 It's 1 o'clock on Monday afternoon and you are watching Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Marck and this is Research in Manoa and every week we introduce some interesting new science discoveries from the University and it's my great pleasure today to have Lisa Hanwona and Amanda Ziegler to Ocean Amanda is a biological oceanographer and Lisa is a physical oceanographer and this is going to be a really interesting discussion because before the show I was saying that I know virtually nothing about physical or biological oceanography so I'm going to learn an awful lot today about what you ladies actually do. Amanda you are a graduate student which means this is what you're working on for your PhD correct? Correct. And then Lisa you've been here at Manoa for about a year as a postdoctoral fellow correct? That's correct. And you've had some background not only working in Antarctica but also in the Atlantic in terms of trying to study it. So for our audience can you just give us a description what do biological and physical oceanographers do Lisa if you could go first? Okay so thanks for having us first of all I'm very excited. So what is a physical oceanographer do? I mean it's a whole range of things we basically want to understand the interaction of the ocean with the atmosphere how oceans move also because the earth is rotating that brings in energy into the ocean you've got the tides from the moon so you've got this whole range of topics that you can look at in really big dimensions but also in a small one so there's like my thesis was about turbulence at the upper ocean so this is basically how wind and surface with solar radiations or sunshine would change the movement of the water at the water surface. And of course since we live in Hawaii surrounded by the Pacific Ocean presumably understand in the dynamics of the ocean and how it interacts with the atmosphere is really important to everybody living here in Hawaii. Yeah I mean you wouldn't have ways if there wouldn't be this interaction. And then Amanda you study more of the biology correct so what type of animals do you look at? Are you looking at little small phytoplankton or big sharks or something like that? Yeah again thank you for having us. Well for biological oceanography again as Lisa echoes it could be a range of looking at a range of organisms. My personal specialty is looking at benthic ecology so I'm interested in the animals that live on the sea floor in a range of habitats and I'm specifically interested in Antarctica. I also mainly look at larger animals so anything we call it megafauna anything larger than around a centimeter so that you could identify from photography or from video. Okay so anything you can see yeah there are other investigators of Manoa who look at really small phytoplankton watercolour and that sort of thing. Amanda you are primarily interested with things which live on the bottom. Yes correct. You can see with your eyes if you are lucky enough to be diving on the bottom and then Lisa presumably you're interested in how the physical environment whether it's saline water or whether you've got. Melt water. Fresh water. And so I presume that's one reason why both of you are interested in Antarctica because you've got this really interesting interplay between fresh water from the ice sheets and the ocean saline water and how it's mixing and how it affects life forms. Yeah. Okay and we've got some pictures so I always like having some illustrations in this show and I think this sort of encapsulates how adventurous you two are. Is this your field area? Yeah this is actually a picture we just took in March this year when we went to our final research trip down to Antarctica to Anford Bay the Fjordady we are studying it's at the Western Antarctic Peninsula so relatively high up in the north I think we looked it up what was it in Alaska? Fairbanks. Similar to Fairbanks it's about 65 south right? Yeah so it's on the other side. Okay and we saw this ship how big was the ship you know how long were you there? Five weeks on the ship we were about 30 to 40 people on board including the crew and the adventurous part I would say is crossing the trade passage so from South America and Chile we started and went down to Palma Station which took about four days. Four days okay and it was my first trip so I can only say it was okay. Okay. You were on this ship as well? Yeah so this was as Lisa said this was our third cruise for this particular project so we were both on this last one together. This particular research vessel that was pictured the Lawrence M. Gould it doubles as a supply vessel for one of the US research stations at Palma Station as she mentioned we have to stop there first we bring supplies scientists to and from Chile back and forth to the to the research station there before we can then go on and do our own research. And your research would be you'd be on station for several weeks or? So our work was all entirely ship based we have a couple cameras and different instruments weather stations on land but everything else we did based on the ship so we would do different measurements of instruments that we put over the side or off the back towed different instruments so we're collecting all of our data from the ship or deploying instruments that stay on the seafloor moorings that stay anchored to the seafloor for months at a time and then we have to go back turn them around take data off of them put new batteries in and hopefully retrieve them at the end. And presumably if you're based off of the ship life is a little bit more comfortable than if you were camping on the... I'd imagine yes. It's warm. It's warm. Unless you fall in the water. Presumably the water is near freezing. It's a very cold environment you wouldn't want to go swimming in it. And I think the next image which you brought along actually shows some of the challenges of deploying some of your instrumentation so Lisa can you tell us the person down at the bottom of the image is standing next to what appears to be a cylinder. Yeah. It's a rosette you take also it's a round measurement device and it has all of these bottles attached to it and you call it a CTD so it's a you measure salinity temperature and depth with it but in these bottles you can actually take water samples within the water column so you can take a couple of liters of water at for example 500 meter depth and then at 300 meter depth and that can give you insight on the chemical composition for example or if you have plankton or krill or any kind of creatures in that water. And both the connectivity and the temperature presumably tell you whether you're seeing regular sea water or it's being flooded by all melt water from the ice sheet. Yeah actually there's like so much you can see just in this profile because you have the surface water which is like