 Well, it's five minutes past seven, so let's get started. It's a beautiful day here at the Abyss, and in fact most days here at the Abyss are beautiful. I'm going to use the speakeasy text for the beginning of this tour, and as we move along, I'm going to stop using prepared text entirely, and just voice and typed text, but I wanted to make sure that everybody got some introduction here, and I do hope that you've had a little bit of an opportunity to look around, look around at the posters here, because it'll give you some idea of the vast number of exhibits that are here on the Abyss Observatory, both on the ground and up in the sky. So the title, today we're going to do something different. In the past we have started with the tropical area. There is so much going on in the Arctic and the subarctic that today we are going to start there, and we may not even get around to the tropical area, but certainly you can come back and explore that, and we will do other tours as well. So my second life name is Delia Lake. I know many of you, but not all of you. I've known for years and years. In the solid world, my name is Linda Kelly, and I work in consulting about sustainability, and particularly in enterprise ecology, which covers a systems approach to doing responsible business. Here, I have the great privilege of being a habitat curator for the Abyss Observatory, and work with Jan in producing what you see here, and many other people as well. This is truly a team effort to make the Abyss Observatory. So welcome, everyone. We're so glad to have you here today, and as you see from the posters, there are many, many exhibits and technologies highlighted here. So please do come back as often as you can. Somebody mentioned earlier they wanted to go swimming, yeah, I do too. So yes, some of us will certainly do that today, because we want to have this as meaningful to you as possible. We will be using only the beginning introduction in preparation, and then text chat and voice. So please do interrupt with questions at any time. We may or may not get through the temperate and tropical areas, but we will do as much as we can today and plan for other tours at another time. If you like swimming, and you feel free to change into a swimming suit later, or now, or scuba, or any other such thing. So let's get walking across the bridge, and then to your left. We're standing here in front of Noah's Oceanus. Oceanus is an exploration and research ship in Second Life. We have the Oceanus always docked here at Port Canaveral in Florida. But in the other world, the solid world, she is on the second leg of a research program. And so she will be out until July 12th, and researching the deep water off North Carolina, way beyond the continental shelf. And this is an area we don't know much about. We have thought that some of the very deep water was basically vacant, and it is not at all. So if you want to follow the research, I gave a link to the Oceanus' live stream. And so you might want to copy that down. Because they have three cameras of live underwater showing what they're doing. When you return here, you might also want to walk on to the research vessel here and take a look around. But for today, we will continue our tour here. As we enter a colder area, you'll see that the vegetation is going to change to primarily conifers, so far as trees go. But I want to note that here to our right up the hill is a stand of red cedar, but one of them looks very stressed. That's because it is. That change is enabling the insects to travel further north to live through winters. And this is a really negative effect on the trees. It is stressing them significantly. Now, in front of me is a map projection. Well, actually, a series of map projections. I'm going to move ahead, but take a minute and look at the maps because that will give you an idea of the real world counterparts to what we're going to be talking about today. Yeah, it's hot here today. I mean, it's hot in the area that we are walking through as an example. It is, and I'll say this a couple of times, today in the northern part of the subarctic, today's weather forecast in most of the world is 60 Fahrenheit, 15 Celsius. This is a real, real difficulty for the plants and animals who call these areas home. Yeah, yeah. Whales are noisy this morning. Yes. Yeah. So the red circle is the area of where we are focusing today. There is land mass in the Antarctic. The majority of that, the vast majority of that is still covered with ice and people are not, researchers are living there part time, but it is not permanently inhabited. If you look around to the left side, you'll see the world's subarctic regions, and they're marked in pink, and the back just for reference, and I'll leave this set of maps here, is all of the biomes of the world. So we have chosen to focus on three of them here, the subarctic, the temperate and the tropical, but there are a number of others as well. So let's walk out a little bit further. I'll go up, but walk out to the rocky point there, and what do you see? Oops, I got stuck in a rock. Yeah. A stranded polar bear with a cub, yeah, and it's questionable whether that cub will survive. Polar bears can swim, of course. What else do you see here? Yeah, our polar bear here is pretty thin. The mother is pretty thin. For comparison, look at the grizzly on shore and cub. They're going to do okay. There's enough food for them. What about the landscape? What do you see? What kind of landscape is this? Enough salmon, yes. In fact, this grizzly mom is eyeing the salmon down below. There south, the salmon are very stressed. Right on the point here, what do you see? Right on the rocks. We have