 Thank you very much for coming, my name is Jess Burton and I direct the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative. We are a non-profit in the city, we're based in the city. We work with 20 organizations to accelerate conservation in Southern Maine and develop strategic partnerships. And this is an example of a very strategic partnership with the Portland Public Library. In the series of the Sustainability Series, we're thrilled to be a part of the partnership to bring this conversation, touching on so many different aspects of our lives and our impact on the environment. We're thrilled to be here tonight and I welcome you and thank you for coming. And I'm going to just turn it over to Sam. Hi, I'm Sam. I work here for the Library of Science and we're in one of our missions is to bring Science Center to the city to everybody. So that includes opportunities like this to learn about important topics that touch our lives. It's especially relevant this month and next month because it is the Arboretic Council. Will we be in time? I'm not going to mention that at all. Okay, so I won't get into that too much, but it's a very prestigious meeting of officials here in Portland that are from around the world talking about really high-level policy things. So it's cool, but we get to learn a little bit about what's going on in the Arctic and out in Brazil. I welcome Ben and Chris for the talk. Great. Thanks, Sam. Thanks, everyone. Yeah, my name is Ben Twining and Chris Epley is here and you'll hear from him in 20 minutes or so. And we are both senior research scientists at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, which is in Booth Bay Arbor, or East Booth Bay actually. And we're going to talk about research that we and others at Bigelow have been doing in the Arctic over the past couple years. And so we're going to focus on sort of two things. The first part I'm going to talk about is sort of the nutrient side of this, and I'm going to talk a little bit about what the impacts are of ice melting in the Arctic, sort of the natural processes, productivity and nutrient cycling in the Arctic. And then Chris is going to come up and talk more about the human impact side and how that might change with a melting Arctic or a warming Arctic, and in particular some of the work that he's been doing on oil spill, potential oil spills in the Arctic. So, I think that I'm going to say because we have a nice intimate crowd that if you guys have questions, I think, you know, feel free to sort of stop us. The goal here is to communicate our science as clearly as possible, and if we say something that you don't understand, we have a question, just raise your hand and we'll make a conversation. So if you search for Bigelow Laboratory on YouTube, we have a channel, and actually there's full length versions of both of these talks from this summer that you can see, but that would be the way, yeah, there's a whole channel for us on YouTube. Okay, so before I get to the Arctic, I just want to give you a little plug for Bigelow Laboratory. Bigelow is a nonprofit research institution started in 1974, and our mission is to investigate the microbial drivers, excuse me, of ocean processes. So these are the plankton. These are the organisms that live in the ocean that are too small to see with the naked eye for the most part, but they're incredibly important. So they make half of the oxygen you breathe, they're the base of the marine food web, and they take up a lot of the carbon dioxide that we emit. And so while they're small and hard to see, they're incredibly important, and they deserve a champion in the world. And so Bigelow is really one of the only institutions in the world that focuses on microbial oceanography. And I'll talk a little bit more about those organisms today, but this is sort of a picture. We've got these copepod, these are sort of v-insects of the sea, and these single-celled algae called phytoplankton that many of us study. They come in lots of beautiful different forms, and there are millions of these in each of every teaspoon of seawater. And so that's what Bigelow does, we study these, most of us studies these microbial organisms. Okay, so as I mentioned, we're going to sort of divide this into two parts. I'm going to talk a little bit about the Arctic, and then I'm going to talk about impacts on productivity, mostly the productivity of those plankton, and then Chris is going to come up and talk about human impacts. Nice and easy. Alright, let's start with the basics. The Arctic versus the Antarctic. This is important, I think, because many people just think of these as the polar regions or the regions that are ice-covered, but there are some really important differences. And one of them, as my five-year-old knows, is that polar bears live in the Arctic, and penguins live in the Antarctic, and that's the way it is. So that's one difference, but there's another difference as well. If you look, if we zoom into these beautiful satellite images a little bit more, there's Antarctica. And I think what's immediately obvious is that it is a continent that is surrounded by water, right? You've got an ice-covered landmass with very little of that landmass actually showing, because it's covered in massive amounts of ice, and then you have this massive water body, this other notion that isolates it from the rest of the continents. And so that's very different from the Arctic. In fact, it's sort of the opposite of the Arctic, right? Here's the North Pole, the Arctic Ocean, and you have basically an ice-covered ocean, which is surrounded by landmass. And some people have referred to this as actually a mediterranean or polar mediterranean sea, because it's a sea in the middle of land. And in that way it's very different. Not only do you have the people and the indigenous populations that live around the Arctic in those lands, but you also have things like nutrients and material that gets into the Arctic Ocean from the land. And that's something that I study and I'll talk a little more about. But in general, this ice is not sitting on top of land, it's sitting on top of the ocean. And so that's a big difference. Point number one, this is between the Arctic and the Antarctic. Okay, so one of the things you've probably heard, or may have heard, is that the ice covering the Arctic Ocean is becoming less abundant. And I've got a couple slides to show you that. This is data collected by satellite. I downloaded this two days ago. On September 26th, you can go in and get daily information on it. And this shows you, here's the North Pole, and you can see this is the current extent of ice cover in the Arctic. And this orange line is the median, the average cover of the Arctic Ocean of ice for this day over the last 30 years or so. So you can tell just looking at this snapshot that there's significantly less cover than they've seen on average over the last 30 years. And this is a trend that has been going on for about a decade now or more, which is a lessening of the coverage of the Arctic sea ice. And here's how that looks sort of over time. Here you've got the months from June to October. And here we're looking at the extent of ice cover in millions of square kilometers. And this is the area that has at least 15% sea ice, right? So they sort of make a cut off of how much of the ocean is covered in ice. And here is the long-term average. Again, that about 30-year average, 1981 to 2010. And you can see it's sort of relatively high. Of course, it's peaks in the winter and then it starts to melt in the summer. And the minimum is right around September. It was on September 10th this year, which is notable because it's my birthday. And then it starts to freeze up again and you start ice cover to go up. So here's the long-term median or long-term average. And then this light gray section is sort of two standard deviations. And that's an indication of how much variability there is around