 It's one o'clock on Tuesday the 25th of January and you are watching Science at Soast. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark. For those of you who haven't seen the first two shows in this series, Soast is the School of Ocean, Earth Science and Technology at UH Minoa, where we do lots of neat things including oceanography, which is what we're going to be hearing about today. My guest is James Allen, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the University in the Department of Oceanography. So James, welcome. It's a real pleasure to have you on board, so to speak. Hopefully we aren't on a ship, but you're on board anyway, so welcome. And you study a variety of oceanographic phenomena. So can you just tell the viewers a little bit about yourself? You're a post-doc, so what are you doing? So I study ocean color. I come from a meteorological background, so I'm used to studying just water in different forms. But one of the main things I'm working on right now is how light is affected by all the different things kind of floating around in the ocean. And so if you've ever looked at the ocean and you've seen all the different kinds of emeralds or ceruleans, just kind of these blues and greens, sometimes even yellowish-browns, even reds sometimes, that's all affected by the different things that are floating around the ocean. I can actually pop up the first slide here. And so I've chosen a few different kind of generic satellite images. And one of the major things that we're interested in learning more about ocean color is how it's affected by these microscopic algae called phytoplankton. And so they form the foundation of the ocean food web. And so I've got a couple of different images here. The top one is kind of what we call a trichodesmium bloom. And sailors would also know this as... That's the top right where we've got that sort of brown blob with yellow hairs coming from it, right? Yes. Sea sawdust. Sea sawdust. Yeah. So these tiny microscopic organisms can bloom in such large quantities that we can actually see them from space. And so they're quite important phytoplankton to our global ecosystem. I think every other breath that you take is the oxygen comes from phytoplankton specifically. And then the other half comes from trees, land, plants, and everything. I was going to ask you, why should anybody in the street worry about ocean color? And you're starting to hint. If we breathe air, then we might want to think about it, right? Every other breath comes from these things. Is there anything else which ocean biota are important for? So we have the carbon cycle. They're known for pulling in excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And then they do photosynthesis with it. And then they either grow or die, get eaten and then sink to the bottom of the ocean or sometimes they kind of get re-suspended into the surface of the ocean. So they're a really good source of taking that excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and just shunting it down to the bottom of the ocean. OK, so some of our viewers may have heard the word carbon sequestration, right? So this is a naturally occurring way of putting CO2 into the bottom of the ocean. So it sounds like they're pretty important. It's like, oh, yes. Quite important. And you showed us a couple of images taken by satellites of different colors. And the ones on the left, they are actually the ocean. Is that correct? Yes, these are the views from a satellite flying over about 438 miles altitude. OK. And when I go swimming at Kaimukia, it doesn't look like that. Why are the colors so garishly bright? Oh, well, we have this way of processing, doing kind of these math with colors to sort of highlight the different aspects of the ocean biology that are happening in the water. So we'll focus more on the blues and the greens and kind of divide blue by green. And that can tell us how much of a pigment called chlorophyll is in the water. And so we'll know chlorophyll as the thing that helps us do photo. Well, not us, but plants do photosynthesis. OK. Nick, and presumably, is it the whole ocean surface? Or do we just sit in tropical environments like Hawaii? Can you make measurements of color anywhere else around the planet? Anywhere that there's no clouds. So clouds sometimes get in my way. That's good. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's weird. I used to love clouds, but now I'm just like, you're in my way right now. So. And I think in your second slide, you actually have a map which shows some of the global distribution. And can you talk the the audience through this? Clearly, the continents are the black blobs. So we'll ignore those for the time being. They're not as important. What would someone like yourself see in this kind of image? So I guess the biggest thing that I can see immediately is the dark blues kind of correspond to these very low chlorophyll values. And then you as you get into the bright greens and oranges and reds, that's where you have a super high concentration of chlorophyll or the amount of pigment or phytoplankton that are floating around in the surface of the ocean. And so you can kind of see the bottom. There's the scale bar and we don't worry about the actual values. But blue is low and red is high. Correct. Yes. Yes. OK. And so you can kind of see like where we kind of imagine the deserts of land, these deserts of the ocean kind of line up with that. So you have the what we call the gyre. So those are kinds of the deserts of the ocean. And Hawaii is situated right in the middle of a North Pacific subtropical gyre. It's a mouthful, but it's a very important part of the world, the global ocean. I want why are gyres important, is it? So we have this we're situated really nicely to where we can actually leave these leave this island and go a very short trek north. And we're immediately just in the middle of the ocean. And since they take up such a large amount of the global ocean, any little change that happens in them is kind of exponentially increased into global dynamic cycles. So it