sea lions, we have seals, and way around the corner, we have a walrus. The walrus, as you will see, is on shore because there isn't enough ice. They're all being forced inland. The polar bears also are being forced onto land often these days because they can't fish on the ice floes anymore or in lots of places, in some places they can. Because of the heat, there is a fundamental breakdown in many of the old normal processes. We have very little of the multi-year ice, and that changes the whole circulation system of the Arctic and subarctic regions to only have a single-year ice, and it also doesn't support the weight or the activities of the polar bears. On both sides, where the Arctic and the warmer oceans, although for us we wouldn't consider the North Atlantic or the North Pacific warm, they have typically been warmer than the Arctic waters. Yes, there's a, this is changing the global circulation. It's changing the global circulation of the ocean water, and it's also changing the circulation in the atmosphere. Yes, yes, we have puffins. Yes, the changes are happening a lot faster than people had predicted. So in the Straits, now the Fram is in between Greenland and Europe, you know, it's warming a lot faster than the Arctic Ocean even. And the more the ice is melted, the more heat the water absorbs, and the faster it warms. That's, Maron, that's like cutting off your nose despite your face. The nature will do what nature is going to do, and that is regardless of what any humans say we should be talking about. Well, you know, yes, asteroid climate change has always happened. So if you go back to the beginnings of planet Earth, we didn't have an oxygen atmosphere even. And so over the eons, billions of years, we have had warming and cooling and warming and cooling. But what's different here is that it is warming much faster, much, much, much faster. So that the last time there were trees in the Arctic, for instance, was about 3.5 million years ago. It's a long time. We're going to get trees in the Arctic in our lifetimes. So that is much faster, and none of the plants or animals are able to adjust at the speed that this is happening. As an example, not that many years ago, the world scientists decided to build a seed tank at Svardval Island. So that's Norwegian, but it is way above the Arctic Circle. It seemed like a smart thing in recorded history that had always been very solid, very frozen, but that's not true anymore. The ground on Svardval Island is thawing. The permafrost is melting. And although the vault itself is secure, the entrance, the entry ramp has flooded with water. They've had to pump it out. And this is where all the examples of the diverse and unique seeds are stored for the world. So the multi-year ice is disappearing everywhere. And as we said, it has a lot of consequences all around. One of the things that you can't see is the daily vertical migration of the zooplankton. So this has a huge effect on the circulation of the oceans, and you wouldn't think that something critters that are so microscopic would have that. But it is because of the zooplankton rising up in the day and rising up and falling down that you have a lot of the circulation of nutrients here. And all of the creatures depend on that, so that as a, for instance, the gray whales, Pacific whales, that they will go for birthing to Baja California to the warm waters there. They swim in the summer up to the Arctic so that they can feed on the nutrient-rich phytoplankton, zooplankton here in the Arctic. This is having a, because the, there is an invasion of species of zooplankton and from the warmer waters, this is having an effect on the nutrition of the whales. One would, you don't think about these things, but the copepods that are native to the Arctic are fatter, heavier than the copepods that are native to the warmer waters. And so what happens is that they don't sink as far. The invaders don't sink as far and there is less circulation and less migration of nutrients from the rich bottom waters to the top. We don't know what the real effects will be of this, but as we are humanity in the developed countries putting more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere and less oxygen into the atmosphere because of cutting down forests, because of the reduced circulation in the Arctic, this is bound to have a detrimental effect on much of the Earth's life. Yes. Yes. It's that the migration, all right, so the migration patterns have changed in the oceans. With the warmer waters the prey fish are going farther north and so the sequence is out of whack. So the birthing and early feeding of many species is out of whack. The typical traditional prey species are not there in abundance at the traditional birthing spawning areas. So that's part of what has the whales hungry. That coupled with the less nutrient rich water here, so that the phytoplankton and zooplankton that are here in the Arctic are smaller. They're thinner, they're smaller, they're not as nutritious, so that eating, the larger animals have to eat a lot more. And we are seeing plastic pollution in all of the waters. So you have the microplastics up here in the Arctic waters as well. No nutrition in that. Yes. Yes, so the animals are getting diseases and stresses that they never had before and so that the evolution can't change that fast, it can't work that fast. Now, grizzlies and polar bears can intermate. There's only, they thought for a while that there were multiple examples, but there's really so far only one example of that happening. And so the research is very small, but they expect that that's going to happen a lot more as the polar bears must migrate inland. So