this average. But within two standard deviations, you have about 95% of all the variability. So this is sort of, most years are in this sort of envelope of time. And here is where 2016 is, the current year. So you can see that for much of the year and much of the summer, it's been significantly below not only the average, but below two standard deviations below the average. So it's a very low ice year. And in fact, it's the second lowest ice year after 2012, which is the screen dash. So historically, 2012 has been the lowest ice year. And 2016 is now tied with 2007 for the second lowest. But all of the previous decade are all sort of in this range. So we're definitely having a trend with lower ice. And if you look at it just now, we'll take the September monthly average and look at it over time. So it's starting in 1978 and going up to almost current day. You can see there's just been this steady decline. Not steady, actually. It's been highly variable. But over time, there's a real trend of decreasing ice cover. So hopefully all of this sort of comes together to convince you that ice is becoming less abundant in the year. So this, we're taking to account floating ice because, you know, these satellites are looking at any kind of ice cover. But my impression is icebergs are relatively rare in the Arctic. Mostly sea ice. You have icebergs that come off of Greenland and the big ice sheets over Greenland. But I don't think very many of them make their way up into the Arctic Ocean. But it would. Okay, one other point I want to point out about sea ice and sea ice thickness is that not only is it becoming, the coverage is becoming less, it's becoming sparser coverage. But it's also becoming younger. So more of the ice that is found in the Arctic is now single year ice or new ice that's formed every year. And so I'm going to show a little movie here that's just going to flip through an annual image from 1981 up through 2007. And what this shows here again is the Arctic, here's Greenland, Canada, and Alaska. And the colors show the age of the ice. So red is ice that's more than five years old. It's been around for a long time. Going down to dark blue, which is single year ice, and light blue, which is open water. And so what we'll see, there we go, is that we're starting to slowly click forward 1984, 85, 86. And so you can see the sort of, the contraction and expansion of the ice seasonally. But you can also see that this red and yellow and green ice, it's getting, it's basically getting a lesser and lesser extent. There's less multi-year ice in the summer. And it's also getting sort of compressed in the Canadian Arctic. And more of this is becoming free. And by the time we get to 2007, it's really just along the coast in the Beaufort Sea where you're getting this multi-year ice. And so that's important because these ice, these types of ice behave differently. There's different organisms that live in the multi-year ice. It has different stability. And also different ability to cap the water from the atmosphere above it. And so there's another big trend, which is basically the getting younger of the ice. Okay, so what are the implications of this melting ice? Well, one of them is physical. And that is that it changes the heat balance of the Arctic. So when you have ice that's snow covered and the sun hits the ice, 90% of it reflects off and just goes back into space. And that reflectivity we call albedo. And it's basically, yeah, the amount of solar radiation that's reflected off of the ice. So only about 10% of it would actually be absorbed by the water. Now if you have bare ice, if that snow has melted or never came, it actually is significantly different. In that case, about 50% of it, wait, 5% of that solar radiation is reflected and the rest is absorbed. And so in that case, you're going to get much more warming of the Arctic when you don't have snow around. But if you go to an open ocean where you don't have any ice cover at all, then suddenly less than 10% in this case they're averaging about 6% of the radiation is reflected back and more than 90% of it is absorbed. And so this is something that scientists call positive feedback, which is the idea that as ice melts, you tend to have more absorption of heat by the Arctic Ocean and that may cause it to warm more. So one of the concerns is that there's maybe a tipping point and after you have a certain amount of ice that's not present, you can have more and more warming in the Arctic. So this is one concern about a melting, a melted Arctic Ocean. There's also going to be impacts on biology. So one way to think about this is this cartoon that talks about sort of the seasonal, sort of the seasonal trend of productivity from winter to spring and summer. So over here on the left, we have sort of the dark winter, right? In the polar regions, there's no light in the gift of winter. And here you've got ice and snow covering the water, very little light. And basically there's not much biology going on underneath the water because there's little light. And it's what we call net heterotrophic, meaning that there's like more animals than plants, is what we think about it. There's nothing creating oxygen. And then as the year progresses and as the sun starts to rise, you get a time point when there's suddenly enough solar radiation to support the growth of plants. And so you start to have, you can see sort of the green coming, and that productivity happens first at the bottom of the ice as opposed to in the water below it. And that's because there's more light in the bottom of the ice because light is coming from above. So the nutrients from this sea water are used by algae. And they grow in the bottom of the ice. They create a big bloom. And then organisms come like copepods and krill and things that are going to eat that algae and they eat it. And then they tend to poop a lot and they tend to sink that carbon and that productivity down to the bottom of the ocean where it supports the whole ecosystem of things that live on the bottom. Muscles, clams and other things like that. And so you sort of have this system and then also at this point the ice is melting and it's getting warmer and you tend to have just melt ponds and then ice-free waters. And that lets the light get in and you then actually can have blooms down in the water. And so you have this very productive time of the year where you have very strongly autotrophic, not heterotrophic system. You've got a lot of productivity and production of biomass. So that's how it sort of works in the Arctic. You have a very strong seasonal signal. So what's going to change with melting ice? Well one thing that's going to change is the timing of that big bloom. So in the top panel here it's a similar plot where we sort of time is along the x-axis. And this is sort of what we have now. We've got this dark winter. You've got the sun starting to come up in April and May. You have this blue of that algae at the bottom of the ice in late May. And then it breaks up and you get big bloom in the water column in June and July. And then as the sun goes down and you run out of nutrients you tend to have this red period which is when all of the phytoplankton is getting eaten by bigger organisms and bacteria and it becomes net heterotrophic and then you tend to have ice coming up again and it goes back to its dark phase. So you can see that that gets shifted forward about maybe a month or two depending on how much warming there is because there's a lot less ice. Suddenly the ice is melting around April instead of June. And so that will become earlier. It may become more intense. And then you may get more productivity depending on what the nutrients do. So you can see it's a little more green and these green arrows are a little thicker than up here. But the timing of that may affect the bigger organisms. So these plankton serve as the food for whales and for fish and for other large species that