really is important to kind of understand how these gyres are changing over time. And is that why you're at Soarstone in the Department of Oceanography? Yes, this is the perfect place to study this. We have state of the art facilities that give me everything I need to get all this ocean color measured. All right. And I believe you're a member of Seymour. Is that correct? Or what does Seymour stand for? What do they Seymour is the center of microbial oceanography? Oof, you caught me on research and education. And education. Yes. OK. So, you know, they train students. They do cutting edge science. Primarily on ocean color phenomena or anything else. I'm kind of a specialized person for ocean color, but we do have a lot of biology and chemistry and physics going on here. And it's such a nice field being an oceanography because there's so many people working on these vastly different things. And we all come together to this multidisciplinary. Here is how the earth is changing over time. And it takes a lot of different people to come in together for that. Sounds perfect. And you showed us that satellite image of the colored ocean. Do you get that kind of data set every day or every year? Or what sort of snapshot in time does this represent? On the order of about every two days, I can get a more or less complete ish image of the entire ocean. And I can actually show you the next slide, which has orbit cycles of one of our satellites. So this one hasn't been launched yet. It's got a couple of years before it gets launched. But it revolves around the earth every twenty two hour or every 90 minutes, really, it takes from pole to pole. It rotates around the earth and we can kind of scan the ocean and see how it's changing over time. So so in the left hand below, it looks like we've just collected data over Africa. Yes. And am I correct in thinking that, you know, as orbits two and three progress, we're seeing part of the Atlantic. Yes, and it's OK. Slowly rotating over the or the earth is rotating underneath it. Got you. Yes. So the satellite is in a fixed orbit around the earth, but then the earth, because it rotates every 24 hours, presumably. We have some satellites that stay in one place, but we have this one that just spins top to down, top to down. OK, are you a satellite person or do you just look at the data? I do a combination of satellite and field studies. And so one of the things that one of the most important parts of our field or at least ocean optics, ocean color is ground proofing. We need to make sure that the satellites are seeing exactly what we're telling them that they're seeing. And so that takes a lot of validation and science just general for from the ground. Does that mean you're calibrating your instrument so that when you measure blueness of the ocean, you know what blueness means or something like that? Is that it? Yes. OK. OK. And then. You do fieldwork. Yes. What kind of fieldwork? You know, I would always go stomping around the ground in my fieldwork, but do you go swimming? Do you go on a ship or what sort of things do you do? I'm not the best swimmer, but I do go on ships. So I can actually show the next slide here. This is a highlight. We have the this time series of observations that so has been doing since 1988. And there's these world class laboratories, both on the sea and in the labs here at Seymour, where we measure biology, chemistry, the physics, even geology aspects of the ocean. How are these changing over time? And so we have these go out every month ish for about a week. And there's the station Aloha, just about 60 miles north of Oahu. So so let's walk through. You've got three different images. Yes, let's start off with the top left. The top left, that's the map of Hawaii. And we have our little trail that takes us from where we have our RV Kila Moana, the research vessel Kila Moana in the bottom left. And it sails up to Station Aloha, which is that red point up to the north of Oahu. It might just be a little hard to see for you. But we were about, you say, 80 miles north of Haleva or somewhere like that. Yes. All right. And how long does it take to get there? Or less than a day? Less than a day. OK. And you visit there once a year or once every month? Once every month, which is as often as we can, which is as often. OK. And so in the bottom left hand image, yes, that is an impressive ship. What is that? That is the back of the Kila Moana. So we're kind of looking at the green, what we call the A frame. And it's used to deploy these massive packages over the back of the ship. And they go down to whatever depth you're interested in and collect samples for us. I'm backing up again. Kila Moana, who owns it? Who, you know, decides where it's going to go? What kind of ship is it? Is it a Navy ship or Coast Guards or what? It's a university vessel. I'm actually not quite sure why. Yes, University of Hawaii. OK. I'm not sure the particulars of the ownership. OK, but that's impressive that the university has an ocean going vessel to conduct this kind of research, right? Yes. And the fact that we can go out to the middle of the ocean within a day. It's just how many people does it carry? Roughly, I mean, is it a dozen or a hundred or I'd say around 20 to 30? 