinking about engaging them as well as some of the studies. And although the Ocean Pavilion is kind of what I call the show and tell part of the agenda, there are also a series of sessions that happen that are actually hosted by the conference itself on topical issues of interest. So when we get a better sense of the agenda that will not only be the Ocean Pavilion part of this but also the actual formal sessions that will be engaged. And so thinking about whether and how we engage with other partners I think it's got a real opportunity for us so I think it's great that OSB is set up but probably needs to do a little bit more strategic thinking about how we both identify the science folks that are there and active that we might want to focus on meeting with them as well and elevating not only the work that we do but our international collaborations as well. Thanks, Tony. Yeah, Lynn. And I know you said you were going to be at COP also. Yeah, so I'm planning to go with the Scripps group and have submitted an abstract on behalf of one Argo to one of those sessions. So I'd love to be helpful. And I'll be bringing a plexiglass basically see through Argo prop. But yeah, whatever I can do to help especially with the sustained observations part and the resilience of the coastal and ocean observing sort of things. Okay. Yeah. How much can you come up to the table and just introduce yourself? So we're helping coordinators some other pieces of information that might be useful the pavilions in the blue zone which is also the zone that was housed most of the government pavilions. So there's a lot of chances for interactions with other governments. There's also a big nature pavilion. So I'd go back to Kelly's point their opportunities if people go over to interact with other pavilions Tony's point also and you should look at some of those opportunities. I think it's a great opportunity to kind of expand the purview for awareness of OSB. And on the programming side I think the programming submission deadline closed on Friday and I think we have 180 or 200 program requests for roughly 60 spots. So there's gonna be, we're gonna look for opportunities where there's overlap and we can integrate people together. So keep an eye out when you're doing there might be some opportunities to merge things together to get more people involved but just some logistical info. I just wanna make one comment too also there also will be some a variety of other activities for people who wanna track things. And so there will be both there's also something called a virtual ocean pavilion which is an online asset which complements the real-time sessions that are happening at the ocean pavilion. So we'll make sure that we get the information out about the virtual ocean pavilion. The global ocean forum is also working on a report on progress on oceans and climate action. So that's a multi-partner effort to actually give a sort of a bit of a report card and update on ocean climate action in general that'll come out before that. So I'll also make sure that's available and there will be a pretty good directory not only of what's happening at the ocean pavilion but all of the other ocean meetings it is a bit of a three-ring circus maybe a good entertaining one but there's a lot going on at this meeting. And so there will be an online searchable database for other ocean events that might be at the nature pavilion or any number of other places that might be of interest as well that people can usually participate in real-time. Thank you, Tony. So I will put my email in the chat and if anybody is planning on attending just do reach out to us and we'll figure out how to best work together and we look forward to seeing you in Dubai. Hey, Kelly, do you wanna... I don't quite know what the status of the badges is right now, do you have any updates? Nope. Yeah, so we, as the national economies I think we did we end up getting three badges? Two badges this year. So, yeah, so Kelly's still badge-less. I guess that's something that we're hoping there'll be an extra that shows up. Yeah, I think I'm using one of those. I think I have something but... Yeah. The last update. Okay. Do you have a sense when the final decisions will be made about the schedule and the abstracts? I mean, I know it was just, Friday was the close. I think it'll be a few weeks only because and then it'll start trying to get people to interact. So it'll probably take a better part of a month by the time they're finished guessing. Sorry, for those of you who are on online it'll probably take several weeks to a month before the final program is established and the abstracts are settled. Thank you. Yeah, so if anybody online has any comments or wants to ask a question, just raise your hand. You're in virtual hand. I probably won't be able to see your actual hand. Okay, well, I'm not seeing anything. So I did forget to show some of our opening slides which is just about our safety minute for those who are in the room. So Safa, could you bring those up? So this is for people who are in the room, the star shows you where you're located and the important part is if there's any emergency, let's say a fire alarm goes off is to know where the exit is. So it's basically where you came in this morning and we do have, I forget what you call it, but we have sort of a location across the street at the building museum. If there is a fire alarm, that's where we're recommended to go and then they will let us know when it's safe to be back in the building. Next one. And then we have our hybrid meeting logistics. And so the main thing for us today is to make sure that you mute when you're not speaking. And if you're in the room, you have to use the microphone. So if you're not sitting at the table, please come up to the table, take an available seat and make sure to use the mic. And then we're going to, as much as possible, if you can stay on the Zoom, even if you're in the room, so that you can also use your virtual hand, it will make it a little bit easier to call in people in order. So that's one of the things that we're asking for you. And then if you're going to, and I forgot, if you're going to be asking a question or talking, it does help to have your video on. And I apologize because I forgot to do that before I did our safety minute. Is that it, Safa? Okay. So I'm going to ask, we have two guests today. Robert, Bob Richmond, or Robert Richmond from the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and Ken Bussler from Woods Hole Oceanographic. And I'm just going to ask if you're both on the line. Yeah, I see Bob. Good. Thank you. Thank you for joining. I know it's a little earlier in your location, but you've got company because Rosie is also here and Ken. And I know it's a little bit early. It's about 10 minutes ahead of schedule, but would you two be ready to go forward? Yep, we're ready to go. Okay. And do you have a presentation? Yeah, I do. So if I can share screen, I'll operate it from my side if that's okay. Yes. And I will say, so by way of introduction, that Bob served on our committee for the coral study that we did on increasing coral resilience, and Ken Bussler served on our committee for the Ocean CDR. So both alumni of OSB activities. Okay, it's asking me to go ahead and allow. Yep. Okay. Should it be okay? One moment. Let's share screen and share. Okay, can people see my screen? Yeah, the slideshow mode. There we go. All right, good to go. Okay, well, thanks so much everyone for this opportunity. I'd like to thank Susan Roberts for allowing us and inviting us to give a presentation. Ken and I were invited to serve on a scientific expert panel by a group called the Pacific Islands Forum. It's 18 sovereign nations in the Pacific, 16 of which are island nations populated by indigenous populations. And it also includes Australia and New Zealand. And so Ken and I for almost a year and a half now have been part of a five person group that were asked to basically evaluate the present plans that are already underway for the release of treated radioactively contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. And so Ken and I were asked, invited earlier this month to submit an editorial to Science Magazine on our observations, not just about Fukushima, but within the context of healthier oceans. And so thanks to that, we were given the invitation, which we're very grateful for. And so what we'd like to do is we'll kind of tag team and going through a bit of the context, the background, the history and where we are and have time for questions because no pun intended, this is a very hot and timely topic that we're concerned about. I'm pleased to say that as of this morning, we had over 7,000 downloads, which doesn't speak to us as much as it does to the topic that that many people do care about ocean health. So I think the important context, especially for the Pacific Island leaders was the fact that we're not painting on a blank canvas. We're all well aware that the oceans are already in trouble for a variety of reasons, hence things like the UN Ocean Decade, the recently signed high seas treaty, and a lot of other work that's gone into recognizing that we've really got to do a better job of how we treat the oceans and the people who depend on them. We know that there are a variety of anthropogenic disturbances already occurring, climate change, obviously one of the biggest one with ocean acidification, temperature changes, sea level rise, we see it affecting populations of fish due to the expansion of the Western Pacific warning pool. We see it affecting areas of productivity due to ocean acidification and the effects on the even the external skeletons of calcifying organisms. This is superimposed over exploitation of fisheries resources, hence efforts to expand large scale marine protected areas and pollution, which is what we're going to focus on today, a real rogues gallery of everything from mercury to plastics, personal care products. I also served on the sunscreen committee, the UV filters. And it's very clear that our oceans are being affected by a variety of these anthropogenic disturbances. I don't think anyone ever expected that you would have to consider how many cans of tuna you fed your child in a month. And that's where we are. So it's very clear that the oceans are a recipient for a lot of the things that we don't intend. And yet when we look at them and as a cumulative impacts, these are concerns moving forward. I work and have been working in the Pacific Islands for over 44 years now, living and working in everything from areas full disclosure. I did my doctoral dissertation research at NOE talk at all in the Marshall Islands, one of the sites of the nuclear testing program from 1946 to 1958 with a total of 67 atomic detonations. And so I have experience in evaluating the uptake, trophic transfer and bioaccumulation of radiouclides myself. I was there 80, 81 and 82 on NOE talk. That's when they poured the infamous run at Dome. They took one atomic bomb crater and pushed a lot of the radioactive waste from the testing, capped it over with concrete and that concrete is already falling apart. Raising the question, as a graduate student meeting with the engineers, saying right at the functional half-life of concrete is 50 years and a half-life of carbon 14 is 5,730. How do you reconcile what's going on? And there was a large shrug. We're dealing with issues of food security for the islands as cultural identity and practices. And having had the chance to spend a lot of time, the upper right-hand photo is actually part of my fishing group on NOE talk that I used to go out with regularly. It's not just a matter of getting protein, but it really is the fabric of life. This is where a lot of socialization occurs, a lot of the activities. Up below that, we see women's groups that are meeting literally on the reef at low tide where they're gleaning. But once again, this is far more than just protein. It's where children learn to socialize with one another. One of the women's groups I work with in Palau on a regular basis describe the reef in the coastal areas, the community psychiatrist. This is where they get together and work out a lot of problems within the community. Unfortunately, everything from family abuse to drugs and things of that nature. And so we see that the ocean and the related resources are very much not only part of cultural identity that's handed down from generation to generation, but it gets to individual and community health, physical health, mental health, community health as a group. And I think those that like myself who grew up in Western society don't really understand how essential the integrity of the ocean resources are to the people who depend on them. Obviously, economic stability, this is not only for the food they eat, but for many of these islands, it really is their economy. We talked about ecological integrity, land-sea connections and the connections between the organisms on the reef. We look at things like intergenerational responsibility. One of the real pleasures of working with Pacific and with groups like the Pacific Island Forum is they always take the long view. Whenever I'm in the Pacific working with island communities, the question I will always be asked is how will this decision affect our children, our grandchildren and generations to come? It's very different for what we just saw in Congress, the fact that the United States government is open with five hours to spare where people look on a two, four or six-year cycle. If you're in the House of Representatives, everything I've ever been asked is on a two-year cycle, Executive Branch is four and Senate is six. And so we see different worlds completely in terms of this intergenerational responsibility and environmental sustainability that goes with it. And so the concerns regarding planetary radioactivity in the Pacific are the actual radio nuclides and the effect on the environmental and connected human health. What's going on right now is truly a transboundary and transgenerational issue, meaning it's not staying within the waters of Japan where this is being released, but it's going across boundaries. And for that reason, here we have the High Seas Treaty that was signed in June, and before the ink is already dry, we have a major issue of transboundary concerns, which is really the focus of the High Seas Treaty and the UN Ocean Decade. But this is also a transgenerational issue. It's supposed to go on for over 30 years in terms of discharge and Ken will speak more of that. Once again, ecological, cultural, and economic implications, and Ken will address the issue that, it's one thing to say something is bad, can you come up with something better? And I think we have. So I'll turn it over to Ken at this point. Thank you, Bob. Susan on the Ocean Studies Board, I assume you can hear me? All right. So my job, I think I'm a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Spent the last 40 years, so I look at radioactivity in the ocean. And I just want to kind of go back to what the different sources are that we're concerned with and how they compare, say, to other releases, and then get on to this PIF-experts group and what we're thinking about the new releases from the tanks. And so this slide is just meant to an apology for some of the pretty small numbers and fonts, but it's really just designed to say, hey, we live in this radioactive world. There are lots of sources. And when you think of what humans have introduced, you've probably, many of you see in the Oppenheimer movie, ever since we launched the nuclear weapons era in the 1950s and 60s, the largest release is typically associated with those atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. And so if we add up all of the cesium that was released, 137, that isotope, it's a 30 or half life, we get something close to 1,000. Peta becker rails, I'll use this unit a lot. It's 10 to the 15th. So a becker rail is a very small amount of radioactivity. Peta is a very big unit that goes with it. But if we stick with that, that's the largest green circle there. Most of it, two thirds fell in the ocean because it was distributed globally and we live on this ocean planet. Chernobyl, about the time I was doing my thesis, happened in 1986. That was largely a land-based accident. It delivered most of that radioactivity on land. Eastern Europe, Europe and parts of Asia, but we even could detect that around the globe as well, 85 in those same units, but 10 times smaller, but certainly something of great significance in comparison. And then we come along in 2011, hard to imagine for me 12 plus years ago, and there was this accident, we'll get into that a little bit more, but for the same isotope, about four or five times less. But since that reactor was on a coast, much more delivered directly to the ocean from Fukushima, Daichi. And realize also next is that it wasn't just cesium, they're tracking at least 50 forms of radioactivity, usually it's this soup of different isotopes, different half-lives, different chemistry in the ocean, different health effects. So we can't just use one to say what the consequences might be, but here is strontium 90, a very small amount was released, but it is a great concern in terms of this uptake and tritium we're gonna hear about in the tanks, 0.3 of these becquerel units released originally, not very much, but that's what we're gonna talk about a bit more. And can we go one more forward Bob? And I just want to remind you, if you're a radiochemist, Claudia certainly knows this, one of our challenges often, how do you detect these smaller amounts of what humans introduced the ocean against the natural background? So things like uranium 238, potassium 40, yes, they are much more abundant, hundreds of thousands of times more uranium potassium than these isotopes, but these are unique, this is what we've added to the environment. So the consequences need to be considered from all of these sources. So that's the general background, let's get the Fukushima next slide. And so we're talking 2011, and we're talking a magnitude nine earthquake, if you remember the consequences, this tsunami that came in 30, 60 minutes later, the coastline, something close to 20,000 people, missing or dead, hundreds of thousands of billions inundated and destroyed. A several days later, the power was lost at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which caused overheating, and then largely an atmospheric release mid-March. So we're going from March 11th, close to a week later, when the peak and atmospheric deposition happened, luckily for Japan winds blow largely offshore. So 80 plus percent fell in the ocean. And again, we could detect that around the globe in smaller amounts. That direct discharge is what went in the ocean. And that's things like cooling water and buildings that are destroyed, ruptured in terms of their integrity. So groundwater flows in and out of those buildings to this day. Next slide, we'll put some numbers on this. We're gonna go back to these pedobecquerel units, 15 to 20 from the atmosphere and mostly fell falling in the ocean. And then three to 10 comes with the direct discharge. So that's where we were at in 2011 with a single isotope again. I don't have time to go into all the isotopes, but let's look at what's happening today on the next slide. So what are the ongoing sources? So how does that compare? And a lot of this you can't control, right? There are heroic efforts to reduce the explosive releases at the site, add in cooling waters, but things like rivers that fall out on land will lead to a river discharge in those same units. I see a lot of 0.0 something. So a hundred to a thousand times less, but over the next decade, centuries and longer, there still will be a release from rivers to the ocean, much, much smaller than what happened 2011. There is a, in that black area of groundwater release from the beaches that we've documented about the same order, so that's contributing. And then the site itself, that skinny aerial coming out of the site, again, similar units. So there's three sources today, and that's things like leaky buildings, when it rains, accidental releases when tanks overflow, there is a small but ongoing release. So let's look at, oh, the next slide, I'll tell you what we're gonna really talk about here. It's what's gonna come out of tanks. So as they collect this cooling water, how much is gonna come in the ocean? We don't really know that number for season very well, but Tritium, it's on the order of one peta becquerel. That's actually a bigger number than the original release on that slide with those circles. But anyway, that's Tritium. We're gonna get into what that really means as we move ahead here. So Bob, we can go on to cesium. So I'll have three more of these and we'll get into the tanks more. I just wanna give you a flavor of the relative amounts that came out. And cesium's a fission product, comes from multiple sources whether it's weapon testing, nuclear power generation. And these dots are individual samples, cesium 137 in the ocean. The y-axis, the vertical axis is the becquerels that unit per cubic meter per 1000 liters. So that's a small unit in a big volume of water. And the upper insert map, the red area, that's actually a fallout map of where that plume landed on land. But these are the highest values closest to the reactor. And they went back, and those are thousands of data points, right? From 2011 on the left, 2020 on the right. And the point is before 2011, that number used to be two in those units. So you have to use the logarithmic scale to get up there in mid-March to something near 60 million becquerels per cubic meter. So this was certainly unprecedented, extremely high levels in the ocean. These could cause direct harm, reproductive effects on marine life and other things. So we should be seeing that slide. I'm seeing a note that it's not moving forward. Is that everyone here? Let's go back. No, it seems to be moving forward. Okay, so I don't know who wrote that note. Must have been someone from the virtual audience. And I just want to point out before I move ahead, the highest number we ever saw in the ocean was about 1000. So that's why when we say this unprecedented for the oceans, that is why. And we knew some of those numbers right away. These are TEPCO's data, by the way, not my data. So the next slide, Bob, the trends are quite informative. What you see that rapid decrease is due to the Hurok efforts to stop the leaks by merely direct discharge. So that took a couple of months. Early April was the peak in the ocean. You