people eat and use for subsistence. And the timing of that may not match. Their food may suddenly not be available at the same time as the organisms that eat that food. So that's another potential impact that is of concern. Alright, but phytoplankton need more than light. So I focus mostly on light and in order to demonstrate that I've put up this mytide it is 550 appropriate time for a cocktail of hour. And this is an example of what phytoplankton needs. So in addition to needing sunlight to have a good drink, you also need nutrients. Without nutrients, plants can't grow. And most of the nutrients in the ocean are in the bottom of the ocean and that's because they tend to be used up in the surface and then those plants took them up and to sink down and be remineralized. They get turned back into dissolved forms and they reside down there. So in order to support more growth in the top of the ocean, you need to mix that, those nutrients up. So you need to mix your drink. And it turns out that that's hard to do because of the density gradients in the ocean. When you have a lot of ice up here you may notice that your ice your drink can get sort of watery, right? Because your ice is melting and that makes it harder for this nutrients at the bottom to mix up. Perfect analogy. The cocktail. And this is sort of what it is. You've got your phytoplankton at the surface, I guess here it's our lime and then we've got our nutrient-rich waters down there. And in order for them to grow they need to be able to mix into that surface water. Which is hard to do with all that else melting ice which makes it fresher. So let's not think about two kinds of nutrients. One of them are what we call macro nutrients. And these are things like nitrogen and phosphorus and silicon. And these are the things that form the major building blocks of biology and of life in the ocean. So just like if you need to if you want to fertilize your lawn you tend to add fertilizer you shouldn't do that in excess I will say because we've got sustainability people here and I want to be super environmentally conscious but if you did do that they contain nitrogen and phosphorus. Those are your macro nutrients. And those are also the things that limit the productivity of the ocean in general. So this map shows the concentration of nitrate. This is the primary nitrogen containing nutrient in the ocean that can limit productivity. And the color scheme shows the concentration of nitrate going from very low as purple and then red is very rich. And what you can see this is what depth is this about a thousand meters. So this is deep in the ocean. You can see that deep in the Atlantic Ocean and deep in the Atlantic there's not very much nitrate relative to deep in the Pacific. So there's a lot more nitrate nitrogen nutrients over in the Pacific than in the Atlantic. And this is because of the way the water flows around the world. It's a different lecture I won't talk about that. But I pointed out because the Arctic Ocean which is way up here but too tall for me you can see that one of the places that the Arctic Ocean touches the rest of the world is the Pacific Ocean right here where it's really high nitrate. And the other place is in the North Atlantic where there's relatively low nitrate. And so one of the things that affects the productivity of the Arctic is how much water gets into the Arctic from the Pacific versus the Atlantic. That's a lot of oceanography to throw at you but that matters for productivity. And another thing you can see this is now looking turn your head sideways this is looking south to north along the Pacific Ocean and this is looking down to 6,000 meters in the bottom of the ocean. So with that almost more than 3 miles. And so here's 60 degrees south down near Antarctica here's 60 degrees north and you can see that as you go to the north concentrations of nitrate and here is the Bering Strait. So there's this little shallow sort of shelf that the Pacific water has to get over to then get into the Arctic Ocean. And this shows you this dramatic radiant between Pacific, rich Pacific water and the relatively nutrient poor Arctic water. And that's because of all of this productivity which is off of the Alastin shelf which is using up this nitrate. I think of this as like the deadliest catch you've probably seen that on TV the very rich crab, fishery and the Gulf of Alaska that's sort of up here this is the deadliest catch sink of nutrients but this affects how much nutrients get into the air. And there's another kind of nutrients that fight a point to need as well they need what we call micronutrients and so my analogy here is to fruity pebbles fruity pebbles they've just discovered turns out that they like them but they will point out that even fruity pebbles have some good aspects. Here's the nutrition label from fruity pebbles and you can see that in addition to containing 10% of your saturated fat and 240 calories and lots of other not so great things like 15% of your sodium they also contain some things you really need these are your vitamins and minerals so a serving of fruity pebbles contains 20% of your diet iron so if you don't get enough iron you become an even and the fruity pebbles also contain zinc 20% of your zinc that's good good for your skin and your hair contains copper and contains vitamin B12 and these are all examples of compounds that use metals so to be a healthy human you need a bunch of different metals to grow vitamin B12 contains mostly cobalt and just like humans phytoplankton need these same metals to grow and so micronutrients are the metals that are nutrients for phytoplankton and that's what I study so for the sort of second part of my or the last part of my talk before Chris comes up I want to talk about or to show some pictures from a cruise that we went on or people in my group went on last year to the North Pole to study the concentrations of these nutrients these micronutrients like iron up in the Arctic Ocean to give you a flavor of what it's like to do research in the Arctic so this was a cruise that happened the last summer about a year ago right now went from August to October and it went at that time of year because that's the ice minimum that's the time of year when there's the least amount of ice on average and the goal was to get up to the North Pole so there had not been a surface a US surface ship that had made it to the North Pole unaccompanied ever and so this was sort of a historic mission and the ship left out of Dutch Harbor which is I think also the deadliest catch place and they went north up into the Bering Sea through the Strait up into the Chukchi they went up straight first to the North Pole they made it to the North Pole and then came back through the Chukchi Sea over the shelf and back to to Dutch Harbor so it took about two months and it was on a boat called the Healy which is the only fully capable icebreaker that the US maintains currently in the Arctic it's about 420 feet long and I've got some pictures here just to give you a flavor of what it's like to do this research so this is part of a program called Geo Traces which has been an international program to measure metals in the oceans including the Arctic Ocean and here's an example of sort of some of the measures you have to take to measure something like iron in a pristine environment without contaminating it with your own body or with your ship so one of the things that you want to collect examples of sea ice or snow on the ice and you don't want to contaminate them with the ship's exhaust as you have to go far away from the ship so the ship would get into an ice they would put the researchers down on the snow and they'd have to carry their stuff usually about half a mile away from the ship in order to take their samples like bag covered materials here we've got some researchers who have been actually put on to an ice flow so here's a piece of that sea ice and they're collecting