might be a lot of fresh water coming in from melting glaciers and melting icebergs then if you go deeper there might be an incoming current at depth so there's especially in the fjord that we look at we we think that there's deeper water coming off the ocean into that area which surface is there because of the bottom topography so little hills on the sea. Yeah Amanda why do you pick a fjord and a fjord is a drowned glaciated valley as I correct so it's been carved by the glaciers over time and now it's essentially like a canyon might be on on land but it's submerged. Fjords are really interesting places to study because they are such steep walled regions so you get a lot of different biology on the on the walls on the seafloor it also concentrates a lot of organic matters so all of the productivity all the animals the plants living in the surface ocean may collect in that in that deeper basin so we're curious how this is different from the open shelf surrounding the rest of the continent. So fjord is a key locality to go and make a variety of measurements and presumed it's more sheltered as well so you don't get beat up by rough waves or something like that. Yeah it's very very common when we're inside the fjord it's very glassy. Looks very idyllic in that first image and I think we've got another instrument being deployed showing in this image and Lisa you said that it was collecting water samples at different depths is that what we're seeing down here at the bottom left? No this is actually a specialty of Amanda. I told you I knew nothing about this. I mean I wouldn't have known a couple of months ago. So we're looking at a sediment trap and so we put this down on a mooring which is anchored to the seafloor it's sitting around 150 meters above the bottom of the seafloor and it's essentially a giant cone it's exactly what it looks like it concentrates all of the sinking material coming out down onto the seafloor so that's essentially all of the food that the animals on the seafood for unless they're eating each other they need that to survive. Okay and how long would you have to leave this cone actually on the floor to get a representative sample? So it has 21 sampling bottles in it so we actually can vary how long each bottle is collecting for so we first deployment we left this out for around four or five months and got all those 21 samples turned it around left it out for another four months and then it was left out for another year so you have to kind of change the sampling interval. But typically you might leave for one of those sampling bottles you might have data which were collected over a few weeks to a couple months or something. And how much sediment do you actually get accumulated is it like a very thin layer or do you get you know a big sample? Yeah so that the picture actually before was showing it really well with all 21 bottles lined up it varies significantly throughout the year so when you have these pulses of the material sinking out then all of the and the plants that were growing the surface you'll get a really thick deposit of sediment it might be a couple centimeters thick of the screen flocking material and other times throughout the winter it seems like there's very very little coming down no no real sunlight for vital plankton to grow or it may be covered by sea ice so it's a really seasonal habitat for for animals relying on this. And the goal of the collection is primarily to look at what the food source is for all of the animals that are living on the bottom of the fjord. Yeah so this the sediment trap can be it's a way to quantify that amount the flux the particular organic carbon flux to the seafloor which is as I said it's basically all the food that the animals on the seafloor rely on. Okay has this been done for a long time or these sort of pioneering measurements so you've got no long-term time series to study? So inside the fjord this hasn't been done very very often a lot of the fjords on the Western Arctic Peninsula have been visited but not very well studied throughout time there is a long-term ecological research project that LTER for short that occurs since I don't know it's at least 25 years now on the outer shelf on the peninsula and they'd employ the same sediment trap so we have long-term records from outside of the fjords but nothing in fact. You can probably guess where I'm heading with this in that in the second half of the show we'll probably consider a little bit of what the changing environment is like with climate change trying to find out if you are seeing it for the first time or whether you're seeing it as part of a longer 25-year record of that sort of thing. I think we've got time just one more image if we can show the next image and this is I'm guessing Amanda this is some of the large critters that you like to look at can you tell us anything about what we're seeing? Yeah so this is a shot taken from one of the trolls that we did this is essentially a very large net which we drag along the bottom and it scoops up all of the animals that's in its way. We spend a few hours on deck maybe even up to six hours rinsing them off and sorting them by their identification so in the photo we've got a lot of bright orange those are sea stars like some asteroids you might see around here but they're different species. In conveniently they don't have a scale bar with them how big are some of these animals? So those were maybe a few inches across okay they do get much larger but in this photo there's also an octopus kind of in the center there again a few inches long a very large scale worm beneath that looks just kind of like a giant giant worm there in the center and those are really interesting animals in the Antarctic because they're predators and there are some of the top predators in these. And these would be living at depth of what 400 meters something like that? Yep they can go deeper as well but in the fjord we were collecting them from deep basins around 500 meters. Okay well we'll talk more about these after the break. Let me just remind you you are watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Mark and I have Amanda Ziegler and Lisa Hanbrun. I'm with me today both oceanographers one biology one physical oceanography and we'll be talking a bit more as we come back at the second half of the show. See you then. Aloha my name is Steven Phillip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and I'm the host of Shrink Rap Hawaii where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this we must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at 3 o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa and I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Mark. We're looking at ecology of the ocean deep or ecology off the shores of Antarctica with Amanda Ziegler and Lisa Hanbrun. Welcome to you both again. It's