start to see the 11, through 2011 to 2015, a gradual decrease and then a leveling off to this day that number at the reactor site is somewhere between 10 and 100. Obviously higher than what it was before. So the conclusion is the reactor is still a source. And what we'll be talking about is how much more might the tanks add should we be concerned? But if I may, one more version of this, Bob, is the next slide. Just again, maybe Claudia lives and breathes this unit with me, but what does it really mean to have cesium that high? Well, here's some numbers in terms of what's allowed to be released. The highest bar, the red line on there, is at 90,000 in units of becquerel per cubic meter. That's what they're allowed to release from an operational nuclear power plant that's providing power. Drinking water limits in Japan are about 10,000. And fish, I put this kind of fuzzy line on here. If you had fish living in an ocean of about 1,000, they will take up cesium into their muscles in their tissues like potassium. And if they're at or below that line, they should be below Japan's strict threshold to see food safety. And they reached that point in 2015. So it took several years. I think it's important to point out that it took many years to kind of recover from this accident. And it wasn't until 2015 when the fisheries, which are quite important to Japan culturally for their economy, reopened. And that's, now we're in a situation in 2023 where they're asking the question, well, deliberately, are we going to try and release this? Would it be okay? How would it affect not just cesium, but even other isotopes? So we'll get onto some slides, less with pictures as we move ahead. And I'll just say a bit of the history then as we look at those tanks. Next slide, Bob, as we go in there. So here we are in 2023. What's the problem, right? Why should we care? Why should this ocean studies board care? Well, if you think of that, Mickey Mars, mouse cartoon, Sorcerer's apprentice, water keeps accumulating. Every day, initially 500 tons now, about 100 tons per day leaks into the buildings. This is groundwater. This is largely underground structures that contain the radioactive molten down materials. That still has to be kept cool. And so they deliberately add water and this cooling water gets recirculated. But every week, originally one tank would be filled. Now it's about a hundred tons, it takes about a bit longer than that to fill a tank, but they have over 1.3 million tons of water stored on the site. It's getting more volume every day. Something certainly has to be done. If you flip forward, Mickey Mouse was trying to solve this problem, never got to an answer. Japan, if you can forward one slide, Bob, has now this tank farm, over a thousand tanks, all vintages, different designs. This was never designed to be a permanent structure, but they've been wrestling with this issue since the beginning of what to do with this water. And that's now reached a point where they are trying to make a decision. In fact, if we move on to the next slide, they've been thinking about this, of course, way before today. And if we just look at some of the timing here, the history, top right 2013 is when they first started considering, let's just take that tank water and put it in the ocean. What would that do? What are the options? They were talking back then about tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, so the H and H2O. On this plot here, I've put how much tritium on the leftmost side is in those tanks. In fact, those other isotopes, all of the different ones that are there, bit of an alphabet soup of radioactive isotopes, they're all much lower in terms of the back rails per liter. I've converted a bit to per meter squared, the units we used before on the right, but they still are quite high in the tanks even after cleanup using what they call ALPS. It's a advanced liquid processing system. It's undergone many generations. But one thing of importance here, the second bullet on the top, right, is that they were not talking about all of the other forms of radioactivity until 2018 when they released the first public data. We certainly knew they had to be part of that cooling water. And again, this cooling water is not the same, the last bullet on the right, as a nuclear power plant. This is in direct contact water with a molten core that's separated under normal nuclear power plant operation. So these numbers would be not nearly as high in an operational nuclear power plant around the world. I think that's been one misconception. It's just like any reactor. Well, no, it's not. It's not just Tritium. We were also frustrated this paper, 2020, this was an early COVID project of mine, the way I looked at it. I gathered their data, put them in a spreadsheet. They were in PDF format, it was quite a pain, but those bars show you the range. So this immense variability tank to tank two, three, five orders of magnitude difference in each isotope in between the isotopes, which tells me that the cleanup system that they're proposing to use in the future, these next 20, 30 years when they will be releasing it, has not been consistent over the past 10 years. And I think that's an important point to keep in mind when we looked at the data. So the last three or four slides, Bob, I think it's just words. We move forward. Should ocean disposal be considered? I told you they talked about that in 2013, 2020, they issued a radiological impact assessment report and impact assessment. I looked at that, others did, they solicited public comments, Prime Minister endorsed the plan shortly after that, Prime Minister Suga and countries like the US agencies like IEA voice support in general. Now we'll get to that plan on the next couple of slides but certainly immediately there was opposition by the bordering countries or neighboring countries, I'm sorry, not bordering Korea, China, again the specific islands group and several of the NGOs in the region said, hey, wait a minute, we're not happy with the assessment or this idea and we'll give you some reasons why. And 2022 is when Bob and I and three other scientists were asked to help advise the Pacific Islands Forum. So that's a little bit of a history getting you up to date. So what did we find when we looked at the data and we had a number of opportunities to address TEPCO Japanese government and IEA directly and through emails and questions. We certainly felt that the decision alone shouldn't be based on tritium, that's mostly what you hear about in the media, those will be low, we agree on that. But we felt that there was inadequate data quality and quantity, if you don't know what's in the tanks, how can you make an optimal plan? And that gets back to only knowing what's in 40% of the tanks to this day. I showed you thousands of data points in the ocean would not be that hard to go to a thousand tanks and make measurements. Next on this slide, Bob, we also don't think it adequately considers not just the non-tritium isos, but organically bound tritium. I mentioned tritium so radioactive form of hydrogen, OBT stands for the forms that don't behave like inorganic tritium and would accumulate in tissue and seafloor that's not considered. There's a bit of this out of sight out of mind to this day, they really don't have an adequate monitoring program, not just for tritium, but these other isotopes. And they put this year in particular in the last couple has this urgency that sorcerers apprentice, we've got to do something we're running out of space when in fact on the site there is land available. We're keeping that open for eventual removal of the molten core decades away. And around this site, there is a lot of land where you're not going to be building schools and buildings anytime soon. Let's move ahead on some of the points here. And I think this is a big concern take home today. This is setting a precedent that we're taking a 12 year old disaster site and starting to dispose of radioactive waste in the ocean, something that's not allowed under normal conditions under like the London dumping convention. The plan is I've called it the trust us plan. They haven't, we don't think it's sufficient. They're assuming things will work for the next 30 plus years that we take. And we think there are better alternatives. We'll mention that in a couple of slides next Bob. So just something quickly about the IAEA because what we've heard in the news is they've approved this. Well, they are under the UN, their body. They do a lot of really good things for us. They are one of the gatekeepers when things go wrong with radioactivity. They train capacity build, but this assessment is at odds with some of their own human rights rapporteurs. I think that's important to point out. And they have a mandate atoms for peace for the peaceful use of nuclear power. So certainly many countries, NGOs and others do not think they are an independent body to do such assessments. And remember, they do not have a regulatory authority that resides in Japan like any country with nuclear power. So the other bullets on this slide, Bob, you move ahead just to update you if you haven't followed this IAEA in July, stated in their report, this was after a couple of years and visits that they would meet international standards if it goes to plan. But to us the interesting word is they neither recommend nor endorse the plan or justify it. So when people say they approve the plan, it's simply saying it could meet the international standards if currently applied. And based on that, essentially they started discharge immediately on a pipe, by the way, that was built into the ocean a kilometers offshore even before this assessment started before the assessment was completed. So they had this plan from the start. It was endorsed and moving ahead. And next. So before I turn it back to Bob, I think a few points that we're trying to reinforce here, I think really comes down to we can and should do better. I think we could right now ask them to be stopping this release. There is not this urgency. We need a more inclusive and comprehensive plan. We need to explore alternatives. You could be storing those liquids. If you're looking out 30 to 50 years and you're isotope concern is a tritium with a 12 year half-life. After 50 years, 95 plus percent has decayed away. It will no longer be a concern whether it's liquid or as my colleagues actually convinced me make it solidified, make a concrete form. And that way it's more stable and they need concrete for things like tsunami berries and others. And we fully believe that these alternatives have not been adequately considered. And just as quote from the UN decade, let's apply the science we need for the ocean we want. Next on here, Bob, the last part, and then I'll turn it back to Bob is, I think the really important questions and Ocean Studies Board maybe to think about and other applications is not always just the science and technology. What will the impacts be of tritium? What is the dose of tritium? And we don't know if it will be carried out according to plan based on 12 years of these variable cleanups. But the concerns are about transparency and oversight. And how can the public have confidence at all as well? These are quotes from ASB Brown, a group from a group called Safecast in Japan that's made really good progress, giving people and powering people to carry around Geiger counters that they build at home to monitor their exposure. I think those two lines are really important here. It's not just the science, it's how will the public have confidence? And then back to how will the science be brought to this will create the environment, the ocean transparency that we need. So I think it's back to Bob and then a lot of time I think at the end for questions. Great, thanks so much, Ken, really appreciate that. So I'm a biologist by training, even though I actually did time in a radiation biology and biophysics lab years ago when I was an undergraduate studying the uptake and accumulation of radioactive ruthenia 106 and crayfish as an indicator of nuclear power plant leakages, two years on NOE talk watching what was going on being involved in sampling for Brookhaven National Laboratory in Lawrence Livermore and just looking at the way in which people interacted with things on NOE talk. There are cultural activities, there's a particular fish and Marshall's a called pulak, it's a naso, it's a surgeon fish. And their favorite thing to do is when they catch the fish, they cut it open, pop out the stomach, squeeze out the sand and eat it right away. And this is not what you wanna be doing in a site where there's radio nuclides. Goatfish that feed in the bottom, they have barbels. And if we looked at the distribution as Ken pointed out, there's different tissues or different dynamics, there's different k-biology of where it's going in. And for the goatfish, their gills were red hot because they were constantly passing and filtering material through this area that was picking up the radio nuclides. So this is where we constantly hear, well, if you examine the volume of the ocean and you do the calculations of what the radio nuclides are that Ken showed some of the numbers there, then it should be just fine, but this is the problem. Dilution versus bioaccumulation is where chemistry and biology collide. If the ocean was a sterile vessel, then the calculations are absolutely correct, but as soon as you add biology, everything changes. The organisms, the sediments that Ken has talked about are become a repository. They had things in the radiological, ecological impact assessment, the REIA, that would make statements and assumptions like there will be equilibrium between the bottom sediments in the ocean water very quickly, but that's not true. When you have bioturbation, you have organisms that live in the sediment, they're constantly turning it over and we learned this on, and we talked the hard way when we were doing some coring off of Renit, that was the atoll of the island in the atoll where the radio nuclides were more or less poured into that bomb crater. When we did the cores, fortunately that day, I was driving the boat and not handling the cores, but the cores were red-hot with plutonium because once a number of the detonations and a weak talk didn't go critical, just the charges and the bombs exploded and plutonium went everywhere and it turns out the plutonium isn't sinking in the sediment because Kalianasa, this informal shrimp, is constantly doing bioturbation and the plutonium would come right back up to the surface of the sediment as well. So these are things that when we look at the presence of organisms and radio nuclides, we know it from mercury, radio nuclides as well. Again, as Ken mentioned, the discharge is planned to go on for 30 plus years. In 2011, there were tuna caught off the San Diego that had seasoned 137 in them. The levels were very low, so I want to be very careful to say, they were not at levels that people were concerned about, but this is within the same year. Obviously there was a major discharge that occurred at the time, but when you think of a 30-year time period and tuna can get to be 15 years old, this is where people look at things like mercury and tuna. It's large tuna that you want to be avoiding, the large pelagics. There's something called the Relative Biological Effectiveness, the RBE. As Ken mentioned, we have different radioisotopes that are total of 62 that have been identified, some of which you can ignore because they're half-liders are very short, but we talk about things like gamma ray discharge, which is higher energy than a beta particle. But when you look at what's called the Relative Biological Effectiveness, the RBE, even low-level beta emitters can be very concerning because the particles get stuck. They don't go right through. Gamma radiation goes right through. It's very high energy, but beta particles can be trapped in tissue and continue to release ionizing radiation for tissues and cells. And one of the things that Ken mentioned that strontium, the nickname for strontium is the bone seeker because chemically strontium will bind with calcium gets in the bones and you don't want radionuclides and ionizing radiation in your bones because in the marrow is where your red blood cells and white blood cells are constantly being produced. You don't want ionizing radiation when there's fast cell turnover. Ken mentioned organically bound tritium. There's a number of flavors of that, including one called nonescapable or insoluble. And there are data that are available in the literature showing that the biological half-life can be over 500 days in the livers of certain bottom fish. Once again, ionizing radiation effects, and this is very disturbing to me that I and colleagues that do a lot of sub-lethal effects of stressors, it causes DNA damage while single and double strand damage. It affects RNA and also signaling proteins. So one of the really frustrating things, and we'll talk a little bit more about it, but they have a tank full of bottom fish at the site with a video camera on it so people can see the fish are swimming. And they're not dead. Well, there's a lot of things other than death that matter. And that's one of our catchphrases when we do our ecotoxicology, is death is a rather crude estimator of stress. We look at stress at the sub-lethal level and we have a variety of tools, including things that we do specifically for DNA. DNA AP sites, apyrinic, apyrindinic, comet assay, we can look at proteins, DNA damage proteins that are expressed to be able to show what's going on in an organism. None of these techniques are being included in any of the monitoring programs. And these are the things that worry us, signaling protein damage. These are the things that tell the cells what to do. Everything from metabolism to immunological system, these are all notably compromised by radiation and the effects of the radionuclides. There are differences between the way in which nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA are affected. External exposure of things like low-level beta emitters is not really a concern because your clothing and skin will stop it. But it's much different when you ingest an organism, a seafood product that has ionizing radiation, radionuclides in it, because once it gets inside, you have none of the protection from your skin or your clothing. And in the case of nuclear DNA, at least there's a membrane around it. The mitochondrial DNA is generally more affected by everything, including low-level beta emitters as well. So as biologists, we're looking at the data we went in. I think all of us with open eyes saying, show us the data that's safe, we're fine. But to this day, the data emissions are omissions, not emissions, are very concerning to us. And we're good scientists. We're just simply saying when the data are there to demonstrate the safety, but again, in ecotoxicology, you often say an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It simply means you don't have the data. And that's consistently been a problem for all of us on this committee. Radio-nuclide uptake. So on the left-hand side, here's just a couple of cartoons, Tridium, Adam, or Tradiated Water on the top. A Carbon-14 on the bottom. Tridium has a half-life of 12.3 years. Carbon-14, 5,730 years. They can take up into Plankton. We are, listen, any sci-fi movie, we are a carbon-based organisms. I've used Carbon-14 in experiments and looking at translocation on the tablates into zozanthellae and into the animal tissue host of a coral. But we know that hydrogen and carbon get taken up by phytoplankton on the top left there. They get into the zooplankton. And from there, they can get into fish, fish larvae, into people. And in the bottom sevens, and Ken and his group have done amazingly good work on sediment reservoirs for a variety of reggae nuclides. And again, we have bottom feeders. We have bio-turbation. So these are all routes for getting into people. And that's the concern. It's not just dilution in the ocean. It's uptake, trophic transfer, bioaccumulation, and then exposure to people and to the ecosystem components. As no good deed goes unpunished, I got a chance to actually visit the Fukushima site last February as part of the mission. From the Pacific Island Forum, I was one of three of the scientists on the panel that accompanied the leaders from the Cook Islands, from Fiji, from the Marshall Islands to be on site to be able to answer questions. And we had a number of interactions with TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company. Interestingly enough, the two groups that were running the show was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. No representatives from their version of EPA, no representatives from their version of NIH or CDC. And so it was the International Affairs and Industry that were running the show. And so we got into some animated discussions. Everything was done through an interpreter. And when Ken was saying, we don't know what's in the tanks, let's call the source term, for whatever reason, I guess I was sitting between the other two scientists. So they both pointed at me at the same time and said, you talk to them. And so we asked a very fundamental question. All right, can you give us the power analysis you did for the tanks to tell us what you've sampled, how many samples you took, what level of statistical rigor have you done? And we were trying to do this through an interpreter and it wasn't going well. So I just finally looked over at the TEPCO scientists and said, he's speaking English, don't you? He said, yeah. Said, you know what a power analysis is? He goes, of course. I said, can you show us the power analysis of the source terms of what's there? And he said, no. And I said, is it because you won't do it or you didn't do it? Oh, we didn't do it. And so we're all sitting there going, how can you possibly talk about the efficacy of your ALP system in advance like a process? And if you don't know what you're starting with, and their comment was, we don't really care what we're starting with, we're just caring what we end with. And that really is a concern, as Ken said, is do we really trust the data? The top left-hand photo when we drove through the village of Fukushima, it was really devastating. It was totally dystopian. You could drive through the village and the storefront you would look in and everything is still in place from when the earthquake occurred. There's a material just crashed on the floor, shelves that are empty, the clothing store, everything was falling off the racks