ice with their ice hardware 5 gallon bucket so here we were specifically looking for the algae that live on the bottom of the ice and so you can see there's a little bit of that greenish color and so they had been put down in this ice flow to try to collect it with a bucket so it's sort of a combination of super high tech sampling and super low tech sampling here's someone trying to collect an ice sample or excuse me, a snow sample for metal analysis, you can see that not only are they wearing warm gear but they're wearing a Tyvek clean suit over their warm gear they've got this very expensive Tyvek, I'm sorry, Teflon shovel can't get that at Ace True Value hardware store that's been cleaned so that they're not introducing any contamination they're collecting snow in a bag to bring back and melt and do analysis on so all this was about trying to figure out how much iron is in the Arctic Ocean so we can see how likely algae are to be limited by iron here's an effort at taking ice cores so we also wanted to study the ice both the single year and the multi year ice and so here you've got a drill and a system for coring that ice again this is an all Teflon all plastic system with some titanium to give it rigidity they're putting down again wearing suits and trying not to contaminate the sample with their their dusty human bodies and that's what an ice core looks like after it's been drilled so you can see it's about a meter a meter and a half long three or four feet long and it's all wrapped in a basically a big ziplock bag to keep it uncontaminated and they're heading back to the ship with the scientific booty to get those ice cores back to the ship we would cut them up into layers of different parts to see how much iron and other metals was in the surface of the ice versus the part in contact with the seawater so we build these clean labs that are covered in plastic and with a filtered air we put them in these very clean plastic trays and basically chop them up so basically cut them into pieces and then these slices of the ice and melt them and collect the phytoplankton that live within them and this is what you actually get so although those look fairly clean when you concentrate the algae onto a filter these are both samples of phytoplankton that were collected from the bottom of ice and this dark green is something called Melocyra I'll show you a picture of it in another picture in a second and it's a diatom so it's a single celled plant that creates these very long chains of the ice and this is what those animals are eating on the bottom of the ice this sort of green, goopy phytoplankton and then what we would do in our group this is a technician who works with me Sarah Rashiberg she was on the crews and we would look at them under a microscope so these are the individual cells which of those cells is about the width of the human hair and you can see some of them have a lot of color in them that's the plant pigment chlorophyll these empty glass shells and unfortunately we were there at the end of the blue we were there in September because of the ice minimum but a lot of the algae weren't very happy they were very low in iron and I think they were sort of starving at the end of the year but we're still working up and looking at the data and what we do with these is we actually then scan the cells and determine what they're made of so these are maps that are distributed in these cells so here's a string of cells and this is silicon which is part of the glass shell and then there are other elements phosphorus and sulfur and iron and copper and zinc that make up the molecules within the cell and what we're doing in our role is to measure how much of these nutrients have been taken up by the cells and so we go to a facility in Illinois and we make these measurements to measure their content so those from a remote collection in the North Pole we bring them back to Maine and then we take them out to Illinois and analyze them and all of this is to understand how much more slides just to sort of highlight the sort of historic nature of this this is a nice group picture at the top of the at the North Pole this is the Healy again the whole crew there's about think about 50 scientists the first time a U.S. ship had made it a surface ship had made it to the North Pole on a company so we've had nuclear submarines there but not U.S. surface ships you can tell us the North Pole because we're at the North Pole with the little pole and there's Santa so you know you're in the right place and then there's a little bit of a ceremony just sort of commemorating that with some Coast Guard military comp and circumstances is appropriate so we had a handing off of the scientists doing our best to stand in attention and behave appropriately and got to meet Santa so yeah so that's a little bit of a background and a little bit of a flavor about how the Arctic is changing how the ice melt might affect biological productivity and then a little flavor of how we go about studying those natural processes so now I'm going to hand it over to Chris Chris is going to talk about the facts and how those might change with the changing Arctic now I might respond oh you need this alright over here can you hear me okay that's okay excellent so we have this changing Arctic and then really nicely how all these natural systems are going to change what I want to focus on this last part of this presentation is how does the effect become a direct effect of climate change in terms of idle climate changing etc but what is the indirect effect of climate change so you can, you saw how the ice extend changes rapidly and shrinks that also leads to more human activities so humans think okay this is some great opportunities we have here all of a sudden the Arctic is more accessible so there is a possibility that we could explore these resources all of a sudden you have less ice people start thinking of we could actually use Arctic for shipping what you see here is some shipping routes that go either along the coast of Russia or along the US, Canada reaching here for example Asia and Europe or Asia and the US on a much shorter kind of like scale than when you use the traditional shipping routes the traditional shipping routes would go either Suez Canal or you could save some time and fuel it if you use this one here and they are already some ships are using these shipping routes I have to say it's way way less than the other shipping routes but people start thinking if the ice continues to melt and all of a sudden you have ice free summer in the Arctic maybe these shipping routes will be much more heavily used and this isn't just for transport of goods it's also for tourism which is another potential that can increase a lot and this is a useful ceremony this is a ship that just passed the Northwest Passage this summer so just about a couple months ago it started off from Alaska went through this Northwest Passage along the US coast and the Canadian coast and actually then came down towards us and actually the first port in the US went to Harvard and the remarkable thing about this is the first time that such a luxury cruise ship makes this Northwest Passage and this possible because there is less ice this carried about 1700 people on board so this is definitely much more people out there to think about what would happen if you have an accident on ships there and you have to do a search and rescue operation for 1700 people and it would pose some logistic challenges but also you can think about the environmental challenge what happens if a ship goes around and there is an oil spill this one picture here is the Exxon and Albees spilled more than 25 years ago it's in the subarctics not in the arctics you can see it was a single tanker that got a ground and this whole oil oiled the whole coastline the Gulf of Alaska with some really detrimental effect for the environment so what we have now is this opening arctic that poses