either you can walk up onto the land and up the hill a little bit, or you can just cam up, but somebody mentioned the tundra and the melting of the permafrost. That certainly has happened and it's happening here in our virtual example as well. So if you notice up top, the only example they have, it did not produce infertile, you know, we're not getting mules, mule bears or whatever. But this particular one family set was more aggressive, but since it's such a small sample, they don't know that that's what is going to happen. They just is not data at this point. So the beavers is another really interesting change. There have always been beavers in the the southern part of the subarctic or there have been for a very long time, but they have not moved into the northern areas. But as the flying of the tundra, the flying of the permafrost, the beavers are moving north and they're making their ponds. So what does that mean? It means that there are now homes to a whole new set of plants and animals. So you're getting shrubs that were not there before. You are getting habitat for more moose, for more deer coming up. Yeah, the beavers are changing the whole landscape. So we don't typically think of one species being a pivotal change species, but this is one that is already making that change. Take a minute now start to walk off the point and let's walk along the along the coast a little bit more. Cass, in that this area, the human populations are very small. So there are the beavers are making a significant change and allowing other animals and plants to move in so that they with more water that these are well fed brown bears. They don't bite. So if you look around, you're going to see that there are wolves. There are elk, moose, more grasses, more insects. Somebody mentioned insects. Insects never survived the Arctic winters before, but some of the recent winters have been so warm that insects are surviving, which is just mind boggling. If you look down into the water here, you'll see that there is a cold water coral reef. Until recently, nobody knew that there were any cold water corals, but now we have found them all over the coastal areas of the world. And we're doing more and more deep water research and finding corals there too. So although the tropical corals are highly stressed and may not survive, there are cold water corals as well. Another thing here that will probably affect what we have done in this particular display, this particular habitat, is that they are finding more with the robot research, and they're getting more pictures of the deep water squid. And so they had recently a juvenile trying to pull off parts of a camera. But it was only the, I think the third ghost squid that they had ever been able to photograph doing things. As we said, all of the animals and plants are going to find their nutrient sources changing. Some will be able to adapt and some will not. So there's no way that in any virtual setting we can represent the entire habitat with all of the ecology. But we've tried to do representative samples here, so that in every habitat you will find a representative set of plants and animals, you will find both prey and predators. And while they might not all live in exactly the same place, they all live in these kinds of environments. So from here, for people who want to go underwater and swim, yeah, absolutely, that's a great thing to do. But for people who would prefer to walk, if you go up here in a minute, you can take the tube, excuse me, I'm going to swim, but other people are welcome to go down with tube. Oh, and before you go, you might notice that there is a brown bear, a grizzly, right above here, moving into a temperate coastal rainforest. And again, if you explore that, excuse me, you will find an entire habitat right there in that little coastal rainforest. I'm going to quickly change into scuba and get in the water. So this is a transition zone. It's a transition between the subarctic and the temperate. What you will see here is that the kelp forests are moving north as well. So either swim or cam here, kelp forests are one of the most highly productive areas of the ocean. They are not only spawning grounds, but home to many, many creatures, big and small. Yeah, the water is a little bit cooler here, yeah. You might want to cam down. We did not go down there, but do cam down all the way to the bottom here because in the deep ocean, mostly temperate, but some tropical, although they don't really know because they're finding more and more and more and more of the hydrothermal vents, the hot water ocean vents. You will see why it's important to have the phytoplankton move the watercolors because as things die and decay, decompose, the nutrients stay on the bottom and this movement of the circulation by the phytoplankton brings this nutrient source up to the top again. But you will find some of the tube worms, some of the clams, and some animals down there. There are sealocanths, there are a number of fish and crabs and they cannot go to the surface that they are so adapted to the very high pressure of the lower waters. Also there's no sunlight, so photosynthesis doesn't operate and they are able to use the hydrogen sulfide which would burn most creatures to do what sunlight would normally do for surface animals or surface plants, rather. So moving along here a little bit, what do you find if you go down here, what do you find here in the kelp forest? What do you notice? Yes. The thermal, the hydrogen sulfide from the thermal vents and the heat is providing an energy, allows them to convert energy, yes. Notice that it's not just one kind of algae and kelp, by the way, is a giant algae. It is not a