 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. The morning of October 29th, 1988, the University of Hawaii's research vessel Moana Wave sets sail embarking on the very first oceanographic research expedition of the Hawaii Ocean Time Series program, often referred to by its acronym HOT. This program was developed by researchers in the newly created School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. Roger Lucas and David Carl, professors in the Department of Oceanography, spearheaded this effort and led the first expedition to Station Aloha. Located 60 nautical miles to the north of the island of Oahu, Hawaii, Station Aloha lies in the open ocean in the largest ecosystem on the planet, the North Pacific subtropical gyre. The primary objective of the HOT program was to obtain a long term time series to provide a comprehensive description of the physical and biogeochemical parameters of the ocean at a location characteristic of the gyre. All right, welcome back to Think Tech and research in Manoa, we have a special show so much so that I think I'm getting a little emotional about it. That's Dave Carl over there, the director of Seymour, the center for my Probuloceanography research and education, next to him is Angelique White and she is going to be running, maybe already running the Station Aloha program HOT, that's not the Opera Theater. It's not, I am. It's the Hawaii Ocean Time Series, okay, 100 miles north of Oahu. Welcome to the show Dave. Well Jay, it's great to be back at Think Tech Hawaii and be part of your great gig down here at Pioneer Plaza. Thank you Dave. Thank you for always supporting us for so many years. Angelique, you're a professor of oceanography and what is your role in HOT? I am slated to take over as lead principal investigator for the Hawaiian Ocean Time Series program, which I have said is kind of like taking over the New England Patriots from Tom Brady. It's an impossible task, so we're in a transition period where I'm really learning more about the program from those that have worked with this amazing research institution here at UH Minoas for 30 years now. 30 years today, as a matter of fact, October 30th, 1988, Dave had an idea in his head and he made it happen 30 years ago. That's right, it actually predates the date that we established the Station. It took about four years actually to think about how to design and implement a time series program like HOT and it involved a great number of people and a number of research symposia and workshops. Roger Lucas and I, Roger, my colleague at the University of Hawaii, a physical oceanographer and myself, a biologist and biogeochemist, put proposals in about 1987 to establish the Station Aloha, which, as you said, is 100 kilometers due north of Kahuku Point on Oahu, Hawaii, and we deployed there on October 30th, 1988 to actually physically start the time series and at that time we thought we might have a five-year run, maybe a decade at most and here we are 30 years later with an ongoing program that's funded for another five years with new leadership succession and a large number of scientific achievements behind us. So it's kind of a time for celebration but a time for keeping up the hard work that we've become accustomed to. It's great, 30 years is such a, it's fabulous. But Hawaii Ocean Time Series, what is it, Time Series? I'll tell you what I think it is. You study things out there. You study, you make a graph of various measurements and you do it over time. Is it that simple? It's that simple. You know, the earth is constantly changing. The ocean is constantly in motion. The atmosphere is changing as we know. There's carbon dioxide building up in our atmosphere. The ocean is a little bit opaque to change. We don't recognize change because the change is very subtle. So in order to make measurements and to be able to pick out systematic change from the background variability, you need to study a system time and time again. We've known that from Time Series on in terrestrial environments. You might need 30, 40, 50 years before you see a change in climate or in our case in ocean climate. So we are basically establishing the baseline. We didn't know how long it would take to get a sense of the mean condition of the ocean out at Station Aloha. But now we know, looking back, it probably took about a decade to be able to start resolving seasonal changes from the noise in the system. And now we've got very robust seasonal climatologies, we call them, the mean condition by month of the open ocean. And now we can start to look at the effects of humankind, changes in climate, changes in warming, changes in acidification, and these are things that have come out of our program. Just dawning on me that you have seen in measuring these over time, the climate change metrics, you've seen climate change develop over the past 30 years, you've seen a lot that way. Yeah, we have. And so the program actually has another major mission in that's education and training. And that's where my colleague, Angelique White, comes in. She is going to inherit the leadership of this program. And she has earned that because she's been involved in the program for many years, and we can ask her a little bit about that maybe right now, or maybe when we start the segment of the show on the future, because she is really the future. But maybe we can ask her to tell us a little bit about where she fit into this program, how many years she's been involved, in what role she's been involved. Yeah, let me ask you that. You've been involved in the program, what role have you had? And your line is, funny you should ask. Funny you should ask. Yes. I'm one of hundreds that have been involved in the program, both as a student. I was at Oregon State University, and Dave's my scientific grandpa. He was the advisor of my advisor. So I had just the incredible opportunity to come to Hawaii and to be a part of a very small part of Station Aloha, but conducting