some opportunities for humans for economy for indigenous people there but also some risks and the question is now how do we handle this how do we assess what we should do and what we should not do we think that science is really necessary to evaluate this opportunities and risks and come up with some clear idea if we do this then this happens and this is what really fascinates me about science is to use our science to try to solve problems and try to come up with prediction and recommendations for this and then at Bigelow we recently just created a center we call it for venture research for the opening arctic oceans and what we said is traditionally science is the tendency of just staying within the science area and with this rapidly changing arctic especially we feel it's much more open needs that the science engages more and more with the needs of the local population asking politicians asking the public what do we need and be much closer to the needs there to do this science so at Bigelow we do a little experiment to see how can we translate our science more rapidly so we can come up with good science based solutions and informed policy makers and raise public awareness what I want to talk about now specifically what is the risk of oil spills in the arctic and more specific what happens if there is an oil spill in the arctic so you can always say you shouldn't have an oil spill in the arctic but if one happens then you need to know how this oil is going to behave and as you can imagine an oil spill in the arctic is very different than an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico not on the other so the main reason because it's different is because we have ice and this is a little illustration what would happen if you have oil in the arctic you can have an oil slick then this can interact with the ice it could kind of like be trapped in the ice it could be trapped within this snow ice slush it could potentially migrate through the ice and form some pools it could be absorbed by snow if you have a deep sea oil spill that comes down from the bottom this could come all the way up and then act in the lake at the bottom of the ice so you see there is it's just way more of a complex system if you have oil in the arctic besides this the ecosystem is very very vulnerable there so in a project we did field work last week last year we were interested in specifically how do the microbes react to this oil so the question we want to answer is if we have this oil spill in arctic environment do the microbes the bacteria, the phytoplankton react very differently than in a warmer environment and also where does the oil end up and I now want to just show you a few pictures of how we did field work and this was a project this was actually funded by oil and gas producers so oil and gas producers came together and said can you investigate this for us and we went up to Svalbard which is an island of Norway and made some artificial oil spill so we contained everything and investigated how oil behaves and when you come up there you have a lot of polar bears so whenever you do some research and you have a polar bear guard the method of transportation is scooters and you're very close to the north pole the other thing about transportation like you need to have airplanes to go places and we ended up in a little lab container a beautiful pure that was all frozen and this is how our lab looked like and this is the setup where we ended up putting the oil in so this was this plastic bag that is floating and this we put out on a pure out here this was deployed in February so it was all dark and this is how it looked after installation then every March April all the lights get in all these installations come up we then went back there every month to take ice for samples to look at where is the oil now and how did the bacteria that was the project specifically did other bacteria react to this oil this is how you can see Ben already showed how they you are not so worried about metal conomination we were interested in organics it was a little bit easier to do but basically coming there every month taking course putting it in a tank slicing them afterwards melting them we didn't do it very metal clean and this is how our ice core looked like and to analyze it we melted it because this is how you then can work with it and we melted it in this little bag so you can see depending on the depths you had you had this oil layer that were ice core we then made some experiments to see even at this very cold water so this is below freezing temperature this water is 9 1.8 Celsius approximately how can bacteria exist there and actually degrade this oil so yeah this is just to give you a little impression of how this is just for my experience this is like a beautiful beautiful area out there I was there in May and then back there in June and it was 24 hours light by the time I came there the second time it's really a nice pristine environment there so we're just wrapping up this project now but I want to tell you a little bit what we learned so far so what we can see is if you have an oil spill and then it gets into the ice there is an oil layer that forms in the ice that stays pretty much the whole year at the same place so this here on the ice core this will be the bottom and this will be the snow on top and this is where the oil layer is so when we put in this oil and then wait if this layer floats on water so it stayed there and then you have ice growing during the season on the same time there is no coming from the top so this oil basically stayed there but the second thing we saw is that also throughout that ice so here the outer core is just like oil that was contaminated on the surface by the core and once you shake off this you see the lower part looks pretty clear but when you then go in the lab and do analysis of the compounds you still can find some compounds that actually managed to migrate all the way through the ice core but if you look at the total mass of oil after a whole season when the ice melts again we could still see that most of the oil is still present so what happens is this one here now is mesocosms that were then recovered after season after the ice melted again it was about 2 hours when they were recovered in all of them you still can see like a lot of oil still being present so what happens in the in the winter is you basically freeze this oil layer and then you have some oil compounds of oil and diffuse through the water by the bulk of the oil still stays here so if you have an oil spill at the end when the snow melts you have to clean it up at this point and what was pretty interesting from my point of view I investigated a lot of bioregivational of oil and I did a lot of work in the Gulf of Mexico to look at how bacteria can make oil there and there it's beautiful warm it's good condition so it's not really surprising that there's actually a little box that can eat oil after all oil is just plant material that's really old but even in the Arctic even in this ice cores that were really cold and old seawater temperature you have bacteria that seem to be pretty effective in degrading the oil the only thing is that because there is such a big oil layer they just didn't manage to all integrate all this oil within a season so a little bit of schematic how this looks like you have in the ice season you have ice and seawater and the oil layer and then this ice is actually not just solid ice like you have it in your freezer but because it's sea ice that means you also have salt there and because there is salt when the ice melts it creates this little brine channel which has a lot of salt in it so this is why in winter time if you put salt out then the water melts so you have this little brine channel that go down all the way through the ice so through this you can have a transport of some oil components that actually goes all the way in the water but in this ice there seems