plant like a land plant, no, there are no roots to kelp and in fact they float. Now because, excuse me, there is a sign up there and it has some information about kelp forests around the world, the sign is in the tube, but with the warmer waters kelp forests are also under attack and they have enemies that they never had before. So it's not just the water itself being warmer, it's that they are being used faster than they can move or adapt. I don't see it here, but usually there is a shark that comes around here. I don't know what happened to it, where it is today. But often when I'm down here I get nudged by a great white shark. Yes, so far I have not gotten bitten, but I have gotten pushed. Yeah, George there, I don't know, there are positives and negatives I think about the kelp farming. It may work, it may not, they are trying that off some of the southern Alaskan coasts because the fishing has changed significantly and they can't make a living with fishing the same way that they used to. So we'll see, we'll see, I think it needs to be closely monitored. Yeah, the thing is with the regulation, we don't really know yet and so the reason I say closely monitored is we have to keep checking it and reporting and checking it and reporting so that we know what changes there are because we simply do not know right now. If we move along a little bit further we come to another nursery area and this is the marine grasses and the different kind of algae and the eelgrass and marine grasses. So most of the shellfish, many of the smaller fish spawn in this kind of an area, usually people don't like this grass. And so when people build houses and resort areas along the coast, along any of the coasts, they dredge this, they remove it. The fishing by dredging, the bottom trawling also removes this grass and what this does is it takes away the habitats for clams, oysters, many of the smaller fish, lobsters for where they spawn and so that again makes a decreases the population. And that's in addition to the overfishing that happens and we are severely overfishing the ocean. Yeah, that's if you are talking about real estate as an investment for human second homes, then the wetlands can be, they could say it's wasted, but all of the wetlands are the filters for the water so that they are both filtering the water to clean it, but they are also, most of the areas are also storm mitigators. So yeah, they're stabilizing in very real and important ways and you do read about that as the mangrove forest along the tropical coasts, but if you take a minute and you look up here, just above and to the left of where we are right now, you'll see a little point and this is a unique and again endangered representation of a coastal temperate forest. So earlier we saw the temperate rainforest that is, if you want to know more about that, look up the Great Bear rainforest that goes hundreds of miles up and down the Canadian Pacific coast, but this is more of an Atlantic coast area and you'll see that this is a oak and pine and cranberry, it's a bog area and again it stabilizes the land. And in most places oak or pine are not, they don't do well in salt water, but these have adapted over ages and ages to need the salt water and hence the spray that comes up, they are absolutely coastal forest areas and if you come back, there's a nice little cushion to sit under one of the trees there and just kind of look out at the water. Before we go any further and we have talked about plastic and the plastic pollution, but we can do a little better than that. If you go back toward the, if you put your camera vision back toward the northern, toward the Arctic a little bit, you'll see a small area that has sea otters, it has a log that Jan put out with turtles, there's a seal right now climbing up the coast, which they do and you'll see an area that is covered with, with, yeah four ocean has done some of this work, yes. You'll see seaweed covering a rocky area, you'll see dead trees, you'll see driftwood, so somebody mentioned the rise in the sea, the height of the sea, yeah there are places that have were forested and are now inundated and so the trees have died, this is one of those places there where the sea level has risen, but more than that we're taking this area as a demonstration area to show what happens because normally you don't see the plastic where we are in most of the developed world, the plastic that is in the ocean that is large chunks is either in the garbage gyres in the mid oceans or along the coasts of the less developed areas, but it's there and it's real and it's all ours so that we have done this, we really have made a, yeah it's conveniently not in our view, we don't see the mess that we have wrought, although if you look up a little bit just where that seal was going up just above the right hand part of the driftwood, you will see a carcass of a dead bird that was full of plastic and if you look a little closer there is no way, there is no way anymore, if you look a little closer you're going to see the plastic and it's not just the plastic bottles and cans and shoes and it's also the fishing gear, the nets, the wires and all of that is catching and harming the sea creatures so that you have turtles, you have seals, you have whales, you have dolphins and porpoises along with many other marine animals that get caught and strangled by this, this is our mess, we have made this mess and somehow we have to clean it up so I'm going to leave that out there you know as a reminder for people that this is real and it's everywhere, in fact recent research has shown that even in the Antarctic in the waters there are microplastics, we cannot get away from it