research both with the Center for Microbial Ocean Research and Education, and with HOT, as a graduate student. And then I was a postdoc. You were out on that ship a lot. I was out on the ships, yes. By and large for the sort of sister program at the time, which was Seymour, which was a science and technology center. And then I was a postdoc, and then I was a principal investigator and part of the Seymour project. So I've been working at this game, learning from Dave for decades now. So it's really a thrill to be one of the many that has been able to see these discoveries as we've been going along in the last few decades, because HOT really is responsible for a lion's share of our understanding of how the open ocean works. Where's all this stand up in a global landscape? How famous is it when Dave is put together here? How famous is it in Oregon and elsewhere? It's hot. It's hot news. It is the benchmark for open ocean time series. I mean, Dave has already brought up the Bermude Atlantic time series as the sister time series in Atlantic. They were begun on the same day, so happy birthday to both of them. Thirty years. Thirty years, I know. And that's a young time series, because as Dave's already brought up, we're just now starting to see the variability of the system. We're just now starting to see some of these properties change in response to the reign of humans on this planet. So it is an exciting time. We've characterized the seasonal cycles. We know what a day in the life of some of these microbes are. We know how they're structured vertically in the water column. And now we can start to ask these bigger questions of how humans and how larger time scales are impacting the change in these systems. So what's a principal investigator in this context? The joy of having the ability to write the proposal, to write the renewal grants, to organize some of the allocation of materials and supplies and personnel. So it's the oversight of the project, but the real fun part is actually being involved in the science, right? So getting to have a hands-on role and going to see, understanding how you can take these careful long-term measurements and assemble them into new elements of our understanding of how the microbial ocean works. The principal investigator, at least in starting the program back when, how did this decide, right, what were the worthy projects? And you sent me a copy of, gee, a big article that is, that was released, what, today? Limnology and Oceanography, which is a professional, I mean, a scientific journal. So I guess the first thing I want to know is what is limnology? Yeah. Okay. Limnology and Oceanography. These are the two parent disciplines of aquatic sciences. Limnology is freshwater. Limnology is saltwater. And many scientists in this organization, this is a professional society called the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography abbreviated ASLO. And this is probably a 20,000-person society worldwide that sponsors meetings and has a journal called Limnology and Oceanography. As you mentioned earlier today, a virtual issue called Station Aloha, a 30th anniversary, was released. This was a reprinting of some of the seminal scientific papers, some of the benchmark discoveries and achievements that we've made over the last 30 years. It certainly doesn't include all of the information, because we've got nearly 700 scientific papers that describe various characteristics and features of Station Aloha. But this is a collection specifically from this, that were published originally in this journal, which is one of the premier journals in our discipline. So we're very proud of that, and it's a very large swath of articles, everything from microbes to fish, everything from theory to models, scientific models on how the system works. And we've divided it up into a bunch of subsections and have authors from around the world. So this is not just a local thing, it's not just a Hawaii-based center of excellence, it's a global enterprise, and you had asked Angelique a little bit earlier about the role of a principal investigator, and it's really leadership, decision-making, the buck stops there with the principal investigator. If anything good happens, you're responsible, and if anything bad happens, you're responsible. And so far everything that has happened in Station Aloha has been good. We've had several principal investigators over the years, Roger Lucas, myself, Matthew Church, and now Angelique White will take over next August of 2019 as literally the lead principal investigator of the program. So there's only been a few, but we've had a lot of people come out to Station Aloha. We've had nearly 900 scientists, students, technicians, post-docs, volunteers, poets, reporters. We've had a whole swath of society come out there, but when you think about it, that's not really a large number of people considering the fact that more people have probably been to the South Pole than have been to Station Aloha. So we would like to open the door and make sure that people know that we go out to sea once a month for four days, and we always have empty bursts, empty sleeping quarters for volunteers, especially for students or for retired people, for taxpayers, for anybody who really wants to learn more about the work we're doing. And in fact, Jay, I know you haven't been to Station Aloha, but we'd like to take you there in a short set of videos. Is that okay? Yeah, let's do that now. Okay, let's go leaving port from our port in downtown Honolulu. We have had several marine operations centers in history. This happens to be Pier 45, and that's our flagship, the Kila Moana, which is a Navy-owned ship, and we operate it on a charter party agreement from the U.S. Navy. We be in the University of Hawaii. So here it is across from the Mattson Docks, and we're getting ready to deploy. We're walking up the gangway with a few last-minute items. We've already loaded the ship, and now we're leaving