to be a really fascinating attitude that life can actually use this oil and transport it but then at the end of the season we are still going to have your oil layer there so to end this presentation I just want to mention that we are really interested in translating science like this or results like this and not just writing our scientific paper and publishing it and creating the science to the public a big mission of us and what I want to make you aware of is that currently we have this Arctic Council meeting going on this is a picture of an Arctic ministerial meeting two years ago in Canada you see John Kerry right there and what the Arctic Council is this is a UN organization, an intergovernmental organization that manages talks about Arctic issues so members of this are all the Arctic states you see the flag back there but also the representative of the indigenous people you see their flags down here are present there so they sit at the table with the minister of the Arctic nations and have to say how their land should be managed and what should be done next week starting from Monday there are the senior Arctic officials which are ambassadors and politicians and ministers from all these countries are going to come together important and have a three day meeting to discuss issues we had also some working groups of this Arctic Council coming in important already two weeks ago there was the working group that's called the Protection of the Marine Environment Marine Archive Environment that was here in and they discussed issues about shipping or invasive species or things like that creating marine protected areas here so a lot of these meetings are just closed but I want to make aware of one opportunity that there is so on Monday a lot of institutions about around Maine are organizing a conference that's a full day that's overturned from morning to the afternoon where there's going to be a lot of panel discussions about all this changing in the Arctic from a different perspective and on Maine and the Arctic of Com you can see a lot of events and see whether they are publicly open and whether we have to register or not I think for this event you have to register until tomorrow so with this I want to just end this and say thanks open to questions and discussion yes when you use biological degradation bacteria, how do you produce them? so kind of a question how are, how does this work how do you introduce something that degrades oil how do you introduce the biology so if you so how do you control the spill or how do you control the bacteria the bacteria so this is the interesting thing bacteria are like all over the world and bacteria that can degrade oil are also in all the oceans so oil is like all plant materials and bacteria they just learn to eat whatever is available and because a lot of oily material is present in the environment they just evolve to be able to to use oil to make a living of course usually if you don't have a lot of oil around then they don't have this enzymes that degrade this oil are not that active but as soon as you put in oil then they start to produce all these enzymes and they upregulate everything so and degrade oil very effectively for example also in the Gulf of Mexico it is still there the study is very extensively it just took a couple days until this bacteria started growing and then degrading this oil so I'd say because oil is a natural material there are like everywhere on the world you can find bacteria that can degrade well sure you've not put your bacteria in a TDMT oil so how do I stop it from infecting my ship? so this is the other thing with how fast do they eat the oil as you saw in this experiment for example we purchased a little oil there and still after season you still can recover a lot of oil so while they can be efficient at degrading oil it's really not that much that they really degrade if you have a big slick there it takes a long time or if you oil a shoreline this is going to stay there a long time like you still now can find oil residues from the X1 Valdez oil still if you look at the right spot it's not a lot but there are some officer oil is still there although it was in the environment and the point about infecting we always think of bacteria as being bad but in the environment like bacteria or even viruses that have like a really important function and that's just a natural healthy ecosystem has always a sandwich of bacteria and phytoplankin and soup that works together yes so it's like a two part question the experiment for the oil in the ice was it all the yellow staff who worked on that or was it multiple and what was the criminal life for it was it a tough process to get that all out yeah that's a good question so first of all what was our partners so we in most of the research project we do is a lot of partners together so the science community is very collaborative so also in this project there we work with institutes from Norway and France from Canada we work about 6, 7 different institutes Denmark this was another one there and this makes research also very interesting the project you meet your people and you can see how you can put your skills together in a good way to answer all the different aspects of the project your question about cleanup it was about 20 liters of oil for mesoplasm and what we just used was absorbent oil material like it's used in oil so it's we let it melt so this was kind of we had it in these plastic bags so outside of this plastic bag there was nothing but within we just waited until then summer came and it melted the good thing about oil is it floats so we just take it away that being said we cannot avoid that some of the oil compounds actually could dissolve in the water column and go then out through the bottom that being said where we did the experiment it looks called pristine like a coal mine right there so the thinking was this potential additional contamination we introduced is not more than the background level of this coal mine but this is the thing about oil spills experiments it's very not a lot of countries allow it for example in the US there isn't any possibility to do any experiments like this maybe on a really big scale this will be usually wait until we have an oil spill and then study this I'll see if you have questions for Ben so I don't want to I wanted to know what kinds of are you asking why I'm sorry at this beginning and I may want to look at the video later but are you paying attention to what toxic side effects might be happening as a result of any of this experimentation I'm very concerned because when they had the oil break disaster the man made oil volcano because of the deep water horizon in Louisiana they used these chemical disperses which totally polluted the environment and made people really sit and lots of people are covering this back up and I wanted to know if there's any question about the health effects and the talk and any questions are being raised about the toxicity of any of this experimentation or if it's the oil as toxic enough as it is that trying to use microbes to get rid of it sounds like a great idea to be which is why I came and I wanted to know what kinds of things the attention are being paid so that these health side effects don't happen to people and to the environment it's a really good question so one part what's with this person and what's with the toxic part and the toxic part this is actually what the main focus of this project part so I just described the part where I was involved with the bioregulation there's other partners that effect for algae for cobalt paths for the creatures, insects of the sea for an arctic conch just like the whole food chain so that the goal of this project was looking at if you have this arctic but how is it disrupt this whole arctic food chain and the effects there and the second part of this project was a very practical one saying if you have an oil spill you have several options