anymore, it's up to us to insist that we do better not only at recycling but it has to start with the design process to start with a redesign so that we don't have this kind of waste and so that it does not get discarded anywhere because the plastics will be here for thousands of years, some of them, some of them will break down in hundreds of years but some of them will be there for thousands, yeah yeah we've already we've messed up the the sky too and the the CO2 will be around for thousands of years so even if we stopped what we're doing today we would still have an increase in warming of the atmosphere and the oceans for a significant period of time so every time from now on if you are swimming and you feel the the grasses tickle your toes or your legs, remember that this is not something to pull out and throw away but this is the the nursery area for some very important animals, look at that we have a horseshoe crab flying swimming above us, well looks like we are going to get over to the tropical area after all, you notice all along that we have had whales accompanying us, whales swim the entire range of the oceans, they swim thousands of miles so that you will find some kinds of whales in in all of the oceans, now notice how different the the corals look here, what do you think makes the difference here, yeah more light definitely is a change but the colors of the corals come from micro algae so we don't typically think of the role of algae in all of our ocean processes but these algae don't live in the colder waters so that the very cold water corals don't don't have the bright colors, there are so many kinds of algae, if Eve has had somebody's getting stalked by a moray eel but they do that here, the eels are again well fed no danger but but they will stalk you yeah yeah so the corals here are again under attack though they are under attack from the sure sure we can give the eel a name yeah but they they are under attack from the temperatures and from the composition the chemical composition of the waters so that when the oceans absorb the carbon dioxide and of all of the carbon dioxide that we humans have spewed out from our manufacturing and from our lifestyles you know we hear about what goes into the atmosphere but the vast majority has been absorbed by the oceans so what that does is turn the oceans more acidic and why is that of worry well it we read a little bit about the bleaching of the corals but it also is softening the the shells of all of the crustaceans of all of the mollusks are much more brittle so that it will take centuries or for the ocean to be more neutral and less acidic so all in all this is beautiful as it is it is another area that is under severe stress so the question one of the questions is you know what will be able to adapt and what will not you read about the the likely extinctions some will migrate some adapt some other species will move in and we just don't go all we can say is that it is most likely that things will be very different for our grandchildren than they have been for us there's much more here than I have gone over really I do invite you to come back and explore on your own yeah I hope the reason I do habitats like this the reason I want to build habitats like this is that we can read all we want about the science and about what's happening but being here having an experience even if it is a virtual experience gives a different sense than you can get from just reading the text so swimming with the whales being nudged by a moray eel riding a shark riding a swimming along with an orca makes just a different sense of what is going on under the sea then then you get any other way and for many of us we will never go diving in the arctic we may never go diving in the tropics but here we can so please come back bring your friends we can do more tours there are lots of things we did not cover we can have all sorts of conversations we yarn and I would love to have people come back and we would love to interact we would love to talk about what are some of the really important things that are going on in science and in human activity so thank you all for coming really appreciate it oh thank you very much you know we haven't done that and maybe we should maybe we should put this on the destination guide thank you for mentioning that but you're very welcome you can tell that I love doing this and yarn loves doing this too we don't have bleached corals here in the in the tropical but we could we actually could put some around the the corner a little bit and and that may be a very good suggestion to show what that would look like yeah so next time next time we'll have a little bit of an area of bleached corals so do feel free to continue swimming around or you know I'll hang out for a little bit if you have any other questions or things you want to mention or talk about yeah and do share the the video on the website I mean we have had here as an example we have had students from an English-speaking school in Germany come through and throughout the years with the marine habitats we I have had different schools from around the world either come to visit or to watch the videos of some of of these areas but as I said before if you can actually get here you'll bring your friends to to actually come and swim and walk around well George you just have to come back yeah and it was all videoed so that will get posted but if you if you come off around by yourself and you have questions you know please do reach out thank you thank you many of the places have note cards around signs with note cards so if I'm not around our non isn't around do do check out the the information that we have put out already