there. But everywhere we looked are these large canvass or plastic bags full of radioactively contaminated soil from the area. The picture on the bottom of these smiling panda bears, if anyone's ever been to Japan, that's what they use for their stanchions for construction. We weren't allowed to have cell phones with us to take any photos. But here we are walking around the Fukushima site surrounded by 1,000 tanks with 1.3 million tons of radioactively contaminated water, a few hundred meters from three reactors that are in meltdown. And this is what we're looking at is these plastic smiling panda bears all around us. I'm sorry, it was so surreal. I still, I could just sleep for two nights after seeing this go on. But once again, there's this kind of, what's going on there is really concerning. And the one that really I worried about is on the right-hand side. This is a picture of Raphael Grossi, the Director General of the Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA. And they took us to the site where they have these tanks of bottom fish and fiberglass bins for their tritium uptake experiment. So I kept asking, can you tell me about these experiments? What are you feeding the bottom fish? And I got a lot of shrugging and shoulder-hunching. And finally, they answered, well, we have aquaculture commercial pellets that we feed them. So I said, fine, did you treat the pellets with tritiated water first? We'll know, we just go ahead and hold it up. So on three separate occasions, I and my colleagues said, all right, if you want to look at uptake and accumulation of tritium, go ahead and use the tanks but put sediment in the tanks and then put the organisms that they normally feed on, polychaete worms and crustaceans and bivalves in the water and then measure what's going on in the fish as they're feeding on the organisms living in the sediment because that's where the organically bound tritium comes from. And they shrugged said, well, we don't need help with our science, we know what we're doing. So after three efforts to try to say, we'll design the experiment, we'll do the power analysis, we'll do all the stuff and even help you analyze the data for free, their response was to get a picture of the director general of the IAEA holding the commercial pellets over the fiberglass tanks with the bottom fish in it that are swimming saying that the science is impeccable. And so yeah, if we have nightmares, I do, this is certainly the kinds of things that we find very disturbing. So to bring it back to the Pacific Island Forum and the things that we're going to and we're very fortunate, I know you have Rosie Alagato as a member of your, of a science board there. Fortunately, I ran into Rosie yesterday, she lives around the corner from me. So as I was doing my morning run, we had a chance to chat. But the larger issues to consider as part of this issue, regional capacity, cultural integration, connectivity. I work with Pacific fisheries, people all the time with fishers, with communities, with the women's groups. It's actually a very important gender issue too when we look at main resources because of the ways in which there are different gender roles between women and fisheries and men and fisheries. And these are all really important as I alluded to before. And I know Rosie can speak to this far better than I. But whenever you talk to a Pacific Islander, especially navigator, they look at the oceans as connecting the islands, not separating them. Constantly here, the islands are separated by hundreds, thousands of kilometers of ocean, but they're not, they're connected by these things. And that's why we see within a year, cesium showing up across the ocean in fish that are moving and ocean currents as well. On the ocean connects the people culturally, economically, the currents and the fish and other organisms do as well. And so this is really a leadership and stewardship intergenerational legacy of what are we doing? We're not gonna see things showing up there. You can go online and you can see the Australian ambassador eating sushi from fish that were caught off of Fukushima. This is gonna take years to decades to show up. And so these are the kinds of time frames in which we're very concerned. In this panel, the upper left-hand picture are two of my past graduate students, Steven Victor in the black wetsuit, Yemenangol view with a blue top on there. There is not a single Pacific Islander on our panel. And that really spoke to the fact that we're not training the communities that really need to have this kind of science in the kinds of science that they need to be able to do it with their own scientists. I'm very proud of these two. Steven started with me as a undergraduate student and did his master's in my lab. He's now the minister of agriculture, fisheries and the environment for the nation of Palau. And so this is exactly what I'm very concerned about is an opportunity to build capacity. Yemenangol view, the first Palauan to get a PhD in marine and environmental science was the CEO of the Palau International Coralry Center. He's now the lead Brazilian scientist for the Pacific region for the nature conservancy. Two of them brilliant. And the work that they did was wonderful. We need to go forward with it. And in a world in which we talk about Pacific security is a very commonly used term in the United States meaning China. We really need to be investing in the human resources of the region. I've had an NSF advanced technological education grant since 2005 helping to build the marine environmental science programs in American Samoa, Marshall Islands, Federys, States of Micronesia, Northern Marianas and Palau. And it's been amazing to see how many students have gone on to go from two-year degrees to four-year degrees. We're in our fourth cohort of master's degrees in our second cohort of PhDs. I was very fortunate and my colleagues just got an NSF STEM grant scholarships in STEM for marine environmental sciences, which is great. We can't say for native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, but for those institutions that serve them. But the reality is that we're not allowed to give scholarships to any student who is not a US citizen. We can fund the students and many of the students from the Marshalls, the Federys, States of Micronesia and Palau are US citizens of dual citizenship. There are 94,000 Micronesians who live in the US mainland. So in a way, this is kind of cool because we can do a reverse diaspora of bringing the kids that were born in the US mainland from these islands back home to start their degrees in marine environmental science. But it really is an issue that, you know, maybe the scientific community and the board can look at is how can we do a better job of getting culturally connected individuals from the region trained up to be able to do it. In the center is a traditional sailing canoe from Saddlewall Island where I did some work. This is Malopio Lug's village. Those of you that know Mal, he was the one who taught Manila Thompson from Hawaii, the Polynesian Voyaging Society, how to sail. But this incredible traditional knowledge and Ken and I discussed this in our editorial is that these are wonderful systems that have been built on sustainability, but they never had to deal with things like organic phosphate pesticides, radio nuclides and climate change. And so what we need to do is an integration of both of them all the way to the right is a breadfruit fishing kite. It's this really elegant system where they fly a kite over the reef using a Senate rope. They don't use hooks, they use muscle bands from oceanic sharks. The only fish they can catch is along those needlefish. The concept of intergenerational responsibility and sustainability is core to that. We need to bring more of that into the work that we do on the cord and cord Western contemporary science. We're all aware and this is kind of front and center of the national academies. This policy does not keep up with scientific advances. We're advancing on a weekly monthly basis. Many of the standards that are being applied here are years old or decades old and they're not keeping up with the technologies we have today in the multi-omics, proteomics, transcriptomics, genomics. These are able to give us the kinds of data we desperately need, none of these are being applied. Any of the monitoring or the assessment programs are going on right now and that's got us in. What's going on right now violates the precautionary principle, certainly, but they're in the IAEA, they have what are called GSG documents, general safety guidance documents. Number eight specifically speaks to inter-trans boundary issues. Every time one of our members who does a lot more policy than some of the others kept raising the issue of how this violates IAEA's own GSG-8 and they would shrug and say, but look at all the other things that we abide by. It's like, well, that doesn't matter. There's a principle called the LARA as low as reasonably achievable with respect to ionizing radiation exposure. The foundational statement is nobody should be exposed to ionizing radiation without a direct benefit. On the largest scale, the people of the Pacific did nothing to cause this disaster. If you Google was Fukushima preventable, two things will pop up on the beginning of a Google search. One is by the Carnady Institute. Another one is a very well done peer review publication showing that four years before the disaster, TEPCO was warned that they were not up to safety standards, that they should expect up to a 15 meter tsunami wave, which is exactly what occurred. And so when I and my colleagues were walking around Fukushima, we saw that A, they have to build up the sea wall as Ken mentioned and he'll talk more about that in a bit. They have an underground ice barrier to try to keep out some of the groundwater that Ken spoke of. And so this is really important that that be replaced with concrete. And then I showed you those bags of radioactive soil everywhere that really need to be stabilized and put into concrete bunkers or somehow because the next typhoon or storm that hits, all that's going into the ocean. So here we have the idea of the LARA principle of people of the Pacific did nothing to do this. They have no benefit whatsoever, but they are at risk as a result of it, which is in direct violation of the LARA principle. The United Nations Convention for Law of the Sea, if the water that's being treated was put onto a tanker and released at the exact same site, it would be a violation of UNCLOS. They're claiming that because it's a pipeline that as Ken said, was built before any of the reports were in or any permits were given, they considered a discharge rather than a dump and they're claiming that it's illegal under that. Not a lawyer, but I know that it's being challenged. There is actually a formal complaint that's been filed with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. It'll be interesting to see what happens. The newly passed high seas treaty, which is just this wonderful effort going forward that was recently signed. This violates just the core principles. The Pacific Island Forum has an elegant document called 2050 Blue Cotton strategy. I would really recommend the members of the panel, the people from the UN Ocean Decade, to look at that document because it's brilliant. That's absolutely wonderful. And of course, the reason why the hook here, UN Ocean Decade, here we have just a list of some of the things that are being violated, at least in spirit by this ongoing activity and it's just not right. So the policy options include things like acquiesce to Japan, I'll use the term acquiesce right now and every other nation on continued ocean dumping of everything that they don't want on land. And this again is precedent setting as Ken said very well, that when does it stop? An ocean that's already compromised, we just can't keep doing that. There's the opportunity to support the Pacific Islands, Japan and the nuclear power industry and the IABA by offering to collaborate, by to support the next generation of responses to nuclear accidents and waves. This is not the first incident nor will it be the last. This is an opportunity from the challenge and that's exactly where I'd like to end with and is the issues for thought. They talk about monitoring. Well monitoring doesn't prevent problems, it simply identifies when they occur. If and when radio nuclides are found in sediment and organisms and getting around, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. How is this different from other unwanted byproducts? We're dealing with climate change because of an unwanted byproduct of combustion. Right now this particular issue is an unwanted byproduct of nuclear power. We have unwanted byproducts from agrochemicals, plastics, personal care products. We can't just look at each individual stressor, it's the soup and not the ingredients and that's where we look at cumulative impacts and that we've constantly heard including from some of the physicists that have been going after us saying, well the solution to pollution is dilution, it's not. It's the source control and once again, biology undercuts every one of the chemical elements of dilution. So I'll end with this slide simply saying that Fukushima is a tragedy and our hearts go out to the people of Japan who suffered as a result of it. But it's also an opportunity. This is the United Nations Ocean Decade. We all know that continued use of the ocean for dumping waste is not sustainable. This is not the first nor will it be the last such catastrophe. And Japan can be a world leader in advancing new approaches to serious international problems like this and the US can be a great partner as can the International Atomic Energy Agency. And finally, due to the transboundary and transgenerational nature of this problem, new approaches and alternatives to ocean dumping are clearly needed and the only responsible way forward. So I'll end there by saying thank you so much for the opportunity and we have time for questions. Well, thank you so much. There's a lot to unpack there. I have so many questions, but I'd like to go ahead and open it up to the board and here they come. All right, Dan, why don't you go ahead and start us off? Yeah, a couple of points. I think the real question is the critical issue. Yeah, we can't hear you, sorry. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here. One of the, to me, the critical issue is you threw a lot of radio nuclides and what at least we've been hearing on the news is the tradiated water. It's a very different compound than any of the other radionuclides. And so the one figure you showed, predominance was tradiated water. My concern is all those other ones and how much we know about the other radionuclides because I spent a career working with tradiated water. We use it to monitor water flux in animals. So what I can tell you is that the amount of tradiated water that goes to bound organic components of organisms is very small. In fact, that's one of the errors in our measurement of water space. So tradiated water in of itself has a very low rate of getting bound to organic components of an organism. It does, but it's very small. And it does not bioaccumulate because it did that we couldn't measure water flux in an animal. So to me, the real concern is the other radionuclides and many of those do bioaccumulate. And then just the other closing comment and the thing that I find it interesting, this is often the way things occur. And don't take, don't get this comment wrong because, and it's course of parionation right now. The Soviet Union has dumped cores of their nuclear submarines in the Arctic and Novia Zemlia has rotting nuclear submarines that their reactor cores are gonna be breached and some of them have just been dumped in the ocean. And yet that, I mean, maybe obvious reasons because it was a Soviet Union, now Russia has not received much public attention. Those sorts of issues, I mean, it's all part of the same problem. It's all the same ocean and it's all connected. Anyway, thanks. Thank you. I absolutely agree that it's not just Tritium. That's a concern. And that's why we looked at what was in the tanks and that's why we were frustrated that they hadn't analyzed the tanks, all of them. And that this trust us model says, well, we're gonna use a improved Alps and do better next time. And they've shown they can do that for one, two tanks, I confirm those numbers. But if over those 30 years, it behaves anything like what they've shown in 10 years, we will have other isotopes delivered to the ocean that are far greater concern. And as you mentioned, their biological uptake factors like K-Bio are hundreds or thousands of times higher for several, the sediment accumulation. So at the pipe exit, those seafloor sediments, mostly impacts will be localized to the isotopes that accumulate nearby. So things like Cobalt 60, things like Plutonium, things that were actually not there in 2011 will be released in small quantities. It will never be zero. It could be much better, but I agree completely as Tritium is not our concern. We agree that that dose will be low from that isotope. As to other sources, yes, I don't think because we have other sources, we shouldn't try and limit what we're putting in from this source. And I think this gets back to our long-term stewardship of ocean dumping, should we take and even consider the same standards, nuclear power plants do emit Tritium, other radio nuclides that producing a public benefit of power. This is a case where we don't have that benefit. So what we have is, I consider radioactive waste site. And so I think we should hold them to the same standards as we do under the London dumping convention for not allowing radioactive machinery put in the ocean. Again, exemptions are there. We shouldn't have reactor cores in our oceans as well. But this sets up the precedent that any nuclear power generating country could just start using the oceans for their waste. And I think that's not what we want to see with the oceans. Yeah, I just want to come at it. What surprised me is that it's not that difficult. I'm sure you guys know it's not that difficult to analyze for the power spectrum to get the other radio nuclides. So it was concerning that you guys told us that they haven't figured out what else is in that water or it's not that difficult. Especially if you compare it to the effort of the thousands of points on the seas and in the water, they've been analyzing tens of thousands of fish in a very strict standard for seafood safety. Something I didn't get to, maybe we've talked on apologies if I lost connection there, but the reputational damage, you've got a group of fisheries that have fishermen and fishing people who have just now recovered and now they're being told that deliberate we're going to put waste back in your waters where the consumers are going to be concerned, whether it's a low substandard or not. And I think those types of concerns need to be brought into this discussion as well. Rosie? Rosie? I just wanted to kind of lend my voice as an Indigenous Pacific Islander to thank both of you for bringing these issues to the Ocean Studies Board. My colleagues on the board know that I do try and integrate and emphasize and highlight and bring to bear the Indigenous Pacific Islanders because so many of our lands and waters are currently being stewarded by the United States. And I think that the issue that you brought up about the potential to increase capacity for ocean scientists from the Pacific Islands is huge. We know that there are a number of barriers, cultural but more than cultural. We know there are a lot of systemic, stable, persistent barriers. And I think that it's so important that we kind of create the space and shift our mindset from seeing Indigenous Pacific Islanders as passive victims of not only the Fukushima nuclear power waste, but as well as climate change. And really how do we look to create the agency and the capacity for, as I said, these potential ocean scientists to become the folks who are monitoring the change and then able to really advocate for their voices. And in so doing, really can shift the dynamics in the Pacific from one that is, as Bob mentioned, you know, very protection focused. I think a lot of these entities are turning to China because there is a gap in investment and in the capacity and the autonomy and the sovereignty of these nation states. So thank you. Yeah, thanks, Rosie. Appreciate it. I just have to get one little story that when I was in Palau for the our ocean conference the year before, they hosted it there. And it was just a wonderful conference, very strong representation, obviously, was in the Pacific Islands. But Steven Victor, the one I mentioned, my past student as the minister, he was one of the lead people for the whole thing. And, you know, the U.S. State Department was there in force and I have nothing but the most incredible appreciation and respect for John Kerry. Well, I talked to Steve, he goes, yeah, I just met with Kerry and he said, you know what Palauans really need? And he said, yeah, it's just for people to ask Palauans what they really need. And so kind of that's the point is that I'm a scientist, I've been working in the region for a long time, but I'm not a Pacific Islander. And it kind of breaks my heart to say, we couldn't, we did everything we could. It's not that we don't have brilliant people throughout the Pacific and brilliant scientists, but these are things that I think Rosie's comment is so important and maybe that's something that the board can discuss, is how can we start to target the kinds of training and opportunities that are really necessary to invest. And if we're talking about Pacific security, you know, Taiwan, China, Japan are all giving tons of scholarships to Pacific Islanders to give them training, but that comes with a cost. And I think Rosie is definitely the right person to take this on and show maybe there's a better way in which we can invest. If we wanna be partners in the Pacific, there's no better contribution, there's no better investment than people. I just wanna add a clap back comment to what you're saying, Bob, which is that perhaps in upcoming studies of this board addressing DEI and other matters, perhaps we can kind of look to seeing not only what's going on in the continent, but on our island as well. So thank you. I just wanted to make a comment and say that, yes, Rosie, that is number one, lots of number ones on that list for that DEI-JP study to make sure it's