30 people. All apart from the crew, they're all scientists. I mean, we're excited about getting students. Oh, yes. The next generation. Do they take students in? 10 to 15 crew and the rest are all scientists. And we also have some volunteers that come out and help us every month. OK. So you want to get your feet wet? Every month, Kila Moana goes out to this place called Station Aloha. And it sounds like you you drop things off the back of the boat to me. Is that correct? In a nutshell, yeah. In a nutshell, OK. I could actually show the next slide. There's kind of this. Well, for my field, I like to call it the the four the four step process. How do you get from things in the ocean to satellites? And so some of the specialized equipment that we deploy off of the off of the ship itself, we can kind of see on the left side, there's two major things. On the bottom, you'll see this carousel of all these different bottles. And we call that a rosette. And so that package gets deployed off the A frame that we saw in the previous picture. And it goes down to you can take it down to the bottom of the ocean. And on the way up, it closes each of those bottles at very specific depths. So now we can say, oh, I've got four thousand meter water. I will now do chemistry and biology on that. Oh, here's three thousand meters. Here's five hundred meters. And we have these specific depths that we track over time. Over the course of 30 years. So we have and for non metricated viewers, roughly the water depth is about two and a half miles, two and a half miles. Yes. Yeah. Two and a half miles. So you've got a long cable and then you lower it all the way to the bottom. And then on the way up, you're collecting your data. Yes, a lot of data. That we it's it's nice kind of seeing this rosette come off, land on deck and like a dozen different scientists for all circling around with our bottles like, oh, we got to get this water. Oh, that's cold water must come from the bottom. I can. Interesting. And then the middle image, what does that show? So that is one of our optics packages. So we have a whole bunch of different ways of measuring how light interacts with the water. And so it's basically a lot of flashy lights, LEDs that blast blues and oranges and greens. And we use that to shine on the water, which has all these different phytoplankton or detritus or sand, sediments, all kinds of things in there. The light bounces off of that. And then we record how much of that actually comes back into the sensor. And so we can use that to kind of characterize what color is everything floating in the ocean. And we have another instrument I like to call it the bindi lasers. We just fire lasers in the water, well, in a in a tube in the water. And depending on how big those particles are, if they're like microns in size. So think of a millimeter or a centimeter, a couple of or the magnitude smaller than a tenth of an inch. Oh, yeah, I need a microscope to look at these things. And so how big they are, if they're super small versus a little bit bigger than that, still microscopic, it actually bends the laser a different way. And so we can actually see how big these particles are floating in the water, like how healthy these phytoplankton could be or anything like that. And measure of the instruments that the middle one and the one on the right hand side are more specifically here towards ocean color. Yes, because presumably the color that you see with satellites is only say the top 100 meters or if you think if that OK, OK. So in your particular study, if you're calibrating or getting some idea of what the satellites are seeing, you're interested in the topmost part of the ocean. Yes, it's conveniently the most well lit part. So most of the photosynthesis will be happening up there. OK, now remind the viewers, James, why is this important? You mentioned breathing, but presumably it's something to do with ocean productivity at some level, correct? Yes. So phytoplankton form based the foundation of the food web in the ocean. And if we can keep track of how these might be changing over the course of different seasons of the year or even from year to year as we have these giant teleconnections coming through and changing or like El Nino or even climate change, things like that. If we can monitor how these phytoplankton are changing over time, we can kind of see how the productivity, the amount of carbon being sequestered from the from the atmosphere over time. It forms the foundation of the food web. So everything above us, things that eat the phytoplankton, things that eat those and up the food chain, the fish. Fisheries. Some of our viewers may have heard of ocean acidification, for example, or the fact that a lot of the heat is being taken up by the the oceans. Are these the kind of topics that studying ocean colour or the biota can give us information on? The biology, definitely the biology and chemistry. So I'm just one facet of oceanography and there's all kinds of scientists here that are working on these problems. And I help out as I can. Oh, of course. But I'm intrigued. You say that you go to station Aloha every month. Is there a problem that you're collecting data at the same time of the month? You know, sort of I worry about jellyfish coming on shore. They are almost a monthly phenomena. But, you know, would it not be better to make measurements? Say, throughout the day for a week. And then sort of you can look at the temporal variations of colour because the satellites come over in the morning, right? They come over between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. So and the the state at station Aloha, we go out for a week at a time. So there's five to seven days of measurements being made, hopefully with not jellyfish all the time. Yeah, quite a challenge, quite a challenge. Nothing like a rosette with goop. And you're like, what is this? Oh, it's stinging me. Can't sample that. But you said that you started off life as a meteorologist. Tell us a bit more about your career path and what you hope to do. You know, obviously become a tenured faculty member here. But, you know, what what is your career path? How do other students follow what you're doing? Well, I just got my undergrad was in geography. So everybody likes to think of it as the field of maps, which was they were important, but it was basically the attention of all the different sciences and how they kind of convalescent to earth sciences in general. And so I started off, oh, I'm interested in climate change. How do I do that? Oh, let's let's study the weather. How does weather change? And then I got interested in, OK, well, the weather is cool. Satellites are cool. What else are satellites looking at? Oh, there you have this massive campaign in NASA studying the ocean. And NASA and NOAA are using all these kinds of measurements to understand how the oceans are changing. OK, so how do I get with