what to do with the oil spill so currently there will be a control center being set up and they look at the data and they look where the oil is Coast Guard commands it and they say should we just skin the oil to like vacuum it out should we burn it off should we use dispersant or should we just do nothing so this is basically the options that are just technically available in the arctic the logistic part that most dictates what you can do maybe you can't even access it you cannot fly it but then if it's accessible then you still have to choose between can you burn it or can you use dispersants and dispersants are a pretty controversial topic so it's basically just so but their goal is if you have a bad situation you can have like two bad things you can have oil in the water you can either let it come ashore and potentially contaminate your coastline or you can add dispersant that would break up the oil in little droplets and then mixing it in the water column and then it would not come to the shoreline so the responders have to make the decisions then where is the oil where is it going to be where is the ecosystem where it's now where is how sensitive it is if it goes to the shore and make a decision what to do so the best thing is not to have an oil spill but I can say if my opinion is if the ecosystem at the coastline is very sensitive usually it seems to be a good idea to try to keep it offshore then you have all these effects right in the water column but you also have all these microbes and bacteria that can eventually take care of it versus once it comes to the shore the oil can be there for decades or even longer but yeah it's definitely a topic where a lot of research is going on right now because what happened after the Deepwater Horizon incident they said we have to dispersant should we use it and they're like well we don't really have toxicity tests for all the things we have to like fast track and do all this research to come up with that can use it and don't use it because people are not prepared for oil spill that scale Kristen, did you guys test the dispersants in any of the mesocosins in the Arctic to see how performant cold temperatures and ice we actually did so this industry partners this was kind of like the part where they were most interested and they said make some of this just with oil and then also make some of it with a mix of dispersant and then they also said the original idea was burn it like to do a burn but then if you burn it off you create a lot of soot and black smoke so then obviously you don't want to do this in an environment like this so what we did is burning it in a controlled environment and then bringing the residue of this burn oil and kind of like all this different oil spill options and looked at this so far it seems that just the dispersant leads to more mobility of the oil so the more oil leaks out but at the end of the season it doesn't look like a really big big difference just visually but we're still kind of like compiling the data but it seems to be more oil as they're going into the water column but this should be the purpose of this person this guy having more oil there what we're looking at is how the bacteria reacted to this dispersant because you add you have a contamination you have a pollution and then add like another chemical to it so you want to kind of like make sure that it still keeps your bacteria that actually eat the oil and you keep them happy so what did they do? it's not yet very clear so it seems they definitely degraded in all the situations and in some treatments where we had the dispersant some class of bacteria was just growing way more than in the other treatment and we don't really know fully what is the function of the type of acid in which the surface area is formed yeah this is the point of this person so having like this this good access like the bacteria can be much easier to go through that but as Ben also mentioned the bacteria they don't just need food they also need nutrients so it might be that you just run out of nutrients and then although you have this oil the bacteria still kind of might build anything yes the the whole evening presentation makes it clear that there's a lot of changes and the impact on human behavior would be great and how we choose to use that would be determined over this next period of time but I also see the incredible danger and risk of all of these activities and I wonder where this conversation sits with the Artific Council and how aware and sort of integrated the conversation is with the environmental impact and I wonder how that all fits together I would say they are very, very perfect with the Artific Council there are consensus based organizations and they don't have a lot of power to enforce things but what they can do and what they did a lot is directing studies and research and compiling literature so if you go if you look for some Artific information just go on the Artific Council website and browse all these working rooms they have a vast amount of data on artificial pollution assessment or assessment of shipping impacts or impacts of their impact of invasive species who are shipping so they really like collect all this data and put them together and try to bring this then in some recommendations to do something like for example create the deep marine protected area where shipping is restricted or something like this and so do the the industry or the shipping companies the oil companies, the cruise companies do they and are they also participating in any of these conversations or do they just isn't a free for all that cruise company do they just say it's open we're just going to go or is there sort of a process that happens so first the industry they're not part of the Artific Council there are some observers in the Artific Council but this is no industry there's NGOs that are there observing what's going on but the shipping industry has to follow regulations that then national or international law is doing for example for the shipping specifically it's one is national law the other one is the international law so there's this UN organization that IMO is from the Marine Shipping and they just made new regulations for polar region the polar code that's going to be in effect starting from next January I believe where they said you have some more restriction on how to operate shipping so it's not just about how to discharge waste or anything but also how structurally sound does the ship need to be so this is something that's been happening on the international level and then affects the ship operators so yeah I guess this flow of information goes somewhere from the Artic Council to then IMO and creating regulations but it's a slow process and the Arctic is really changing rapidly so I think the law just the regulations have to make sure they can catch up with what's going on and another problem is the Arctic it's there's people out there but it's very scared to populate it so if you create regulation can you really force it then so the question of compliance is the whole different thing if you create a protected area that's close to fisheries can you really control that it's referring to yours but maybe that's the answer yet but I'm wondering if the dynamic is set up between developed nations and indigenous peoples pushing for economic activity versus protection or actually environmental interests in developed nations that are quite far away that are saying protected and you have native people who want economic development I don't know if you have a sense for that that's a very interesting question I don't know if I can answer this in detail I think yet so so the permanent participants of the indigenous people have definitely a strong voice there and the members are just like the six Arctic nations of certain Arctic nations and then there's like I there must be like four or five different indigenous people represent these organizations so