comprehensive. And looks beyond just the ocean sciences, but other academic institutions beyond industry and to see where there's been success and if there's lessons that can be learned from other activities that are ongoing. I do wanted to ask one more question, I guess to close this out because I know we're coming up on time. Given the lack of response from the IAEA with regards to dumping, and I say this very strongly if you think about the precedent piece, I think that is a compelling, very compelling argument in this case. Have you seen a response beyond the IAEA with regards to European Union or even US federal agencies that are very closely monitoring how these releases are happening and what that might mean on a larger global scale? You wanna have that? Go ahead, Bob. Yeah, it's been one of pure frustration. We've been working very closely. I don't think between Ken and I alone, we've done over a hundred interviews in the last month since the discharge occurred. Ken was the one who said, we're not gonna change this with the science, we're gonna change this with education and outreach. And so the IAEA, we had several direct meetings with them and they just blew us off and they made it very clear that they have no authority. That's a Japan's decision and they are. They're an advocacy group for the nuclear industry. So that's kind of hit a dead end. But we have reached out and it's everyone is still worried about the larger issue of security, meaning China, but what's wrong is wrong. And again, like I said, maybe this can be turned around from a tragedy to an opportunity in bringing groups together and providing leadership. And that's kind of my hope is that maybe through public pressure, nothing we're saying is making the difference that I can see is how people will finally hold governments to accountability. That's the blessing and curse of democracy. You get what you vote for or whatever it turns out. But if people will say, this is not acceptable to treat the ocean and future generations this way. And as Rosie said, that's what's coming out of the Pacific Islands. The Pacific Island foreign leaders have been largely marginalized. We know there's been dollar diplomacy going on. I'm not telling people things they don't know, but we're really hoping that, one of the great things scientists can do is to translate the science into a form and a format that people can easily understand. Working with the Pacific Island form has been just really pleasure, extremely bright people. These are all, but they're trained lawyers. They're trained in policy and they're not expected in other science. But a lot of times they were almost scared to ask the question because it seemed trivial. And I remember sitting through the first few briefings we got from TEPCO and from Japan. And when I, you know, I know a lot of Pacific Island leaders and I said, did you understand what they said? And they kind of sheepishly said, no, I said, you're not alone. I couldn't understand anything that they said. And they looked over at them and said, you're the smart guy in the room, what do you think? And he went shake his head as well. So we could do a much better job as a scientific community coming together to communicate these issues. Nothing that we know can't be communicated if that's what we want to do. And that's what we saw a lot of us obfuscation. So it's a long way of saying, I think the opportunity is there and that's the challenge to the science community is how we could do a better job of communicating to leaders what this means. And I think Ken has said it very eloquently, this is setting precedent. What happens here is gonna set the precedent for everything going forward. Well, I wanna thank you both again, Bob Richmond, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Ken Bissler, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for giving really just an outstanding and thoughtful presentation about some of the ongoing issues of radiological releases into the ocean, bringing in communities that are being directly impacted by these activities and some thoughtful ideas about how we might move this forward. However, frustrating the pace and it may be. So thank you so much. It is now noon. We are going to take a lunch break. We will reconvene at one o'clock. So thank you all for joining us and we will see you in a bit. Anything else, Sue? You know, just to add my thanks, you know, I really appreciate you coming in this morning virtually to give us this presentation. And I was gonna invite you, you know, any follow-ups that you might have to share, you know, please feel free to send them to me and I will share them with the board members. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thanks for joining us for the afternoon session of the Ocean Studies Board. In this afternoon's session, I'm very excited. We're gonna talk about ocean heat waves. This is something we've, many of us have been thinking a lot about. And so for the next couple of hours, we have a couple of presentations that we're going to have to kind of set the stage. The goal of this particular session is just to think about the key issues that are associated with ocean heat waves, both in terms of the physical chemical processes and the ecosystem impacts, assess contribution of ocean observations for prediction of events and impacts. And I do wanna have a special call out to Scott and Amy, who really led the way in helping us determine what would be in the session and Kelly for keeping us organized and moving forward. So with that, I'm gonna go ahead and introduce our first speaker, Sophia, you're on the line. Sophia Darmoraki. She's a physical oceanographer who studies climate extremes at the Coastal and Marine Research Laboratory of the Institute and Applied and Computational Mathematics in the Foundation for Research and Technology, it's called FORTH. Her research interests include the investigation of physical processes behind extreme warm cold events in the ocean in the context of climate change. Now, Sophia, I know we're gonna do this a little bit. It's gonna be a little bit awkward. So you help us try and make sure that your slides and your presentation is in. Sophia is joining us from Greece. And as always, we have a few technological problems that we are trying to move forward. So with that, Sophia, I think your presentation is ready and we are on the first slide. Okay, so good afternoon, everybody. Thanks a lot for the introduction. I am Sophia Darmoraki and I'm very excited to speak with you today. I'm so sorry for these technical issues that are not gonna allow me to present the slides, but I'm gonna have your help and everything's gonna be okay. So I appreciate Ocean Studies Board for inviting me to participate in this special session on marine heat waves. As I said, as they already mentioned, I'm a postdoctoral researcher on force in Greece and I'm here to talk to you about why do marine heat waves happen and more specifically, what seems to be the physical mechanism behind their development so far. But before this, can I verify that everybody can hear me okay? Yes, we can, thank you. Okay, that's great. So this subject is quite broad and it does not have just one definitive answer. So when I was planning my talk for today, I was thinking, what would be the most interesting aspects of marine heat wave drivers to show here? And since the question was mostly about the regional events, I decided to leave aside a bulk of literature talking about the drivers that operate on large scale events and highlight the most recent information on the local scale marine heat waves. So next slide. That of course includes a broader set of questions like what do we call marine heat wave? Why are we so interested in them? And of course, the physical drivers. But we know so far and what we have yet to discover. To the end, I will share with you some thoughts from the scientific community on what we're supposed to do, what we should do in order to be better prepared for the next occurrence of these events. So next slide. Is a random profile of SST from several decades ago where temperatures only occasionally exceeded the statistical threshold for extreme values resulting in sporadic, warmer cold episodes? They suggest that ecosystems have evolved to function within a specific thermal range with some of them capable of adapting to conditions beyond its limits. However, since the 1980s, as you all know, the ocean has been warming at an accelerated pace, leading to more frequent occurrences of extreme thermal events known as marine heat waves. Think of them as the oceanic counterparts to atmospheric heat waves, albeit with impacts initially less conspicuous. In reality, the increased frequency and intensity of marine heat waves in recent years have created significant challenges for both marine ecosystems and human communities relying on them. Next slide, please. So in this slide, I have a video you might want to try and play. And here we see what does a marine heat wave look like? And picture here is one of the largest and most intense events recorded in the Pacific Ocean. Does the video play? Yes. Okay, cool. Many of you may be familiar with it already. This is what we call the North Pacific World Blob. This big area of warming that spread off the West coast of US and in the Gulf of Alaska region. And on the right figure, you can see the SST anomalies between January 2015 and February 2016. And SSTs were elevated by one to three degrees Celsius above normal, Celsius temperature, for approximately two years. Between 2014 and 2016. So in essence, we can describe a marine heat wave as a discrete prolonged and anomalous rise in temperature occurring in a specific region. Quantitatively, a marine heat wave is defined when the temperature exceeds the climatological 90th percentile of SST for five days or more. Next slide, please. These events can persist for days to many months. This slide should have a lot of movements, so you might want to try them all, advance the movement. So these events can persist for days to many months, extend over thousands of kilometers at surface and even penetrate hundreds of meters beneath the sea. Marine heat waves have led to mass mortalities and migrations of marine species, the replacement of Mediterranean species by tropical ones and coral bleaching. Now this abrupt reorganization of ecosystems has also had profound economic implications, particularly in the fishery sector with losses amounting to approximately $1 million. This in turn has resulted in tensions among nations reliant on these industries. And in fact, these events have become ubiquitous across the world ocean and as emphasized by this summary from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, many of them would not have occurred without the influence of climate change. So as the duration, extent and depth of marine heat waves have raised serious concern, a new wave of research has been spurred on the physical mechanisms that are responsible for their development. Next slide, please. So since 2011, when the first heat wave across Northwest Australia was documented, marine heat waves have been analyzed in many parts of the global ocean, both as individual event and as a curing phenomena that tend to increase in frequency and intensity over the course of the 20th century. This has revealed their complexity in that their intensity, duration, the vertical propagation and horizontal extent depend on their location and season. And we can perhaps distinguish their drivers in two main categories. The large scale ones where modes of climate variability such as ENSO or mud and julian oscillation are known to modulate marine heat wave properties and influence their development either directly or remotely via atmospheric or oceanic teleconnections. And the second category is the regional drivers where local scale atmospheric and oceanic processes promote or inhibit their onset and decay. Next slide, please. Today I will talk a little bit about the regional scale physical mechanisms whose understanding is important for the marine heat wave predictability. And this slide also includes some advancements. So you might wanna try them. So other core marine heat wave is really just a change in ocean temperature. And when we are thinking about what physically drives the marine heat wave, we're really just asking the question, what drives changes in ocean temperatures? Therefore, very often scientists are using what we call a mixed layer heat budget and an equation describing changes in the heat content of the operation due to various processes. Among other approaches, this is the one that can give us a better idea on the kind of heat contribution positive or negative that atmospheric or oceanic processes have on the development and maintenance of marine heat waves, which is a very complicated thing to answer as it sort of changes depending on the location and season of the event. Now, the atmospheric forcing of marine heat waves includes enhanced solar radiation, suppressed turbulent heat fluxes, persistent atmosphere blocking that enhances clear skies and weak winds, as well as low pressure systems mostly around the tropics. The oceanic mechanisms conducive to marine heat wave on the other hand can be intensified boundary currents that carry warm waters, reemergence of warm temperature anomalies, solving of the mixed layer depth, suppressed vertical mixing and warm core eddies, which have been seen to drive marine heat waves, for example, in the northeast United States continent itself. Now, most studies focus on the dominant driver of marine heat waves simply because it is easier to characterize an event with it, but in reality, it takes more than one process to form a marine heat wave. And very often the processes that conspire to develop a marine heat wave are different from those that maintain the event. Next slide, please. So this slide again also has some movements. I'm so sorry for that. So there's a recent study on the most extreme marine heat waves on the global ocean showed that the mid-latitude events tend to occur mostly due to high pressure systems in the atmosphere that are accompanied by reduced clouds and winds and increased installation. This is a mechanism of a typical time of marine heat wave in the Mediterranean Sea, for example. However, things get trickier when we go around Australia. I kind of always like to talk about Australia events because they hold very good examples of how regional oceanographic conditions may lead to marine heat waves through different processes even in adjacent regions. For example, in one of the movements you must have seen now that the 2016 marine heat wave and the Great Barrier Reef was attributed to increase air temperature due to a concurrent atmospheric heat wave, whereas the 2005 and 2006 events first sat down in Queensland was linked to increase heat transport from the east Australia current. Similarly, in the Tasman Sea, marine heat waves have occurred both due to the anomalous heat advection from the east Australia current and also due to enhanced atmosphere heat flux into the ocean. And there's one particular study which actually highlights that two marine heat waves in the northwestern part of Australia, one happening in 2010, 11, and one in 2013, occurred under the same La Nina, so it's a large-scale climate mode condition. And even though they occurred under the same La Nina conditions, they were attributed to different processes, different dominant drivers, due to their specific location. So the famous 2010, 11 event was related to anomalous poleward transport from the living current, whereas the 2015 marine heat wave to increase atmospheric heat flux into the ocean. And overall, these results highlight some of the challenges in predicting the patterns of extreme warming across coastal regions because even though large-scale climate modes can precondition a region for a marine heat wave, the specific warming patterns that emerge depend on resolving complex, coupled oceanic and atmospheric processes that ultimately regulate the warming responses. And while, next slide, please, while most studies so far have investigated surface marine heat waves, the research on subsurface events has only just begun. We know already that marine heat waves can extend well beyond the mixed layer up to even, let's say, 2000 meters depth. However, little is known about how oceanic and atmospheric forcing controls marine heat wave vertical extent. And one of the most recent studies using a city data off the coast of Sydney has categorized marine heat waves in three classes, basically. The shallow events that are confined to the surface up to 35 meters, the extended events where marine heat waves go from the surface to deeper layers and potentially through the full water column, and the subsurface events. The marine heat waves that are close to the bottom but have no surface signature. This study has also assessed the drivers of these different marine heat wave types, showing that stratification is a very important factor affecting the formation of subsurface events. In particular, they relate surface events with shallow mixed layer depths and increase atmospheric heat fluxes. They also relate extending marine heat waves with large scale ocean sea correlation and warm core eddies. But the drivers of events at the bottom are more complicated since they have no surface expression. These particular heat waves, marine heat waves tend to be more prevalent where the water column is more stratified, hence the kind of the couple from the surface and they typically tend to occur in response to down welly favorable winds. Now, previous studies on these marine heat waves that extend below surface have shown that these marine heat waves, like subsurface ones, they extend below and they exhibit their maximum intensity at depth. And the events that are driven by anomalous oceanic advection, they are four time deepers, while the events which are driven by atmospheric heat fluxes, they seem to be four times more intense. And next slide, please. So overall, what we know about the marine heat waves can be summarized on the following. We know already regional atmosphere and oceanic forcing of individual events in the global ocean, based both on the FST and the mixed layer temperature. We know the large scale atmospheric forcing of heat waves. We know what drives some subsurface events in specific locations. We know that marine heat waves extend below the mixed layer depths. We know that there are a lot of drivers of marine heat waves depending on location and season. And what is tricky and we also began to understand is that if we change the spatial temporal framework that we examined and the mixed layer depths that we are looking at, the changes of temperature, these may result in different marine heat wave drivers. And there's also a movement in that slide again. What we do not know is the regional atmosphere and oceanic forcing of marine heat waves over the global ocean, but using couple climate models which have IRC, they encompass the IRC interaction at high resolution. We also don't know how we regional and large scale forcing of marine heat waves might change under climate change. We also don't know in the future if all the marine heat waves are going to propagate deeper or some of them are gonna be concentrated close to the surface due to increased certification and where is this, if it's going to happen. We also don't know a lot about the influence of salinity and subsurface water masses properties on marine heat wave drivers. And finally, we have not yet related the marine heat wave intensity and duration. So the characteristics of the heat waves to the dominant mechanism of marine heat wave onset. Next slide please. And with this I would like just to point out that for better preparation to adapt to these extreme events we need near real time monitoring of temperature because it's important for the identification of marine heat waves, both surface and subsurface in order to inform the public and aquaculture and fisheries interested. The systematic knowledge of marine heat wave characteristics such as duration and intensity, which is linked to their drivers may also inform for potential disruption of marine ecosystems in the future. And there's a lot of work being done on the short term forecasting of marine heat waves which will also be valuable to marine resource users, the fisheries managers, and all these improved prediction systems are required through collaborations between scientists and marine industries and managers. And with that, I would like to take questions. Thank you a lot for your attention. Thank you so much for that wonderful presentation. I know you can't see us, it was fantastic and I want to congratulate you on doing such a wonderful job not being able to see what it was that you were presenting. I do want to open it up just for a couple of quick questions before we go on to our next section. If anyone has quick questions. Cody McDonald. So I didn't really hear you say this, I guess in the popular press, I hear about these things as a function of climate change, but I didn't really hear you address that. In fact, it seemed to be a question that's still out there. So. You mean how climate change, sorry. Whether these heat waves that we're now seeing more often and in more places, at least in the popular press, they sort of talk about it as if it's a function of climate change. But I didn't really hear you talk to that link. Oh yeah, because I thought that the presentation was more focused on the drivers. So it's not like that climate change is creating the heat waves. It's more like the climate change is exacerbating both the frequency and their duration. So throughout the 20th century, these events have become more frequent all over the world. And in some places like in the Mediterranean Sea, by the end of the 20th century, we're expecting like a full summer full of marine heat waves because the climate change is making these events more frequent and more intense, basically. Great, thanks. That's helpful. Great presentation. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Hello, Sophia. This is Susan Roberts. And thank you again for a really nice presentation. And I'm really glad we have your slides because I know a lot of us will probably go back to that. But I had a question. In addition to being able to predict the onset of a heat wave, what about predicting the dissipation? And are the drivers the same for the dissipation as it is for the origin? So I haven't focused a lot on the decay. You're totally right. But no, the drivers are not the same between the onset and the decay. Depending again where you are and what season you are, I would say that in areas like Mediterranean Sea, for example, while the heat waves are created because of atmospheric heat fluxes, a lot of them are dissipating because of increase of wind speed which creates mixing and then cooling of the ocean. And in other areas, it's like a direction of cool water. So it's like the opposite, kind of opposite processes that contribute to the decay of the marine heat waves. And the truth is that there's not a lot of attention on the decay with on the literature, but it's not like the same processes with the onset. It depends. Like if an event is created because of, let's say, increased insulation or increased atmospheric heat fluxes, if the wind speeds are increasing or there's a sudden heat loss from the ocean and a vertical mixing, then yes, the heat wave might dissipate. But it's like another, it's another world of drivers that needs to be investigated separately, I would say. And sometimes I've done that. Yeah, thank you. Because I was thinking really that for a lot of people that one of the questions they're going to have, how long is this going to last in terms of the stakeholders? We do have some more questions. I think Ailin, how's her hand up? Yes, hi, thank you. This is Ailin from the National Taiwan University of Taiwan. Thank you so much for the wonderful presentation. My question is about the modeling work. You mentioned that there are many drivers, some are climate scales, some are temporal scale, the daily scales. So I'm wondering what is the development of the modeling work in separating these drivers at the moment? What is, excuse me, can you repeat the question? What is what of the modeling work? I couldn't hear you well. Yes. The modeling work which can separate the different drivers, what is the status at the moment? Well, there are some studies which have used earth system models and have performed mixed layer heat budgets, because that's what the models can do, mixed layer heat budgets. And they can run the heat budget and separate the contribution from earth for the heat fluxes, the oceanic advection, oceanic processes. There are some studies with earth system models. I am personally working on a project that uses regional models, and that we are also running mixed layer heat budgets. But it's a little bit digital. I would say that the models have been used on specific individual events so far, and they have performed mixed layer heat budgets. And this is how they isolate the different drivers on specific events. There are not a lot of studies doing global analysis, global mixed layer heat budget, let's say. But there are just not a lot. OK, so for the regional model, is it cappold atmospheric? Yes, yes. OK, thank you. Thank you. Tom, I think you had your hand up next. Thanks, Claudia. And Sophia, thank you very much for a great presentation. This is Tom Miller. You showed a map of the spatial scale of these marine heat waves, and most of them were fairly large spatial scales. And then there was this one curious smaller scale one in the Yellow Sea in 2016. So the question is, are there small spatial scale marine heat waves that are not being captured in the map that you showed us? OK, so this map that I showed is really just provision-ready. We found the most famous or most impactful one. If you look at the marine heat wave tracker online, which is like a tool that is showing the marine heat waves all over the world every day, you can see both small and big marine heat waves happening everywhere, basically. Now, regarding the small scale events in general, the definition that I'm currently and most of the scientists are using, I would say that it does not put a limit on the spatial coverage of the heat waves because this marine heat wave definition is working on every grid point of the ocean. So if your question is whether the marine heat wave definition can capture these small scale events, yes, it can capture. What it cannot capture, however, is events on short time scale meaning less than five days? Does that answer your question? Does, thank you. And Lynn, I think you were next. Yeah, thanks. That was really excellent. I have a question. It's sort of the baseline for the marine heat wave is a particular set of years. And so as the oceans have warmed, then of course the incidence of temperatures above those thresholds goes up. But it's both a combination of general warming and local drivers and maybe natural modes and whatever is the research separating those two things from each other. Because if we want to study how they work, we could be in the one bin of just overall warming. And why is it stronger in some places than others? And on the other side of extreme event, and it might be interesting to know how frequently there are extreme events above the local baseline, sort of over the last sort of a running average of years question. OK, so that's a very, very good for the heat wave. There is some work out there where they do marine heat wave detection with moving the baseline period in more recent years, of course. My personal opinion, I might be wrong, is that the choice of the baseline depends on the questions that you're trying to answer. If as a scientist you're trying to investigate how these extreme events change from the past to the future, how is the duration and intensity, and even the drivers. I'm working on the drivers right now and how these change under climate change. Then you can keep the baseline, which is the baseline like the reference period of the past. But if you, as a scientist, is interested on looking on the events and the drivers in the futures and just on their future with no comparison with the present, then yes, they can use baseline with a running average, let's say. So for me, it's just a really matter of a question, the research question behind that. And also because when you're using a baseline referring to the past, you're kind of investigating events and you see their impact. And you're talking about ecosystems that basically cannot adapt to the future because if these ecosystems are dying at the moment with these current heat waves, by using the baseline reference period on the past, you tell to the people, to the scientists, that these ecosystems might not adapt in the future, might die or disappear. So it's really a matter of a research question, really. I hope that answers your question. Yeah, thanks. It's like a difference between an ecosystem impact and understanding the dynamics kind of, et cetera. Yeah, thank you. I mean, the dynamics, I'm sorry, just one last thing. The dynamics is also something that, how the dynamics are changing in the future is not something that has been handled at the moment, not that I know of. I'm currently, for example, working on a project that is going to look how the dynamics are changing and the climate change and whether the baseline choice has an effect or not. But that, again, comes down to the research question. Thanks again. Yeah, thank you. This is Dan Kust. I work in the North Pacific. And I'm sort of curious the question of scale is, with the NOAA's Integrated Ocean Observing System, we have a lot of coastal zone measurements. But then once you get out into the open ocean, the data sets get much more sparse. So how much can we study the drivers if our data sets are predominantly coastal with a sparse offshore, sort of large-scale, basin-scale sparse data? Or can we? Do you mean how do you, when you say that there's sparse data in means of time or just, or also space? Both. We have developed coastal observing to where we've got glider arrays and things working on both coasts of the US. But they don't go much more than maybe 50 to 100 kilometers offshore. But most of the, at least in the North Pacific, these oceanic heat waves are large-scale, where there is both both in time and space, predominantly limited to the Argo system. So it's there, but it's not as complete as the coastal zone. So I'm just curious, how much of the signal can we understand if we're measuring well in the coastal zone, or can we? I would say that even though you might not be able to study the signal over a large area, number one, you have the benefit of having the information of the drivers or temperature in specific locations. And if the time span of these observations like more than 10 years, let's say, then you might be able to study the drivers and the heat waves in a specific small-scale area, which is not a bad thing or a problematic one in a sense that we do need this kind of information. Because first of all, we can help the models verify their results. And second of all, even if you study a small-scale area, you're kind of getting to the community, the drivers, on a high-resolution framework, let's say, which maybe even the models cannot capture. And because the drivers of marine heat waves can change depending on space, I wouldn't see that as a big problem in a sense. But if you would like to get the signal in a larger spatial scale, maybe you could use satellite data in combination within C2. I'm not sure if this answers your questions. That's great. And then the last question for this section, because, Scott, you get to ask a question later. I've just kicked you the curve. Is John Delaney? Sophia, that was a fascinating presentation. I learned a great deal from you. I'm sort of curious. We all know that the seafloor has volcanic eruptions from time to time. Does the detection system that you folks use to determine the shallower events, does it preclude the possibility that there are other events that are deeper that involve thermal input to the ocean from an erupting underwater volcano? That is a great and very interesting question. This is one of the questions that I also have from time to time. I wish I had time to investigate this. So the answer is that, at the moment, I'm not aware of any literature going on about the link between heat waves and underwater volcano, for example. But for sure, the algorithm that is being used to identify the events can be applied to any different layer of the ocean, providing that the climate model or the observation data set that is being applied to has inside the information of the volcano erupting. So if you have the information of the volcano or any other thermal source, let's say, then the algorithm can work and identify the event. But if not, I'm not sure how we could approach that. But that's an excellent question and really interesting thing. There are two points to share with you. One is that usually seismologists keep close track of where earthquake activity is taking place. And many of the underwater eruptions do not involve bigger earthquakes. But many large series of smaller earthquakes. Plus water that comes out usually has an anomalous helium-3 content. So those two little bits of data, if you go back to your colleagues and chat about it, maybe I'm sure there's activity in the Mediterranean. And certainly, the Pacific has more frequent eruptions in it than the Atlantic. So those are just some thoughts. And thank you again for wonderful illustrations. It's a great help for a simple geologist like me to understand what you're talking about. Thanks a lot about these ideas. I'm going to come back to that with my colleagues. You're right. Thanks a lot for that. The first is Ai-Lin. She is a chair professor at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan. She studies the complex interaction and interplay between ocean eddies, inter-annual and inter-decadal variability, marine heat waves, and climate change with tropical cyclones, especially with regards to super typhoons. And then the second speaker in this section is Iamfei Pan, who's an associate professor and the director of the Graduate Institute of Hydrological and Oceanic Sciences at National Central University, Taiwan. And his research is also focused on typhoon-ocean interactions, especially the ocean's response, and is working on a new frontier of the connection between marine heat waves and typhoon intensifications. So with that, I will let both of you take it away. I think Ai-Lin, you're going to go first. Or I'll let you tell me what you're doing. OK, thank you very much. Yes, yes. Yes, we can hear you. So can you see the screen, the sharing screen? No, it's a, oh, wait. Hello. Here it comes. Yes. Can you hear the, can you see the screen? Yes. OK, great. Thank you very much. So I will do the beginning and the end. And Iamfei will share in the middle part. And first of all, thank you very much for this opportunity of sharing. Our topic is to share about the impact from marine heat wave to tropical cyclones over the Western North Pacific Ocean. And this work is done by three papers, recent papers, two have been published and one in preparation. So the first case we would like to share is super typhoon Hagibis. Super typhoon Hagibis occurred in 2019. It is one of, it is the most expensive hyphens in the history of the Pacific. OK, so the damage is 15 billion US dollars. Why such damage? It went to a place called Tokyo. You can see the bullet trains are all flooded and even the emperor's enthronement parade was postponed. So this is a high impact super typhoon. And what is that so special? This is the suffer Simpson tropical cyclone scale. As we all know, tropical cyclone or hurricanes, the category is from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So this is the traditional scale about 20 knots. You jump from one typhoon category or one tropical cyclone category. In 2014, we proposed the adding of category 6 in our 2014 papers because they are more occurrence of the record breaking tropical cyclones which are much more intense than category 5. And they should be qualified to be category 6 because a category 6 tropical cyclone is much stronger than a category 5. Why? Not only because of intensity in the wind speed. Imagine the energy, the kinetic energy is the square of wind speed. So when we compare a category 5 to category 6, you are having 150% or 160% more kinetic energy comparing a category 5 and a category 6. And even so, it's the destructive potential because the destructive potential is a major as a tube of wind speed. So if we are comparing a category 5 to category 6, it's doubling the destructive potential. So what happened to Hagebus? Hagebus, as I will be showing to you, within 24 hours, it intensified from tropical storm to category 6, tropical storm which means below category 1. So within 24 hours, it intensified from 60 to 160 knots. This is record breaking. We are seeing here, you can see this is explosive intensification, you can see from here. It's just like rocket shooting. On 6th of October, you still have a tropical storm, not even a category 1. One day later, this became a category 6 super typhoons. This is the fastest intensified tropical cycle ever observed in the Western Pacific history. And as we all know, this is the most difficult to focus because current models are not able to capture such rapid intensification event. So I think since this is a marine wave session, I think everybody know what we are saying, that this is a contributed by marine heat wave. As we can see, this is where Hagebus explosively intensified within 24 hours in this warm patch here. So from 3rd, this is very extremely warm, 2 to 3 degree warmer than climatology. And this is the ocean heat content. And this is the marine heat wave region, which they will share with you more. And why marine heat wave can contribute so much, I think this is easy to understand. Usually when marine heat wave comes, it is 2 to 3 degrees more warmer than usual. And this will go into the heat fluxes because ocean's energy to typhoons are through sensible and latent heat fluxes. So it is through modifying of this term here during TCSST because it enhance the sensible heat flux. Marine heat wave set up a perfect precondition for so much more energy for air-sea fluxes and for the latent heat flux because the humidity, the saturated humidity at the ocean surface is a function of sea surface temperature. So if we have marine heat wave, we raise the QS and increase the latent heat flux. And so we can see the matching of the fluxes here coincident with the explosive intensification of Hagepis. And next, I would like to ask Fei to join. He will be sharing another interesting cases called BAVI, which is a typhoon went to North Korea. So Fei. Hi. Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. OK. I'm so I'm in Fei Poon. I'm so delighted to participate in this meeting. And for the next few minutes, I'm going to present our research results about the interaction between the recent typhoon, typhoon BAVI, and the corresponding marine heat wave. Typhoon BAVI was a category three typhoon and the strongest typhoon in the northern East China Sea. And because of the danger of this typhoon, North Korea, for the first time, carried out a live typhoon broadcast in its history, pulling international attention. Next, please. Next slide, please. Thank you. Sorry. Can you go back? Yes. It is important to note that typhoon intensifying in the East China Sea is rare. In the past 30 years, only six typhoons have intensified in this region, in this ocean region. Next, please. Why? Because the background ocean and atmospheric condition are just too bad for TC development. It is usually characterized by cold ocean temperature, strong vertical wind shear, and the relative dry atmosphere. Next, please. However, we found that before typhoon BAVI, this ocean temperature was abnormally warm, exceeding 30 degrees Celsius. If we compare with the climatology, we can see that the warming is about three degrees, which provide a very favorable condition for typhoon to intensify in this region. Next, please. And interestingly, we found that this warming is pretty rapid. Actually, at the beginning of August, 2020, the ocean temperature there was about normal, or even below the average. However, this ocean rapidly heated up just before the typhoon. Next, please. And later, we found that it is actually a marine heat wave. And general definition of the marine heat wave is showing on the right-hand side. And basically, we are following the definition of Hop Day at all, 2016. Next, please. And these satellite sea surface temperature, SST maps showing the evolution of the marine heat wave, as indicated by this white crosses. And as you can see, this marine heat wave developed just before the typhoon and disappeared due to the strong SST cooling induced by this typhoon. You can see the figures K and L here. Next, please. And also, luckily, this typhoon almost directly passed through the South Korea's Ocean Research Station, which provide a unique pair of ASC observations for us to study the impact of marine heat wave on this typhoon. And it is also interesting to note that this station capture about six degrees of SST cooling induced by this typhoon. You can see the figure C here, which is the ocean observation. Next, please. And in this study, we use a simple one-dimensional price Waller-Pinkel P-WP ocean mixing model to quantify the impact of the marine heat wave. And basically, you can see that this 1-D P-WP did a very good job in simulating this sea surface temperature evolution at this ocean research station. Next, please. And these are the results for the SST under the typhoon and without marine heat wave. Basically, with the marine heat wave, the SST under the typhoon can remain much warmer under the marine heat wave situation. However, if there is no marine heat wave as indicated by the green curve, the SST under the typhoon would be 1 to 3 degrees smaller, which would be a significant impact to the energy transfer from the ocean to the typhoon. Next, please. And these are the results for the heat flux that we calculate from the flux equation that Yi just showed before. As you can see with the marine heat wave, because the SST is warmer, the larger heat flux supplies to the typhoon. But if there is no marine heat wave, the heat flux would be negative for most of the time. So what we found is that if there is no marine heat wave, this typhoon has no chance to intensify to a category 3, a major typhoon in this East China Sea area. Next, please. And in this study, we also propose that this marine heat wave may be attributed or partially attributed by the typhoon itself. Next, please. The reason is that as the typhoon approach, fair rider in front of the typhoon may create favorable conditions for marine heat wave to develop. These favorable conditions include higher sea surface pressure, stronger solar insulation, and weaker surface wind speed. And all this can contribute to a rapid ocean warming and eventually trigger a marine heat wave and later feeding back to typhoon and boosting typhoon intensity. So I think such marine heat wave and typhoon or tropical cyclone interaction is very interesting and important that deserve further in-depth investigation. And this is my brief introduction. And now I turn it back to Yi Yi. Thank you. So thank you. And I would like to share our conclusions here. First of all, we share the case of marine heat wave and category six, super typhoon hockey pieces, record-breaking explosive intensification. And this is a super typhoon made great impact to the Pacific history and Japan. And marine heat wave and the most intense tropical cyclone in the East China Sea also is a record-holding case because this is a category three, a major TC baby, and which eventually made landfall to North Korea. And both marine heat wave, for both cases, marine heat wave play an important role in their intensification. Imagine marine heat wave can set the background to pre-TC SSD background by two to three degree. And for us who work on tropical cyclone, a 27-degree water is greater than 29 or 30-degree water. You can raise the tropical cyclone by few categories. And this is still a subject, still in its infancy. So we are showing two cases here, and we are doing more ongoing work and with the work in preparation with more cases. But the take-home message is that it can have very large impact on typhoons because of its impact on ARC fluxes. And finally, we also would like to share an interesting finding we found in our study. And as Sophia shared in the earlier word, the driver for marine heat wave is very complex. And we found that maybe tropical cyclone itself can be a partial contributor in the generation of marine heat wave because prior to the, as typhoons are warming, it will induce a large subsidence air in the peripheral of typhoon, which usually a large area. And that subsidence