from Pier 45, coming around Aloha Tower, and out the shipping channel. So this is the main channel coming into Honolulu. So now we've rounded Kahe Point on our way to Station Aloha. You can see the Koulaos in the background, the Wai-Nai Coast. It's always a beautiful trip going out there. We always do it in the daytime because we arrange the cruises so that we leave at eight in the morning, and it roughly takes 12 hours to get to Station Aloha. So on the way out there, we make last-minute preparations. We have an escort with the dolphins, and we're heading out there to Station Aloha. Once you turn the corner, though, around Kahe and Kaheina Point, the weather often gets a lot worse, and here we are beating into the weather because we're actually going upwind usually against the trades. And we get to Station Aloha. If we could take a look here, we arrive there at night and we deploy some experiments right off the bat. This is an experiment to measure the rate of photosynthesis. So we have to put this out on a drifting array out at roughly 3, 4 o'clock in the morning before sunrise, and here we are picking it up late in the day that same day. So we leave it out for 12 hours to measure photosynthesis. This is one of the experiments we've been doing for 30 years to measure the rate at which phytoplankton produce carbon, and here we are right at sunset, taking our experiment off of the... Here's another experiment we do. This is an experiment called the sediment trap array, and this is an experiment to collect sinking particles, which is super important in the ocean. We put that out for three days and pick it up at the end of our deployment period. Again, bringing it on board, and successfully on board. We've only lost this a couple times in over 300 deployments. So this is a very important data set that's used to measure the amount of carbon that's sequestered by the ocean. And these are the experiments coming off of our framework here, and then we take them into the lab and process them afterwards. This experiment has been going on, as I say, for 30 years, and we found that the climatology of particle flux has a seasonality, but it also has an interannual variability. This is another experiment. This one stays down for a year, and this is a very large bottom-mort experiment that we put out. Now this is the workhorse of a hot cruise. This is called the CTD, Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth. This array of open bottles we send down with these bottles in the open position, and this goes underwater on this cable that you see in the foreground. The cable is a conducting cable, which means you can send electronic signals down and allow it to catch a water sample at any depth from the surface all the way down to the seabed at 4,800 meters, and we sample the entire depth of the water column on every hot cruise. This instrument also has a series of sensors that measures temperature, conductivity, which is a measurement of the salinity. It has oxygen sensors, sensors for inherent optical properties, such as absorption and particle scattering. It also measures the fluorescence of the water. You can see the bottles being tripped sequentially there. So by the time this array is recovered, after about 1 to 3 hours, depending on what depth you go to, you have this beautiful water sample from all the depths of the ocean. And we use this for downstream analyses in the lab. We filter this water for particles. We analyze it for soluble materials. We do genomics on it. We filter and measure the DNA content, giving us an indication of the types of organisms that are there. We measure the physics, the physical properties of the water column, and here it is coming on board. You can see that this is a very dangerous operation. We do it very safely, of course. We've never had an accident, but you can see that there's a lot of room here for things to go wrong. This is a very heavy array. We're bringing it back with the crane and with the A-frame, and we have tag lines. Those two people on the side are the people guiding it to the platform. Once it's firmly delivered to the ship, we bring it back into a hangar. You'll see that in a second. It's on a movable platform. We bring it into a covered area. So we get it out of the inclement weather and the sunlight, and we start sampling it. And here it's like a mad fury to get the samples from all depths of the world ocean to take it into the laboratories aboard the ship to make various measurements of the biology, the biogeochemistry, and the physical properties of the seawater. And we've been doing this month after month since October 1988. Here you see a few of the—now we're in the internal laboratories of the vessel, where we filter the sample and collect waters for other purposes. This takes a team of dedicated scientists. We typically sail with anywhere between 15 and 20 scientists on every hot cruise. Everybody has a different station they work at. And that's it for going to Station Aloha. We're safely back now in the studio here at Pioneer Plaza at I think Tecawaii. But that's a rough idea of what we do. Every month at Station Aloha and Jay, you're cordially invited to join us on one of the future hot cruises. I have that on tape now. That's Dave Carl, eventually quite, from the Hawaiian Ocean Time series, which is having its 30th anniversary today, and we're going to talk more about that right after this break. For more than 100 years, American Humane Association has been teaching kids to be kind to animals. Because in our homes, on the farms, on the silver screen, and wildlife conservation caring for the world's vanishing creatures. But we can't do it alone. Visit kindness100.org to find ways to teach kids how they can make a more caring, compassionate, and humane world for all of us. It's so great to be with you guys, Dave Carl, Angelique White. This must be so exciting for you. You spend a fair amount of time on these ships already. So you know the