they are better there but then also the Arctic isn't homogeneous and the indigenous people don't have one single voice like a Sami population may have a very different interest than an Inuit population which again may have a very different interest from Greenland population from Greenland just is kind of like happy dependent but they still get money from Denmark and they can become fully independent once their economy works so they're kind of interested to get their economy growing and there it's this conflict of preserving that traditional lifestyle that they want but also developing some of their resources so they can get their economy growing so it's so very interesting to have dynamic Have you seen the movie Chasing Ice? Do you know what it is? It's a movie about the Arctic ice quickly it's like leaving in frozen because of a little warming climate change and in it they talk a lot about the way that the calving of the ice happens because of the warm water getting underneath the ice and stuff and it causes like huge masses of ice to come off like about the size of Manhattan at one point have you seen it? I should go to the store and have a look but I'm not sure it's much more common but I'm just wondering if people like that are involved with this kind of discussion this kind of are being actively involved people that have been on the front lines to see the disruption of what's happening up in the Arctic because of climate change whether there are people that are like that or like Josh Box or people that have been studying things like cracking and stuff and how how an oil spill might affect that kind of calving off of things and how it can maybe bring more of a global perspective and awareness of these kinds of issues to to help people in the other like the large republic at large to know about the importance of what the Arctic has to offer to meet the mark of the Arctic and I think products like chasing lights are amazing, amazing effective communication vehicles for this people like us who tend to be happy looking at that image of ice cover taking by Sally and it's very convincing and there's probably a much larger part of the public that seeing a very miserable movie about ice melt is much more effective so I think I hope the message is actually pretty similar I think we're both saying that the Arctic is changing, it's changing rapidly in sort of a scary way but I think that we're pursuing different methods for doing that and I'll be surprised if the NGO or the conservation community is a part of those conversations that the Arctic Council is going to actually make very well a strong voice there I didn't have something to give a proper question about any part of these conversations but I think I think that we're sort of all part of a continuum certainly communicating what's going on in a place that isn't here anymore you know that's important but I think I haven't seen that movie the book is great I think we showed it probably I think I would add to that it's also really the time where everybody that has experience is so scientist enough to really communicate their observations to policy makers but I think traditionally my scientists are more like I just do my science and publish my results and that's it but I think that we have to be more making a connection with our decision making than engaging with them that we all kind of try to understand what's happening what's the consequence what's the point about wording for the Arctic in the last 5 or 10 years that there's been a real push to study the Arctic from a scientific perspective more from an observational perspective so there is now and that's really there's been many more financial resources to put into supporting these sort of trying to continue on to try to now learn before changes and understand what we can remember from it I think we don't have a lot of questions from the Antarctic and totally different from other areas it's a really unique spot so I think we are the community is working hard to learn while we can yeah so you mostly studied micro organisms but you said like there are more organisms growing in the longer period and everything then some are normal once and everything do you know like there have been more like thriving of like fish or like other whales and like have they been migrating towards there or have they been like growing in population in there it's a great question I know I think do you sense through indigenous catches and I think there isn't a very developed fishery a commercial fishery in much of the Arctic because of the ice cover it's a tough place to run a commercial fishery so much of the productivity that comes into the charter in Alaska is both in Alaska and not in the Arctic Circle and much of even what's up there for example the native communities around Barrow and in the Canadian Arctic are not going hundreds of miles to the ice cover Arctic to study or to collect fish and capture those things I think it's mostly coastal so the answer I don't know you imagine that you would see those changes you know just like in the Gulf of Maine we see changes in the productivity in the bottom of the food map and we expect those to filter out for the upper food map I think it's the same history there but I'm not aware of really documented changes in the upper and upper food map yeah but the salt area is like we mentioned it's a really veteous catch area just below the Arctic Circle so if you look at the difference then all this productive area goes up there and then it's about a million productive fishery and the upper part or the other thing is the European Arctic is pretty different as you saw and bends like the European Russian Arctic doesn't have that much ice so there is a lot of fisheries on the continent Norwegian, Russian or the Barren Sea and there's also that fish there so it's all like I think it migrated from Russia to the Norwegians also Norwegians have more to catch there because of migration or the migratory fat so in terms of fisheries there's definitely going to be a lot of changes that are just pretty alarming for more bigger marine mammals or polar bears there is definitely changes that have been noticed not all in the same direction polar bears are usually harder to ride but I just heard recently that the polar bear population on the Russian side of the Barren Sea and off the Barren Strait they actually aren't thriving so they are increasing all the polar bear populations are suffering but these animals that depend on life are definitely changing so this is very impactful and the other thing about whales part of the timing that you mentioned in terms of the algae growth and the copobots come and then finally the whales actually eat this so if this timing is all of a sudden off then the whole migration of the whale come all the way up there but then food may not be there anymore so yeah also that's a matter of time maybe one more question I have a specific interest in the pre-input of the James Bay ecosystem and I'm wondering if that's also possibly included in the in this arctic culture at all or how far south does the does the arctic extend to where? within the Arctic Circle I said that's the boundary to use I don't really know if it was it do you know if that's within the Arctic Circle? I don't know but that's the territory that would be but then even the arctic where is the arctic? it's depending on the organization or the law there's slightly different definitions of the arctic some say everything just about the arctic circle is arctic other say where you have like no freeze anymore where you have like a certain temperature gradient so depending on the definition of use you can have the arctic extending all the way to the illusion islands or within there so this is then relatively difficult to have a regulation like this hold a code for shipping this goes pretty much beyond the arctic circles just because of the definition of this different organization's use