air suppress convection and it creates fair weather and low wind speed, which will allow solar radiation to come in to heat up the ocean. And we suspect it can partially contribute in the generation of marine heat wave. And we are also, so we also, we'd like to share this result. So thank you. And if there's questions, please feel free to let us know. Thank you. Thank you both so much for yet another fantastic presentation. What I'd like to do now, and I do recognize that this was a time that we'd call for break, but I really do want to open up the floor for questions and conversations. So I understand that individuals have to leave. But I'd like to go ahead and turn it over to Scott Glenn and Amy to kind of moderate this next session, given all their hard work in pulling together this afternoon's speakers. Good. Thank you. Amy, I'll say a few words that then maybe you want to. Go right ahead. Yes, please. OK. We started on this topic because marine heat waves is in the news. We see that quite a bit. And we thought that some of those news reports would benefit from the scientific perspective, the respected scientific perspective of the national academies. And so that was an important piece of the communication that we wanted to bring out there. And also it's in the news because of the impact on people. And we heard that this morning that we have to bring our science to show the impact on people to get that broader support. And we also have to reward the scientists for that work and these more applied things. And we just heard that from some of our speakers. We also noted that marine heat waves was a unifying theme that could bring many of us together. It impacted almost all of us here. And the example I have of that is just a couple weeks ago at UNESCO, we were talking about marine heat waves and all that. And the example of East Africa came up. And the people that are at risk there because they're sustained, they're looking for fisheries to sustain their livelihoods there and just to eat. And it's threatened by the changes in ecosystems from marine heat waves. But marine heat waves also impact the tropical cyclones that we just heard about. And the tropical cyclones act to mitigate. It's those winds at the end that get it. And we saw that in the SST image. There was the high heat waves by Newfoundland, but also the track of Hurricane Lee was in that and it was much cooler. And so we saw that unifying theme and something that can bring many of us together here. And so then it comes down to can we predict these? And some of those activities there is what we wanted to also bring in, those start to get into seasonal and sub-seasonal forecasts where the ocean plays a critical role. And then what are the observations that we would need? And it came back to that. And so it's like, what should the Ocean Studies Board do? So that's the background of what we did to put all this together. And we'd love to hear comments on any of those topics so that we can come up with what our strategy is. Amy, did you want to? Yeah, I was going to say what you just said as your punchline there about what can the OSB do? How can we contribute? There's been a very sobering set of presentations, I have to say. And as Scott said, I just copy or reiterate what he said, which is that it really is a highly interdisciplinary subject that does touch all of us in fundamental research and applied research. So how can the OSB contribute to tackling this problem and not duplicate what else is being done and add some new value? I'd be interested to hear from anyone, everyone on that question. Deanne, I see your hand is raised. Yeah, I'm trying to think about what the suggestion is how the ocean study moves forward. Nymphs, I'm from the ocean, Cisco Werner has been, within Nymphs they have been working on ways of trying to see how climate change affects fisheries in a predictive way. There is a programmatic area within Nymphs to focus on that. It would probably be worthwhile for us to hear how that's moving forward. I just, that was my positive comment. I think it's a positive comment. I think it's a positive comment. That was my positive comment, negative comment, not on the talks, the talks were great. I agree it's scary because Francis gave a really good overview of the biological impacts associated with the physics and I just wanted to add how unpredictable things could be. In California, when the Dungeonus crab fishery was postponed due to the harmful algal bloom, when it opened up it was during the period of time that humpback whales are migrating and that meant that they were going right into the fishing, to the crab pots and getting tangled up. So there's these interactions in terms of how things change in one area then create other problems down the road in areas that you wouldn't have expected because you wouldn't expect it. I mean in hindsight people say, well, of course you should have known that the humpback whales are migrating in this time of year. And the other one is that not only the California squid are moving north but Humboldt squid are moving from Baja California into the California current and those things are voracious predators. And so increasingly we get a very large predatory squid, squid that's coming in. And then the last thing I wanted to say is the coral reef presentation was also very alarming coupled with the typhoon studies because as we lose coral reefs, coral reefs are a very profound buffer for storm surge. So as these regions especially Florida lose the coral reefs when those hurricanes hit they're gonna have a much significantly greater coastal inundation. So the, yeah, I wish I had something good to say but it's complicated and very concerning. Thank you. Tony. Yeah, I thought these were pretty cool and particularly the coral one. And the reason is I'm gonna take your line and turn it around rather than what can though it's be tell the newscasters. I think what can, are the newscasters telling us about the way we need to think about projecting our science into the news cycle in some way, not in an artificial or marketing way. So, and I say that what I really like about the call things like that coral reef watch early alarms kind of system, that's something that's real that's integrating the long-term observing systems with on the ground abilities to test that connection is so potentially powerful and thinking about science in that way because we talk a lot about long-term time series long-term and I completely know that's how important I you've convinced me how important that is but I really am, I think this the heat the marine heat wave as an event if we really can focus on that can be a very galvanizing thing that the public will understand that and then all the complex science can relate to that. And so some of these presentations to me were really more specific about the marine heat wave as a phenomena that was unique and something we need to pay attention to that also is connected to all of these other things as opposed to just the long-term time series about harmful algal blooms as well but or the long-term time series about temperature and storms and all of those storylines. So I don't know, there's something to me that I think is pretty potentially powerful about thinking about these specific event-driven or more short-term phenomena that link this long-term ops series that we all want and also but this integrating it with shorter term predictions, shorter term impacts things that are going to be more relevant. Again, I'm not thinking about this as a marketing enterprise but I am thinking about as a way to think about the scientific enterprise maybe a little bit differently. And I just think this was a really cool conversation. A quick response to that just really fast that a marine heat wave did make the news and it was reported in the New York Times that the temperatures off the coast of Florida were 100 degrees, yes, and so more. So I'm wondering and I just don't know how that got reported. Who did the press release? Where was the science behind that? And is it just one New York Times reporter on the science beat that got interested in that and then how could you shape that message? So I don't know how that made the New York Times. It was pretty compelling when you saw it. I don't know but I do think I've also had a lot of increase about it from people and scientists and people who that who said really we got to really worry about this. I mean it's really, you know that may wasn't just that article but it's among that among other these types of articles that have made even other scientists and not just the public both simultaneously thinking wait a second, is there something more going on in addition to the broader climate things that we have been talking about and we're doing a pretty good job talking about. But again, there's something about the immediacy of this. Storms are certainly has some of that resonance too. As I said, my boiler's not working and I'm not sure about my furnace when I go home. So we'll see. But again, I think these scientists are really kind of potentially good and I wonder if there's more of the science that can be presented around some of these more immediate uses. And that's connecting with the local science, connecting with that therefore how do you ground truth that I always hear a lot that we never have that verification. We don't have that and therefore what's really happening right now or what's the shorter series that we'll add to that. I hear that a lot and I don't hear as much discussion about investing in that capacity building. I love the capacity building of the Hawaiian folks. I mean, this is what's being discussed in the COP and other issues. It's not capacity building about giving big grants as a better communities but actually developing that next generation of people who can whether it's marine genetic resources or other things are actually at the table doing the science. So that's another I think change in the international discussion and even the domestic discussion about the youth scientists that we're all talking about and getting those folks trained in that particular way. So again, that's sort of another link that came out of the coral presentation and some of the comments on that that I think is something that we need to think about a little bit more. If I could just jump in because I did think of one thing while folks were talking and some alluded to this is engaging the Fisher community themselves in the monitoring of their environment that they work in, they're there. And I know some of this is going on already probably in multiple locations. I'm mostly aware of in the New England shelf region and the shelf fishery but I'm sure it's going on elsewhere. Thank you. Just a quick comment on Marcia's and Tony's comments there. I think it built up over time. It wasn't just one news report or something that is, people were seeing this comment and I heard it for several weeks and I was just wondering if it's like, okay, it's the summertime. We're here in land heat waves and having big impact on people and maybe it was relatable that way or something. So I thought that might be helping us but we also have hands now from Andrew and then Paul and then back to Dan. Yeah, thanks. So I have a little bit of insight into that 101 degree story which I'll touch on first and super briefly. So there was a lot of press interest as everybody knows and I remember that there was early interest in the notion of equating the temperatures to bathwater temperatures and that quickly became, no, no, not bathwater, jacuzzi. This is like a jacuzzi and so once there was this record, it was an instrumentation record that was broken of 101 degrees Fahrenheit. I think what happened is we broke that magic number of 100 degrees and it was also in the minds of reporters that this was very much now greater than human body temperature. It really was a jacuzzi and here was the science to prove it. So it sort of made for an interesting headline and as I said, that 101 degrees Fahrenheit, although it was an instrumental record, I don't think it's actually what the corals experienced but they did experience, you know, 37, 38 degrees. So, you know, 97 degrees Fahrenheit. The other thing I just wanted to mention Dan talked about the role of corals in coastline protection. And I think that's, if we're keeping this upbeat and positive, I think there's some upbeatness there. The department, you know, there's a huge amount of interest now in nature-based solutions to protect coastlines to build coastal resilience and avoid damages. And coral reefs are one example of those. The Department of Defense of all agencies recently invested in a $22 million project that we have here at the University of Miami to not only design the next generation of hybrid reefs, these are a combination of an artificial reef with corals added to them in a way that sort of brings together engineers and biologists to produce something that is a really effective breaker of waves but also has corals on it that are more thermally tolerant recognizing you can't rely on this solution without also making the corals that are building that reef and making it self-repairing able to deal with these kinds of heat stresses. So, there's a really interesting juxtaposition of what's happening right now with a lot of interest in coastal resilience which typically the amount of funding available to do that dwarfs the kind of funding that is available for coral reef conservation. But if those two things can be married together, recognizing that corals actually contribute to coastal restoration, agencies like FEMA are now interested in coral restoration as a way to build coastal resilience. And that changes the conversation in terms of how coral reef conservation actually could be scaled up. And more importantly, how we could build or attempt to build climate resilience into those interventions and restoration strategies. So, I think there's a lot of interesting things going on that we probably wouldn't have predicted just five years ago. Thank you, Andrew. I like how that brings it back to the resiliency to the people part of it. Paul, I think you were next. Yeah, thank you, Francis. That was great. And I really liked how you brought in the people into it and the harvesters. I'm a shellfish biologist but managing shellfish harvest for the Suquamish tribe for the past 30 years. And so, what those people that imputed sound and my task is to try to advise people what to do about climate change. Or should people be investing in fishing boats given what the future holds? And it's so dynamic. But I think the two, I don't have any answers but a couple of things that both you and Amy also pointed out is the instrumentation. If you can get instruments into the hands of the fishermen like that, the dissolved oxygen sensor, that's very interesting concept. If we can, kind of the democratization of science and that would be very helpful, I think it also, it not only does it provide immediate information but it also gives people the sense that they have some control over understanding what's going on. And the other part is the comment about the whales coming in to the fishing gear. If we can make sure that a wide variety of different disciplines are involved in the discussion, I think that's gonna be essential. Thanks. Thank you, Paul. I like the democratization of science part of that there. All the papers that people submitted on this topic, they all said there's a need for more subsurface ocean observations. And we even had that as part of the discussion how the satellites could help with that. Dan, you're up next. Yeah, the follow up and comment Paul just made was that using the fishers to collect data, we use, we put small tags on marine mammals that report the data automatically. And I've often thought we ought to be giving those same tags to fishers to put on your equipment. And every time they put a net in the water, they're gonna be sending back a CTD profile or an oxygen profile. So that's another direction we could be. Fishers don't necessarily get the data instantaneously but it would be available subsequently. The other comment I originally wanted to make was this whole question of shifting baselines and then trying to develop attribution when we do other things in the ocean, what I'm getting at is there's a lot of offshore wind development and people are trying to figure out what do we do for environmental compliance. And my point is our ability to do these environmental assessments and predict through a baseline measurement before and after we put these things in is all thrown out the window when you have these completely erratic events that we have a very poor ability to predict and then associate with what was the factor. And so we're trying to do offshore wind so that it's done environmentally correct but our ability to really assess that because we don't understand the dynamics of the system is quite problematic. Yeah, that offshore wind example is very important because with all that development going on, immediately that change gets blamed for whatever it is, whether it's a climate or a marine heat wave, whatever it is, it's the first place that people look and it may have nothing to do with it. Do we have other comments? I guess I had one comment for EE and FEI so that if, okay, I can say I have that time, fantastic. Thank you for that presentation. I thought that was pretty awesome and I especially liked how you looked at the marine heat wave in the deep water where just changing the magnitude of those fluxes is so important with those in trying to be able to predict rapid intensification but also the shallow water example where there's so many more complications and it's the timing of that cooling and the timing of when you change the heat flux to go from the ocean contributing to intensification to contributing to weakening. There's so many things that impact that and so I wanted to thank you for illuminating both of those pieces. I think there's a lot of interest in both those activities in the U.S. and that we could do a lot of work together between the U.S. and Asia on this. Yeah, thank you Scott, thank you. Right, so Scott, you want us to comment something or? Sure, yes, then we also think it is actually, you know, we talk also about the decay of marine heat wave. Actually as we can see tropical cyclone is the one of the most effective way to cause the decay as well. And tropical cyclone, the decay and feedback and also it has self-induced, it's possible to induce the marine heat wave ahead of tropical cycle itself and to favor its own development. So Fei, you have something to add? No, I don't have anything to say, but I think the marine heat wave and typhoon intensification is very interesting and we don't know much about the processes. So I think more in-depth investigation is needed, yes, thank you. Other questions, Susan? Yeah, I was just gonna say if we don't have any other questions, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all our speakers today. And unfortunately, Sophie wasn't able to stay on with us, but I know she said she would be willing to take a follow up question so we can share her contact information with everyone. But yeah, it was a really excellent session and I know the time zones are probably a bit strange for some of you, so particularly appreciate you accommodating our time zone here. But many, many thanks to all of you for this really interesting session. Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you everyone, that was very interesting. Thank you. And so we do have another session, the last one of the day, and it's supposed to start in about six minutes. So we can take a very short break, but please make sure if you do need to take a break to come back as soon as possible and we'll get started with the last one of the day. Okay, everyone, both people in the room and people online, we're gonna pick up again so if I can get your attention, like, yeah, doesn't work. Oh, well, now it's my pleasure to introduce April Melvin, who is currently the acting director for the Polar Research Board. But relevant to our next session, she is helping out with a new initiative at the Academies, which is the Climate Crossroads. And I think it really relates well to... I should put my camera on. To what we just were talking about in terms of the marine heat waves, where we can see how climate is really affecting so much of what we do, and it really goes across so many different issues, affecting fisheries, but also with the effect on tropical storm intensification. And it's just really kind of, it's seeping into, I think, all of our work. And that's true across the Academies as well. And so we have this new initiative, Climate Crossroads, which is meant to integrate all the great work that we've been doing on climate across the Academies into a program. So it's not gonna be quite as, not as stove-piped perhaps as it was before. And as part of the Climate Crossroads, there are different pathways that have been identified. I think there are four pathways right now, but there could be more developed going forward. So these are not necessarily the final four pathways. And this is the Thriving Ecosystems Pathways, the one that is being led by our division, the Division on Earth and Life Studies. And so that's why I invited them to come and talk to us today. And I think, I don't know, Robin Shane might be joining by phone and Laura Ehlers also by phone, is that right? Yeah, but April's actually here in person. So that's very, you know, we're thrilled to have her. And she's gonna tell us a little bit about this program. Thanks, Sue and all for the opportunity to speak with you today. As Sue mentioned, this is an effort that's being led by Robin Shane, who directs the Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources, as well as co-directs the Board on Animal Health Sciences, Conservation and Research. I have to look, because that's a brand new name that we haven't gotten yet. I work most closely with our Polar Research Board and our Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate. And Laura works with the Water Sciences and Technology Board. And both Robin and Laura are traveling in their cars right now. So it's possible that they'll join by phone and help with any questions. Otherwise, I will take the lead on things. So as Sue just mentioned, an overview of what the Climate Crossroads Initiative is. This is a major new initiative that's really intended to bring together the disparate parts of the academies that are working on climate. Climate change work is occurring across the institution. And sometimes it's well coordinated and sometimes it's been less coordinated. And so this high level office that sits in the executive office of the institution is really intended to galvanize that work and think about how we can do greater cross disciplinary and interdisciplinary work to address the challenges of climate change. So it's intended to leverage the expertise that we have across the institution in various units. And also think about new ways that we can engage with stakeholders and decision makers. So it's really trying to move us beyond our typical study design to do work that can move us more from knowledge to action and be more impactful. So we're kind of, as we're scoping this pathway we're thinking a lot about how we can do things in a new way while leveraging the strengths of the academies and the types of experts that we can bring to bear on these challenges. The leads for the initiative itself are Amanda Stout who used to lead the climate and polar work in our division who you may be familiar with from that context and also Amanda Purcell. So as Sue mentioned, we have a number of disciplinary areas that the initiative is focusing on right now. This is in addition to some other work related to congressional engagement and international engagement. But these four areas are the focus for pathway development at this time. They include looking at climate health and equity which is being led by the National Academy of Medicine and their work has been underway for quite some time now. So it's pretty far along in development. There's also an accelerating decarbonization group that's also pretty far along. They have a report that's coming out later this month on this topic. This is being led by the division on engineering and physical sciences. And then the two newer pathways that are really just getting going and scoping right now are cultivating climate resilient communities led by the division on behavioral and social sciences and education or D-bass. And then the thriving ecosystems pathway being led by the division on earth and life studies which we'll be talking about here more today. I mean, we recognize that there's a lot of opportunity for overlap among these pathways. And so we are in regular conversations with the leads on the other pathways but we had to bend things in some way and so started with these four. So specifically to scoping the thriving ecosystems pathway the primary questions that are driving our development of this pathway are focusing on how do we address the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity and how do we reduce those impacts? And then also how do we think about better managing ecosystems to mitigate climate change and looking to nature-based solutions? Recognizing that the impacts of climate change or adaptation measures that may be taken aren't always going to be the same or maybe unlikely to be the same as what we would look to as mitigation approaches and thinking about how to balance those challenges. So we're undertaking this activity over about a year or a little longer and have a number of deliverables that we're working on. So the first is one that we've wrapped up at this point doing an internal landscape analysis of the academies and all the work that we've already done related to climate change and ecosystems. We ended up finding around 140 reports that touched on this to varying degrees and are looking at how we can use that as really foundational material for how we build out the pathway. When the Climate Crossroads Initiative launched this summer they held a summit which we participated in and had a breakout session where we brought in a number of experts to start to talk about how we might wanna shape this pathway, what were some priority topics or areas that we might wanna look at and just start to get a sense of what others were doing in this space. And now we're kind of a few months into an analysis of the external landscape. So this is thinking about who's doing what in the space of climate change and ecosystems, federally in the NGO world, in the private sector and trying to figure out where our niche would be in that broader landscape and where are there opportunities for us to have partnerships which is something that we haven't typically done in the past and so this is new as we explore but I think that's an important part of what the initiative is trying to do is to develop new partnerships in particular with those who may be better positioned to take actions. And as we move forward, we'll be developing the scope and goals associated with this proposed or with this pathway and start to think about priority activities and outputs that we could have from this. We really started with a very clean slate here and so our have a lot of opportunities to shape how this pathway moves forward. And so we're doing this outreach now to make sure that we're hearing from a broad range of voices and fields of expertise to make sure we're positioning ourselves effectively to make an impact in the space. And last, we will be developing a fundraising plan in addition to having the support of the staff in the Crossroads Initiative Office. We also have a designated staff member in the Office of Development to help with fundraising around this activity and this is intended to reach beyond our typical federal sponsors. So they're very much focused on foundations and private sector and non-federal funding to help us. So that is I think a nice opportunity for us to be able to leverage this new office and build out programs in a way that we haven't necessarily been able to in the past when we're working most directly with the needs of federal sponsors. So in terms of our near term objectives and these are areas that I'm gonna be looking for your input on today, within the external landscape we are trying to identify sectors and organizations that are working on ecosystems and biodiversity. And at this point, organizations of organizations as kind of a scale at which we may be able to wrap our heads around what's going on without getting too far into the weeds and also trying to identify any influencers with whom we may wanna connect that we think could be very instrumental in helping us shape the activity or in developing partnerships. We are also trying to identify those partnership opportunities across sectors and organizations and different types of ecosystems. And we're giving a lot of thought to kind of where or what might be the priority ecosystems or aspects of ecosystems and biodiversity that we may wanna consider focusing on as we're kind of developing out that first suite of activities that we may wanna do and where are the science gaps, where are the needs and where does the academies bring unique value? And then finally, identifying exactly what those activities might be, recognizing they could leverage the types of work that we've done in the past, but we do anticipate it being more broad and a little more bold than perhaps what we've done in the past. And so this is my last slide. We would really value your input when we're thinking about ocean systems and where could the academies play a unique role as we're developing out this ecosystems pathway and are there specific groups or funders, organizations of organizations that you would suggest we be reaching out to to ensure that we're kind of getting a solid understanding of what the external landscape is as it relates to the oceans. And I can leave this up for now. Yeah, I think that would be fine. So yeah, it was something to reference for these. We're gonna see topics. Comments, questions, thoughts? Really, is this the end of your day? Sorry to. Dan? Yeah, it's talking about partnerships there. In California, there's a 30 by 30 initiative to conserve 30% of the biodiversity by 2030 and it's both state and federal. Are you aware of that? We are, yeah. Or at least the federal one we have talked about. Yes, thanks. Paul? Yeah, but I have a number of ideas and I could just email you if that's would be of interest. AT&I affiliated tribes of Northwest Indians does a lot on climate change and they represent tribes throughout the Northwest. And there are several individuals in that group that could be are very influential. There's a lot happening in Puget Sound around climate change. Thank you, Paul. I actually, I have a slide with our email addresses on it, which I forgot about. Wonderful. Tony? Yeah, thanks. I think this is really exciting and good luck. So I'll make three general comments. First of all, I think that I suggest if you haven't done a policy now, particularly there's a different, these issues gets discussed, in my limited experience, these issues gets discussed very differently in the US versus internationally. They use the same language, but the framing and the focus is very different. So if you haven't taken a look at the US policy framework which inhibits a focus on thriving ecosystems, I think you do that because I would propose there's no law in the US that requires us to protect ocean ecosystems. There's marine mammals, there's fisheries, there's a lot of other stuff. So we have a, I think a particularly fractured and we don't need to do a system, but really it's more of what's the affirmative mandate or management to protect thriving ecosystems, particularly in a future-looking environment because US environmental law is backward-looking based on essentially how we fix problems we've solved. And so I do think that's a very, kind of a basic policy framing that if you haven't had somebody take a look at that, I think that could be important if your US is the focus. The other more explicit things is I do think there are, in fact, some openings to think about this, but again, I still think they're gaps. So there is, for example, within the Climate Ocean Action Plan, there's several attitudes talking about scenario-based fisheries management planning, which is something that is sort of trying to happen within the constrained framework of the fisheries management control system. So you might look at the scenario planning framework and look at that as one place to be thinking about these kinds of things and do that. We're in a process of developing what's called a national strategy for planning for sustainable ocean economies. But I don't really see anybody really identifying the metrics of sustainability that will make sure that that will happen in an ecologically thriving way. So I do think that I'm kind of illustrating the disconnect between what I hear, the objectives of your initiative R, versus what I consider to be the challenges that you're going to face. I would say there's a lot of groups, one of our members, Mark Smalding, I'm sure would have some opinions if he hasn't been in touch with you before, thinking about the things mostly within this educated framework about an international framing versus a domestically. I do think there's some international groups. I mean, right now there is an international framework with a conventional biodiversity and the area is being a national restriction. And 30 by 30 is really an adoption at a high level panel of an international goal that we've just kind of adopted for, you would tell me it's not really ecologically significant, but it's an important driver, but it's wrong, but it is nonetheless an important driver of what we're trying to get done. And that's the only thing we have driving us to look at those sustainability issues. And again, I think there's some interest about some groups who are starting to look at, we're talking about decarbonization in this group and CZR and stuff like that, but there are groups that are looking at how do you actually co-design ecological ecosystem protection and offshore wind or other sustainable uses? How do you think about that as a co-development concept? So there are some folks thinking about those kinds of ideas. So obviously this is something I've been struggling with because I feel like, when I deal a lot in my region with offshore wind and this has come up several times, I don't see anybody out there really championing and having the responsibility for thriving ecosystems. And I'm pretty convinced we're not gonna mitigate or regulate our way to thriving ecosystems. That's not gonna be sufficient. So anyway, a couple of thoughts, but happy to connect you with some other folks too that might be more specific than I was. Thank you. Hey, Tom, you have your hand up. Thanks, Sue. So the four panels you showed about health and equity, about communities, about rapid decarbonization and thriving ecosystems, I think we're all very exciting. I think there's a tendency to think of thriving ecosystems as the beautiful kelp forest image you showed, right? You think of wild places and that. I wonder whether there's not a way of trying to bring them all together under an idea that one of the committee members here has championed for the US National Committee for the UN decade. And that's the urban ocean idea of a place that should be a thriving ecosystem that is impacted by climate change, probably more than almost any other system that has direct effects on human health and would benefit from rapid decarbonization. And it brings in all kinds of partners you might not otherwise have related with shipping and with ports and with other areas. So that might be one to think of that may not have come across your radar screen otherwise. Thank you. And we are thinking of ecosystems very broadly. So I think that would fit in with what we're thinking, including agriculture as well and very managed systems too, more pristine, whatever that means now. Okay, so I know I have a privileged position here because I've heard this before. So, but I know one of the things with the climate crossroads, it's a little bit different relative to a lot of the work that we do with the academies is to be more action-oriented. And so the question comes up in terms of thriving ecosystems, what is that really gonna look like? And I mean, April can give me her opinion, but I think it's also a broader question for all of you. When you think about what would a more active approach look like for thriving ecosystems, what would you think about including in that? Mark, do you have a hand up? Yep, sure do. Thanks for all this. I think, Sue, you started to get into it. Thriving has lots of different meanings to people. And thriving is really what people think is thriving is really driven by the diversity of goals and values that people bring to, quote, ecosystems. I think it's really important for the group, and I know maybe it's outside the task state, but the world isn't driven just by climate. A lot of ecosystems are unhealthy for a lot of reasons that predated climate change. And in fact, you can take the Northwest salmon. The big decline was the hydroelectric systems that were put in place because FDR wanted to help get out of the depression. It was essential to the World War II effort. And now you say, well, let's take them out. Well, where does that hydro power come from? How do we manage floods and all these other things? So a lot of times the goals and values are gonna lead us into real conflict. So I think it kind of goes into, I think what maybe Tony was talking about too, perhaps, that it's not just gonna be solved by a usual regulatory approach. They're going to be, it's gotta be dynamic. It's gotta be adaptive to risk. As many people have said, wicked problems have clumsy solutions. And I'm worried that we think, oh, I just decarbonize. Oh, I just put in offshore winds. This is, I'm sure you're all aware of this, but you've gotta take a much broader lens than just looking through the climate change lens, because I think you will miss a lot of other important issues, perhaps. And so I would just a cautionary tale. Thank you. And I think we are thinking about it more broadly. And when we did these internal landscape, we realized that so much of the work that we've done is kind of climate with other stressors as well. And I think that's very much a space where we wanna continue to build out that recognition. I guess I do wanna follow up on some of these points because Mark's point cannot be dismissed. I mean, what is thriving is really in the eyes of the beholder and is really, I think oftentimes, particularly when we talk about from these types of discussions, we come at it from a very privileged place. And so I do think it's important to in your minds or maybe in all of our minds is when you say thriving and you say ecosystem, but then also pull in climate, biodiversity, human health, managing. I mean, those are really are in some ways. And actually for many people, that's conflicting. And it's conflicting both in the immediate space versus the long range space. So it's hard to think about solving long range problems when you have very immediate issues that you have to resolve. So when you talk about these thriving ecosystems pathways, I think there's also this added time scale in addition to the variety of individuals or organisms for that matter that are being impacted in this space. So I think that's why I think a little bit when this came out and we all sat around in silence is because it is such an overwhelming view that I do think there could be a lot to be made to sometimes to just break it down and really think about a specific component, a specific area. I think, you know, Tom's point is valid. I think this is why John Delaney thinks a lot about urban, you know, just because it's, at least it's a little tractable. But again, I really cannot dismiss that piece. And you can see all our conversations in many ways, you know, split apart, deconvolved into these various sections of what we're exactly talking about and who is at risk and what is at risk and how we're addressing the topic. Thank you. And this, as we build this out, our intent is that there'll be a suite of activities which may or may not be linked to one another that we build out. So I mean, it's very possible that we could have activities that aren't related to one another necessarily but focus on different systems or different timescales or different interactions with community needs. So it can be broad in that sense. We just have to somehow wrap our head around something in a cohesive way. Okay, Dan, I think you're next. Yeah, Mark brought up some really interesting points. And to me, a thriving marine ecosystem is a kelp forest with a sea otter in it, but an abalone fisherman wouldn't necessarily agree with that. But I bring that analogy up because these climate change things are complicated. In California, in the North Coast, we had thriving kelp forests without sea otters until the sea star wasting disease hit. That sea star wasting disease probably had something to do with climate change. A lot of these viral things are precipitated by the warming events. And now what happens when we have a warming event, historically, kelps could recover because the urchins were controlled by either the sea otter or by the sea star. Now we have neither. And there's actually talk about bringing sea otters back into the North Coast to bring things back to where the kelp forest can recover. But again, that has a lot of different, A, can you do it? Successfully, B, do you really want to bring a sea otter back to where it was as a person who studied them? I said, of course, other people may not agree, but it could be a solution to the problem. And it's one that's under serious consideration, I think, at least at Fish and Wildlife, it's talked about. But again, it's not the most straightforward way forward. I know from sort of a very similar discussion has been going on, I think, with the coral reef community and the whole idea of introducing coral from somewhere else that's more heat tolerant into an environment where the corals are bleaching. And that's not something that we're, I think, as a community traditionally we're very comfortable with. So yeah, and that's not even a species that was there before. It was a totally different species that you're introducing into the ecosystem, which I think is going to be one of the challenges with thinking about how adaptation to climate change and an ecological perspective, what is that really going to mean? John, finally, we were waiting for you. Yeah, I'm sort of reluctant to sort of jump into this, but because I'm already over my head in the topic that I'm going to talk about, but with Mark's invitation and the opportunity to speak on a broader scale, we have been talking a lot in another group, a variant of this ocean sedgeboard about what we call urban seas. And there are many, many different words, many, many terms that have been used, urban coastline or urban ocean, there are many, many ways to think about it. But let me just sketch briefly the elements that might be involved. If it's urban seas, really we're talking about port cities that are on some coastal embayment or riverine estuarine system. And they, I've counted, there's over 100 of these and the top 40 are well in excess of 10 million people per city, Tokyo, Shanghai, many, many across the world. And if you think about these things, they're very, very important as units. And I admit it's a subset of the global concern, but if you define an urban sea as consisting of one or more port cities embedded in or on the shoreline of a bay, but also surrounded by a drainage basin, you can't talk about what goes on in the bay unless you talk about what's shedding off of the runoff drainage system into the bay because that sets the tone of the caliber and quality. And then the people that live in that drainage basin, if you define it that way, then well over half the people on the planet live within urban sea systems. And they're important because they're central to the economic trade of the whole planet, supply chain nodes. So they're really crucial locally, regionally and globally. Furthermore, they are probably the major source of pollution as if you think of a city as a point source, there's over 200 of them that are bleeding, all kinds of stuff directly into the global ocean and nobody that I know of is tracking the effluent from any of them into the global ocean. The best indicator we have is plastic. And plastic everybody knows now is accumulated in the gyres, but what else follows the plastic or leads the plastic and gets into the ocean and we never pay attention to it because it's not so obvious to see. And then the third point is every one of these in a world that follows 9-11 is vulnerable to potential attack, not by airplanes flying into buildings, but by stealthy subsea vehicles that could easily come quietly in under the clip