 Hi, my name is Ivona. I am an oceanographer at NASA Goddard and... Hi, I'm James Fox. I'm an oceanographer at Oregon State University. So both of us kind of work in NASA funded projects that study ocean, specifically to do with ocean life and the way the carbon flows in the ocean. So we kind of met on a project that we're working together. It's called Exports. It's a large field campaign that is looking at how does carbon that exists in the surface of the ocean transport into deeper ocean? Yeah, I mainly study phytoplankton. So those are the kind of small plants that live in the surface of the ocean. And I look at how much photosynthesis they do. You have something awesome to share with people that are home stuck as we are, that they can use to kind of learn about carbon cycle. So take it away. What I did is I created a game that people can play that kind of takes you through that journey in a kind of shoots and ladders way. And there are a few different activities that you can do to kind of learn more about the different steps that that carbon can take and about the different organisms that are involved in the transport of the carbon. But what we can do today is we can kind of go through ways that you can use this at home and talk through the different steps of the game. And the rules that explain all the different steps and all the different activities are on the second page. So we start here. We start with the phytoplankton that live in the photoclare. That's the part of the ocean that has sunlight in. And that's the part of the ocean that we see from the satellites. And from biological perspective, you know, from you and me at least it's the most important part because that's where the carbon enters into the biological sphere of the ocean. That's where the phytoplankton, the teeny tiny algae, the teeny tiny plants that we study live. And thanks to the presence of photosynthesis and the presence of sunlight, they're capable of converting this carbon dioxide into the organic carbon and then enters into these different portions of the oceanic food web and then they transfer down towards the twilight zone. So that kind of like starts us up there in the surface of the ocean. So if we would jump to activity one, what would happen there? Okay. So activity one is focused very much on the phytoplankton. So one of the amazing things about phytoplankton that even though these organisms are microscopic, you really need a microscope to be able to see them because they're only a few micrometers, a lot of them. They are so abundant in the in the surface of the ocean that we can actually see them from space. So the first activity is a bit more of a discussion activity or I want to talk with the participants about how they think that we can actually see these microscopic organisms from space using satellites. And that's obviously something that you're very much involved with. Yeah. And this is actually something cool that people can go and explore. Like if they go on NASA website and just wander off to the ocean color website, there's so many activities they can learn about how we see things from space. I mean, these are plants and think about what color the plants are green. So similar to the plants of land, there are plants in the ocean have this green pigment called chlorophyll, which allows them to convert this carbon dioxide to the organic form. And, you know, if you add something green in the water, I started going to start making greener. That's what we see from space. It's our first step to seeing things from space, just to detect the greenness of the ocean. And from there on, we can see how much of these phytoplankton is there in the ocean. Exactly. And to jump back to this other page. So one great resource that NASA has put together as part of their promotion for the PACE program, which is a new satellite that we're going up soon. It's a new mission. You can do a quiz online and you can decide or you can take the quiz and you'll find out what kind of phytoplankton you are. Because there are thousands of different phytoplankton in a number of different taxonomic groups, and they all have kind of different characteristics. So you can go there and you can learn what different phytoplankton there are and which one is most like you in terms of its behavior and its characteristics. Okay. So the second activity, here we talk about what they need to photosynthesize. So we're really interested in photosynthesis, which is that process that I talked about earlier, because that's where they capture that carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is really important for taking it, that first step to taking it down into the deep sea. And light is a really, really important component of photosynthesis. We talk about how light will change as you go deeper into the water column. So there are a couple of different ways it will change. It will become, it will start to attenuate, it will start to disappear as you get deeper. That's why you move from the photoclare, that's the area of the ocean right at the top, that's lots of sunlight where the phytoplankton live, down to the twilight zone where you have very, very low levels of light. Another thing that Ivana will probably know much more about is the different wavelengths of light and how those will change as they go deeper into the water column. Yeah, because it's not only just, you know, complete, it's not just the disappearance of the amount of light as you go deeper in the ocean, but it's also a type of white, the color of the light starts changing. Certain wavelengths, certain colors of that sunlight is going to disappear, they're going to be attenuated on the surface of the ocean as you go deeper, only some will be penetrating. Mostly blue and red gets attenuated, gets disappeared, disappeared easier in the surface and then only the green stays down there and lower. There are a number of different boxes that you can land on that, you know, if you remember Schuets and Ladders, it will take you to a different part of the board. And some of them basically tell you whether you're going down in the water column, whether, you know, the organic matter that you've become, so organic matter, as Ivana explained, is once that carbon dioxide has been captured by the phytoplankton, it's locked away as a kind of solid material, organic carbon. So once it's in that state, it will either go down or it'll go up. But once you get down to here, yeah, there are a couple of different pathways that you can really take. Once you leave the voted zone and you start to enter the twilight zone, if you roll a one to three, is you can take the form of just a particulate and you start to become this thing called marine snow, which is where lots of particles start to stick together. And they form these large aggregates. And if you've ever been down into the deep sea or if you've seen videos in the deep sea, you see that it's just this vast blackness with lots of kind of white particles floating down and we call that marine snow. However, you can also get eaten by tiny animals called zooplankton. And these tiny animals, they have the ability to actually swim hundreds of meters up and down in the water column. And they can kind of give you a bit of a ride deeper down into the water column. From the perspective of some kind of like climate control and stuff like that, we really want as much as carbon to sink deep down as possible. But the thing is, there's this whole ecosystem, all these obstacles that this carbon meets along the way that it are obstructing, that actually sink deep, deep, deep down. So and twilight zone is like really very unknown portion of the ocean. That's kind of what exports is really interested about. But ultimately, you know, let's say that, you know, just the carbon wants to go down, down, down, down. And let's say that we went through your game and went through the whole twilight zone, survived all the obstacles, and we got to the deep, deep ocean. What happens then? Once the carbon is in the deep ocean, why is that important? I mean, like, what does the carbon do down there? That's important. Because once it gets down to the deep sea, it's locked away for hundreds, thousands of years. It was sink down to the sea floor, or it will become part of a global ocean current that they call the ocean conveyor belt. And then travel basically the entire breadth of the ocean, but at the very depth, you know, it may be 3000 meters. And eventually, after maybe thousands of years, that water, that deep ocean current will eventually up well. So it will come back up to the surface. And it will come back as refreshed minerals and nutrients and things like that. And then the cycle starts all over again. What satellites and NASA's satellites can see is just the stop, the light layer up in light blue, the upper portion up here. Now, the other stuff that we don't see, which are really cool parts, the stuff that we have to go on the ocean and that in from the ships are using robots and things like that, because you really want to know what portion of that carbon that was taken by the phytoplankton actually ends up where? Because if you wanted running climate models or things like that, ocean may play as a very, very important part in pulling dark carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So knowing the rough path that each of these carbon pretty much atoms take, it's really important. That's kind of what ultimately you and I want to understand. I'm going to kind of like put together the, you know, what are our guys doing together with the story of where the carbon's going to end up and which path it will take. And can we predict that in a better way?