that? Well, I don't really want to study models and be a computer junkie the entire time. So how do I actually get my feet wet, literally? And I basically went to grad school to study generic just oceanography in general. And then from then I kind of fell in love with just ocean color and how we can do math with colors. And it's just such an easy way to do outreach for people because you do this inherently with your eyes all the time. You look at the beach and you're like, wow, that's really pretty. It's very brightly colored. There's probably a lot of sand that's very shallow in there. Or next time I go and I see this green water mass, oh, there's probably a lot of stuff living in there. And we're just putting math to that and seeing how it changes. So are you a mathematician? Do you stare through a microscope? And you said you want to swim, but what kind of skill sets either a college or grad school? Did you have to develop to be where you are right now? So I wouldn't say that I'm much of a microscope person. I'm kind of messy in the lab. You can ask my boss. She got on to me for being messy in the lab last time. So but I mostly I do a lot of math and there's some aspects of programming that you have to do. You have to do what we call scientific programming. And so that's when you take all these like satellites put out so much data. We have a lot of data coming off of these cruises coming up every month. And we have these massive campaigns giving us even more data every once in a while. And so we have so much so many numbers to crunch. And so you kind of have to use Excel on steroids, basically, to get this going. And so programming, scientific programming is kind of the way to go for that. It's basically problem solving with computers. How do I load all this data and make it make sense? And it looked like you were throwing some good toys over the side of the ship. There's an engineer have a role to play in this or designing the instruments. Yeah, what would you like to some of our best friends are the technicians that come with us on the on the ships, because we are really good at breaking things and they're really good at fixing literally anything that we throw at them. So is this the the sort of the complete picture on how you'd study ocean color? Or what would the next step be as you develop into a faculty member and have your own program? Where do you see the measurement of ocean color progressing over the years? It's such a developing field. We have so many different kinds of measurements coming online that we didn't even really think possible 30 years ago. We have a satellite that NASA is launching in a couple of years. I sort of mentioned it's called PACE, the Plankton aerosols and cloud ecosystem satellite. And it's going to give us basically a whole new dimension of color where we have polarized light. So if you ever have those fancy sunglasses that help protect you from the glint flashing off of the water, we basically have that to kind of give us more information on the type of light that's leaving the ocean, not just the color. So we should follow the viewers point out NASA is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. And I think you also mentioned NELA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration as well. So that's a lot of jargon in this. OK, so polarized light, maybe. How about collecting data at different times of the day? Or other different ways of approaching the problem? We can even do optics at night. That middle image that I showed a few slides ago where we showed the package with all the instruments, I can send that any time of the day and still get really good measurements. The one on the right, the sort of science triangle, missile looking thing that just sinks down in the water, but it needs to be lit up by the sun. And so that one's still just time of solar noon when the sun is as close to overhead as we can get. Now, it's sort of getting towards the end of the show. You've told us that you're essentially monitoring ocean color. Is it good news or bad news? Do I dash out and buy all the fish I can right now? Or I wouldn't do that for years to come. So the ocean is changing and we have a lot of really good scientists that are working on solutions to the biggest problems that are facing us today. I mean, we have ocean acidification, we have climate change going on. And yes, we have a lot of different individual efforts that we can focus on, like I can start recycling more. But really, it just takes a bunch of us banding together and getting these massive campaigns done. Like, hey, can we get this company to stop using so much plastic? Or we have all these companies. I think there's a couple of dozen that are mostly responsible for most of the carbon emissions on the planet. So I think it really takes us kind of understanding how our world is changing, why is it changing and then kind of moving into the solution. So how do we actually make the impact to make it stop changing for the worse? The bottom line would be ocean color is just one of the many parameters that scientists like yourself at SOAST and around the country are actually studying to document the change. Yes, you're not going to solve climate change just by changing ocean color. But it sounds like it's an important indicator of what's going on. Yes, and it's just a facet of the field of oceanography in general and in the Earth sciences period, because oceans are just a part of the Earth system that we study. And so it takes a lot of different scientists to come together, just like it's going to take all of us to come together. Well, good words, James, we're almost at the end of the show. I want to thank you very much and remind the viewers. Our guest today has been James Allen. He's a post-op for Research Fellow in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii. So that's it for this week's show. Next week we'll be going perhaps to the moon. One of the other students will be talking about her own interest in the lunar surface, so thank you again for watching and we'll see you again next week. Goodbye.