to the bottom of a large transport ship or even quietly, even more quietly, just come in very slowly, settle into the mud near the city and slowly begin bleeding. Toxins both could be radioactive or just bioactive. And then finally, cities are clearly the place where you have a dramatic, these big cities are dramatic variations in equity. Very poorest people live in the lowest lands. The very wealthy people tend to live on high points. That means that as sea level rises and storms come more common, these people are gonna be swamped just like what happened in Katrina, somewhat what happened in Sandy and others. And they are the least able people to deal with that reversal. They have, so we have a social problem, we have an economic problem, we have a security problem, and basically we have a pollution problem. Those are only a small number of all the factors are involved. And I'm concerned that the academy needs to look as broadly as possible at addressing these problems because as Mark's alluded to, it isn't just climate change, it's urbanization that's also fouling the ocean. And so, these are the kinds of things that many of us are wrestling with and we would really welcome your advice as to the breadth that the academy could bring to bear on a system like this because quite frankly, most of us oceanographers are pretty good underwater, on the water and above the water, but once you get into inner cities, we're sort of out of our depth. And if you go beyond that, there's a lot of issues. So I simply, I know I tried to say this as briefly as I could and I'm sorry if I droned on, but the rest of the board is used to me doing that. Thank you. I think a challenge like this is very in line with what the initiative is trying to do in bringing together groups of experts that aren't thinking about the same issue or aren't thinking about it from the same angle. This is the first time that I have heard about this as a terrestrial ecologist myself. So really appreciate that overview and all the complexity with it. And I did notice that I think Robin is on the line and so I was just gonna give Robin a chance. If you wanna say anything, you know, just pipe right in but she may be not able to if she's driving. So, Tony is that a new hand? Yeah. Okay. Again, this is very exciting and so three more quick things. First of all, I do think if you haven't talked to folks had help in at Duke at the Marine Ecological Geospatial Lab or whatever it's called is a really great guy and it's thought about these things a lot in terms of framing more around but I love his interconnection between standards and criteria and also geospatial characterizations. So if he's not on your list of folks to talk to I would talk to him. I would talk to Ben Halperin who's also been thinking about these questions from a different perspective at the, where is he at it? Santa Barbara. And again, just a more what I call indicator kind of folks but again, I feel like they might have some thoughts about this. I would say I've coordinated a mid-Atlantic ocean seas seascapes kind of project ocean planning and other issues. And we thought years ago when this administration was starting out with regional ocean planning that we would set up healthy ecosystem indicators and criteria and we pretty much gave up because everybody was aware of the data and we don't have enough data and what's the data and what's the healthy ecosystem? I still think it's a useful thing to do and an important thing to do in some criteria. So if you can come up with some criteria and frameworks for thinking about that it could maybe be useful in some way but I would want to pick up Mark's point about the adaptive part. I think the data we spent a lot of time earlier in the day about the data and observations of a framework. So thinking very much about how the increasing data that is available might be utilized to help inform your systems. I feel like starting from that point I feel like that sometimes an add-on and you might want to start from that because I think we're at the point of we have lots of late data, we need more and we need better but if you can maybe engineer your questions a little bit with the data and thought upfront that might be an interesting way to approach some of these issues. And I think again, the people that I haven't been really dealing with but I think there are people I mean, for example in the Mid-Atlantic I do think there's like so much data that's happening now as a result of what's happening with the industry. So you're talking about an industry partnerships, et cetera. So how that private public data thing is probably would be useful for your sets. And the last thought is just on the international frame I just would say talk to some of the donors I would be very interesting on why the foundations don't want to support ecological and environmental protection in the US but they support a lot internationally because if you look a lot of the healthy ocean ecosystems most of the maps say let's go to Indonesia because that's where the core resource are, let's go here. So if we're thinking about a US effort a little bit I would talk to some of the folks of the oceans five and some of those other groups about, okay so or the Bloomberg folks are great too about whether or not what would interest the foundations and some of the private money investing in the US because currently they don't very much. Thank you. And I see we have Robin now. Oh, we can't hear you. Still on mute, Robin. Yeah, I lost her. And then I saw Laura Ehlers I think is also on. So I'll say the same thing to Laura if she wants to join in, you know, chime right in. In the meantime, Paul, your hand is up again. Yeah, hi. You know, one of the things I think would be very helpful and widely applicable is if you could identify tools that people can use to analyze the data, visualize data. We're using one, it's called Velma EPA put it together. I think it's visualizing the ecosystem, land, skate management assessments but what it's doing is to help us map the fate and transport of contaminants flowing down watersheds into the sea where they contaminate shellfish and also we're modeling a six PPD quinone which is the tire dust component of the tire dust that's killing coho salmon. So those putting, you know, funding development of tools that different people can use all over the world would be, I think a very good use of resources and it crosses all the disciplines. Not many of the disciplines. Hey, Susan. Go ahead. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Oh, hey, sorry. Couldn't do it with the regular zoom link but this is by phone. This is Robin Shane. I just wanna say that I really appreciate what's really very helpful is to understand how all of you are thinking about this. And in fact, I think I appreciate the advice that you're giving to us to think about as we go forward and talk to other potential partners and also sponsors. And it sounds like to me that some of the hard thinking that really is a place for the academies is about this discussion around, you know, what is thriving may be different. It is an optimization problem. Is it a priorities and even in the community trying to figure out what they ought to do and is it a compromise? I think if we're gonna be stuck on trying to find the absolute quote unquote right solution or optimization I'm not sure there's even time for that but maybe it's an adaptive. It sounds like there was call for sort of dynamics maybe adaptive management of the situation given that there's not just climate change but all these other stressors. And I think that even that our mandate is a little bit towards taking action in order to help ecosystem and biodiversity adapt that we need rich thinking about it that is flexible so that there can be some action taken which may give us some learning so that we can build on that. I mean, I'm saying that in the big way. And so it's really the board and the experts that it can draw on that I think if we can find the right sponsors that are willing to get answers that may be, you know not like silver bullets because it sounds like it's not gonna be that other than was it Glenn McDonald or summits that just stop messing up what we've already messed up, you know that we're gonna need to have both some fundamental knowledge but also some facts and some considerations that everyone's gonna have to get real with in order to say like, well, we don't know everything and we can't know everything. So we really have to try to preserve the resource if we wanna preserve the benefits to humans say and I know I'm starting to kind of get vague on my own thinking but you know, it's unlikely that the Fed for sure would ask for a study on, you know what's the fuzzy thinking about how we should deal with climate change but I think we're gonna need that too in addition to some more concrete plans about trying some things that may help ecosystems to thrive while providing ecosystems, goods and services that humans benefit from because it's in our sort of long-term interest to do so. So that was just a very long-winded way of saying it's really gonna be the board that we're gonna come back to to crystallize the projects that we're gonna be trying to pitch in but the insights that you're giving us are thought it's just really helpful. John, do you still have your hand up? I do. It was probably an error for me to stop but just by pointing out the problems I think there are possible solutions out there but they're long-term solutions and I think that if I showed you my screen I could show you a graph that shows the last 10 years of the use of what are known now as digital twins of various systems and it turns out that that's a strongly exponential curve and there are something close to a thousand new digital twin efforts around the world and country looking at simulation in a computer of almost a perfect example of what a real world system is and you don't build these right away, they take a while they were best used in the avionics industry 10, 15, 20 years ago but they're now applying them to ecological systems and you accumulate all the historical information that's germane and then you begin collecting real-time data from virtually everything the traffic flow in a city, the nutrient flux and the poison fluxes that are coming down the rivers into the oceans like Paul mentioned and you look at all sorts of things you look at the quality of the fishing industry you look at the quality of the shipping industry you look at the jobs, you look at the pollution in the air, you look at everything even the way you educate your children all of that can be put into a system and it's gonna take a long time to do this really well but if we begin doing that for a couple examples somewhere, wherever they are it will begin to learn how all these factors are interconnected and how moving one is gonna actually begin to affect others and when you begin to look at a system that way then I believe there will be a new generation of decision makers probably in their 30s and 40s now maybe 20s and 30s and 40s that will come along and we'll be able to look at the entire forest and I'm using that metaphorically entire forest is sort of the tree that they are a specialist in and that's really what we need in order to get to the point where we have inspired and insightful and data-based decision making about how entire ecosystems can evolve in an ecosystem that is in urban sea and Shanghai is gonna be different in urban systems in San Francisco but each group is gonna have a strong local community that takes ownership and gives direct information that's relevant to that particular problem but there's not gonna have to also be a national and I hope eventually international factor that where we all learn from one another as we go down this path so I didn't need to just point out all the problems in my earlier comment but there's a lot to this and there are potential solutions I can't say there's solutions but imagine being a decision maker and you have all the information you want up to date every day at your fingertips and you can interrogate this digital twin with what if questions? What if this, what if that, what if this, what if that and before long you are looking at something that isn't just one problem of fixing this or one problem of fixing that what you're doing is balancing the way all of the factors interact with one another. I've seen Galen, that's a note in the chat. Galen, did you wanna chime in? Yeah, I just wanna say that John's vision of what a digital twin could be is wonderful. It would be great if we had that but the reality of what we're doing right now with simulations and models, data simulation is far from that vision and so I think we'd have to be really realistic about the energy that it would take to develop such digital twins and be realistic about timelines of that that would require and the investment that that would require. I think that this is not a realistic thing that we're gonna have for a comprehensive decision-making in the decades to come unless we get really, really specific of a specific idea, a specific set of observations and invest a ton of money in these. I think there's a lot of hype about the idea of digital twins and underestimation of the amount of uncertainty that remains even in the models that we do have that are for very specific applications. I just think we have to be careful. I would not argue against being careful. I would argue against making too short a lot of time walking. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We don't have to just work on the immediate problems we should be working on a suite of problems that stretch into the timelines of your grandchildren. Okay, Marcia, did you take your hand down or you? I'll just make one more comment on digital twins and AI in general, but I think it's really important to manage expectations because you put something out there and you make these big promises and then when they don't realize then you're gonna lose confidence of the decision-makers for a really long time. So just managing the expectations of what can reasonably be accomplished with the data that we have while looking to the future, incorporating uncertainty and all that is great, but it's just very careful about how you package that. Good point. Okay, and let's see, Paul had his hand up earlier. Paul, did you want to? Yeah, I just think that we do have to look at modeling and we don't know what's coming around the corner. The future isn't, it used to be, we could tell the future just by looking at the past. We can't do that anymore. So we really do need to put effort into these different modeling efforts and eventually maybe John's vision will come, but I think it'll be a long, long time. I think we just need to keep chipping away at it and wherever we can build these tools, use these tools and support working at that. So yeah, just in support of what everyone has said, that's all. Yeah, just sorry, just one more thing to follow up on what Paul and John and Galen were talking about, communicating uncertainty is probably one of the most important things we could do as a science community, because we really fail at that. We really are bad and people don't understand where the uncertainties are. And they can then make decisions about that. If they understand that, some things are important, some things aren't. When I was working with Task Force Ocean with the Navy, I mean, the submarine commanders say, everybody makes these tactical decision aids for us when we're underwater and the alarms are going off all the time. And so we just turn them all off because we don't understand what's certain or uncertain. If you could just tell us where you think you know something and where you're confident about it, some level of that, they can then make the risk assessment. If we could provide that to decision makers, wow, that would really be helpful. Instead, we tend not to do that very well. And I think communicating uncertainty is hard, but I think we have to really think that would be really valuable if we could do that. I'll stop there. Mark, we're working on putting uncertainty in the TDAs, I promise you. Mark, I do want to push back and just say, I think the fear that so many scientists have of not being able to communicate that uncertainty or being wrong because we have this as rightly, hypothesis testing, I think that in some ways has paralyzed us from being able to communicate that uncertainty and to talk to individuals and regulators and boots on the ground about what they should and should not be worrying about. So it is this interesting dynamic about, again, we need to be trained better, we need to think about this better, about how do we overcome our inertia and worry of saying, well, this is true, but is it true in a court of law? Well, you know, because that's our problem, right? So, you know, I think that it needs more conversation. Okay, Thomas, see your hands up. Sure, I want to second that the idea of communicating uncertainty, I think it helps the credibility of the whole argument and the whole concept of climate change as the, probably the token conservative on the board, maybe hopefully there's one more than me, I think it's very important because there's a whole host of people that roll out on the street in protest and scream that the world's gonna end tomorrow and it undermines the credibility of the science and the whole argument of climate change. So, this has been a hugely great afternoon and morning session and to the degree that all of this can get out in very simple terms, to the masses would be very, very, very helpful. At the risk of expressing myself out of turn, you're clearly the smartest conservative I've ever met. Okay. I hope that's not recorded. I hope that's not recorded. Out of top of that one, yeah. Laura, are you able to get off mute? Can you hear me? Yes, we can. So, this is Laura Thaler, who's our third staff member on the Thriving Ecosystems. Sorry that it's been difficult for me to participate more fully. I was gonna ask the OSB members since you've only got a minute left in your meeting. If you might help our pathway, think about how the concept of nature-based solutions applies to estuarine and marine settings because we've been thinking of it primarily in terms of terrestrial landscapes, where I think the static nature of them kind of makes a little bit more sense to us, but half of our pathway is supposed to be devoted to this idea of how ecosystems can be manipulated as part of nature-based solutions. And if you know of high priority actions that are gonna need to take place in the open ocean and what those might be, you could maybe write some ideas down and give them to April, just to help us kind of think about those issues, because none of the three of us probably are experts on any of the ocean types of solutions. And I don't wanna throw out words like mangroves and coastal reefs and that, I don't know enough about it to be useful. So if you have ideas about nature-based solutions and oceanic settings, we'd really like to hear about them and what role you think they might play in the near future. Okay, so we have three more hands up and we do have to adjourn soon. So could you make your comments quick, Tom, maybe? So I just need to defend fishery science in general. We do a pretty good job communicating uncertainty. The whole management framework is built around us communicating uncertainty. And I think when you do it consistently, the stakeholders begin to understand and appreciate the limits to knowledge that drive the limits to their action. So it's not just about the scientists communicating, it's as much as anything about the policy framework within which those decisions are made accepting uncertainty. And then very quickly, if you want a nature-based solution, drive 50 miles south and east and look at the number of oysters that have been thrown in the Chesapeake Bay. Okay, so maybe, let's see, Dan, did you have a comment, a quick comment and then Galen will get the last word. Yeah, Paul put in a thing about one of the problems our ability to assess risk as people. I was gonna say virtually the same thing is communicating uncertainty. I'm not sure that's our problem because no matter how we communicate it, most people don't fundamentally, people don't know how to assess uncertainty because as people, we're not looking at assessing risk. We are. And then the other, to me, what is the most frustrating thing in terms of how do we communicate climate change? Look what happened to COVID. I mean, there couldn't have been any more obvious risk assessment things and how well did we as a society deal with that? So that to me frustrates it. We couldn't even do a good job with COVID. How the hell are we gonna do with climate change? Okay, Galen, you get to end us on maybe a more upbeat note. Yeah, I was just gonna respond about the request on nature-based solutions in the ocean. I think the first thing to remember is that the ocean already takes up 25% of our annual emissions and that background carbon sink is poorly quantified and we don't have a really good handle on that. And therefore, if we think about going out manipulating the ocean, which is a pretty crazy idea given the huge uncertainty of how we could measure and understand it, the idea of getting to additionality with some company going out there and doing whatever is pretty far-fetched at this time. So work is ongoing. You know, of course, there was a National Academy report. It's a big active area in chemical oceanography right now and I am talking about the open ocean, blue ocean, not the coastal side because that's where most of the carbon goes anyways. So there's a lot going on but it is kind of a wild west right now and people try to sell you snake oil and I think the scientific community is trying to catch up. So I don't know where that leaves y'all's activities but there are people on the board here who are interested in it. So I'll just leave it at that. Okay, thank you, Galen. And thank you to April for coming down here and for Laura and Robin for joining from their travels. So I really appreciate it and I think there's no shortage of interest on the board. So I think this will be an ongoing conversation that we'll be having. So thank you very much. So we're going to adjourn the meeting but I'm gonna ask the board members to come back. And so for those of you who are calling in, Safa will send you the Zoom link for calling in. So we'll take maybe a 10 minute break. That sound good? Okay, thank you again everyone and really enjoyed having so many active participants today.