story, but now you emerge as a principal investigator. So what is your view of that? We saw some of the instruments that are being used in those four-day visits to the ocean. We saw, well, we certainly got the idea that this whole project embraces the ocean in every way that science can think of. I think this is an ever-evolving program. So as new technology has emerged, they've been embraced by the program, the Wine Ocean Time series, both here at UH Manoa, and internationally serves as a platform for other researchers to come and test new instruments and test new approaches and really see if we can start to understand the microbial world in new and exciting ways. And I think we've got a video of sort of a classical measure of some of these aspects of microbial oceanography that I could walk you through coming up. Yeah, let's see if we can find that. That would be great if we had that. Ah, is that it? Right, yeah. So, you know, the old-school nettoes, so since the time of Darwin, the easiest way to look at the diversity of microbes, since they're too small for you to see with the naked eye, is to tow a fine mesh through the water, and that's what you see here. So after 15 to 20 minutes, what looked like it was pristine, beautiful blue, maybe devoid of biomass, actually is this rich soup of organic material with a wide array of organisms that are spending their daily lives acquiring carbon to build new biomass than out of the kindness of their microbial hearts sink to the bottom of the ocean floor and get caught in Dave's particle interceptor traps. So we're combining these sort of older classical technologies with new automated imaging technologies to capture the morphological and taxonomic diversity of the base of the food web. Okay, morphological? Different shapes and sizes. We might even have a few pictures of organisms we could show. Taxonomic? Different classes of organisms. So organisms that have silica shells surrounding their bodies, organisms that have here in this photo we're looking at, nitrogen-fixing organisms, and the grazers that consume them. There's a whole range of things that you, actually I don't even know what that one is, and I think that's a part of the, I'm sure somebody does, but that's a part of the wonder of that becomes a crab. That's a face. No, it's not. Yeah, it's a juvenile crab larva. So there's an incredible variety of the shape and color and trophic roles of organisms. You have these symbiotic organisms, right? So there's a diversity that one doesn't really appreciate fully just by looking at this sort of blue endless summer of the North Pacific. Yeah, yeah. It's so interesting. It's an endless summer, and you see and expect to see, you know, blue infinitely for thousands of miles. It's really, I really like that. There are secrets there, secrets that even Captain Nemo had no idea. So, you know, can you give us a praisey on how this kind of science has developed over these 30 years? Yeah, well, Jay, this is, as Angelique said, it's an evolving discipline, oceanography as a scientific line of inquiry is about roughly 150 years old. Maybe it started with the Challenger expedition or majesty ship which went around the world and published a large number of volumes on the discoveries that were made. They actually made a port call in Honolulu, and we've got some beautiful images of King Kalakaua and his team going down to the Challenger and having lunch aboard the vessel. Take a look at that if we could. We don't have any hands over there. We have some old photos. So the Challenger at Hawaii actually played a role in the founding of the field of oceanography. Fast forward to the creation of the university in 1907, University of Hawaii. And about 1921, we turned to David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University for some advice on how to build and grow the University of Hawaii, which had just changed its name from the College of Hawaii to the University of Hawaii and building in new different programs, especially in the sciences. And Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford, was a marine scientist. So he said, look, you're sitting on a platform in the middle of the most important ocean on this planet. You should turn to the sea. You should become the place where people do oceanography. And fortunately, the fathers of our great university took that to heart. And in the 1960s, they built incredible marine research programs, especially expeditionary research programs that had large research vessels, which is what you need to get access to the sea. So since about 1965, the University of Hawaii has been operating any one of a number of a fleet of vessels. We currently have one major vessel, the Kila Moana, which you saw earlier in the show. We started the Hawaii Ocean Time Series program with a ship called the Moana Wave, which was another Navy ship that we were operating for the Navy. And the Moana Wave operated for 75 or so hot cruises through 1999 when we retired it. Its final cruise was a hot cruise. And then we had another ship called that Kaimikaio Kanaloa, the wanderer of the seas of Kanaloa, a Hawaiian word for this beautiful ship, which served us for 85 hot cruises, and we just retired it about two months ago. So our program has outlived these major research vessel assets. And we have right now a beautiful ship, a beautiful platform to work on, but we need a second one. So if anybody listening to this great show is of the means to donate support for a new research vessel, we would be all ears. OK, well, let's give them a moment to call and write and donate, who knows, maybe get some calls. We've been talking about here on Research in Manoa, the Hawaiian Ocean Time Series. And that has been, what, part one. We're now going to go to part two. So we'll take a break. This show is going to evolve into the next part two. So stand by, and you'll see some more. And you'll learn exactly how many voyages have been made to Ocean Station, Aloha.