really fascinating that this is a field I have a little common knowledge of so can you just give me some idea what's it like working in this kind of environment. You're on a ship it's really cold you're trying to study something you know 400 meters beneath you in the ship. It must be an exciting experience right. Yeah it was really breathtaking first of all for me it was the first time going down there and to see this really wonderful landscapes like untouched and and huge dimension I mean the mountains go up to 2,000 meters at times and it's like just at the sea. And this is on the West Antarctic I think very close to Palmer Station. Yeah exactly. And Amanda have you been down there before or is this your first visit? Yep this was actually my third trip down in the past year and a half so pretty rapid fire cruising. A lot of times spent away from Hawaii. Yes quite a challenge. But the working environment I mean do you work like an eight-hour day or do you work around the clock or you know how much break time do you get? It really depends. So on this cruise that we've been there's different projects involved there are different projects involved so it always depends on can you work 24 hours so you have work during the day and at night or if you have land-based operations. So our project was basically from most of the time from ship and you've seen these CTD measurements before and this is something you can take also at night. So there were some when you have to recover an instrument and you have to see the instrument you would go during the day and have different teams assigned to different jobs and then you would shift around or like have another shift studying at eight o'clock in the evening after dinner that would work then until the next morning on another project. And Amanda you say you've been there three times do you go back to the same place every time or do you get to see more of the landscape? Typically on the first two cruises we were exclusively studying the one Fjord and Bird Bay as she mentioned and a little bit a little station out on the open shelf. On this last cruise we actually were working with a lot of other projects involved so we were sharing ship time and so we actually saw most of the peninsula all the way down below the Antarctic Circle which was really exciting very different. 24 hours a day like presumably if you're there. Very beautiful sunsets and sunrises. Now of course the 800 pound gorilla in the room you've been going down there several times and we're wired or we hear a lot of news about say the breakup of the West Antarctic ice sheet and global climate change. Is your research related to how we might be seeing changes in the ecosystem down there? Have you seen this personally or your colleagues, your advisor, the mentor? Well the aim of our project is to understand how everything connects in the system so how the glaciers could affect the growth of the plankton at the surface and thereby how much through the Bantic level sort of sea floor would get and so we have measured that there's an increase of temperature in this area which is about two degrees which is pretty high so we expect there's a change in how much melt water comes in and to understand what this would be for the ecosystem we first have to understand what is going on right now. We hear a lot about how the coral reefs around Hawaii are being stressed out through thermal bleaching as well as ocean acidification. Amanda do you see the same kind of stress maybe in some of the animals which you're identifying on the floor of the the fjords? Do they either look as if they're really healthy or are they also starting to respond in the same way that our coral reefs in trouble around Hawaii? So the Antarctic is actually pretty different a different system and the major reason is that the water column is around freezing as you mentioned in temperature from the surface all the way to the sea floor so temperatures may be around minus one degrees C maybe as high as two degrees C but that's a really small temperature range and most other organisms even if they're in the deep sea may exhibit or most may experience a much larger temperature difference so I haven't personally seen I don't have enough data actually to say that I can see any long-term changes in the bentos but theoretically if there's a greater influx of fresh water from the melting ice sheets we expect that it would have that could be a similar stressor to say the acidification our latitude affecting the coast is that correct so it wouldn't be unexpected to see some kind of change exactly we don't really know how it's going to manifest and that is one of the major questions we want to assess is what is the status of this ecosystem now and how is that projected to change if we increase the flirt freshwater flux coming off the glaciers if they're you know increased melting or if we increase the temperature of the fluid water what will have what will that have an impact on the organisms and the entire ecosystem. At least as a physical oceanographer we know that around the Arctic ocean Antarctic ocean that's where a lot of the base of the food chain is yeah do your studies of the physical oceanography of the area hint that there's any problems or is this sort of a still untested territory where we don't really have the time series to say one way or the other. Well concerning the food chain it is it provides now a lot of food to all levels so it's like the krill but also bigger whales and well currently we have enough food but if the currents might change not a currents change if if the stratification for example so how the fjord is layered because you have fresh water coming on top of salty water which doesn't like to mix as much with the heavy salty water this could change the productivity to surface and thereby also how much food you have but also how much nutrients come into the water and the water is transported out into the onto the ocean and that can provide iron for example which is like one of the key nutrients for growth. So this increases the importance of people like the two of you doing longer term studies because we really aren't under clear exactly how the environment is changing so hopefully this is your career. Let's take a look at another slide and see and this looks as if it's nighttime operations correct and the people here what are they doing we saw they sorting through something from one of these strategies or? Well I presume this is a box score. This was actually one of the trawls that the animals were shown in the previous slide. Yeah. So this is the finish result. We have to do to sort through the animals once it comes up we spend a few hours out on deck sorting through and you can see everyone's quite bundled because it was pretty cold out on deck and sorting through all the different animals sorting them into all those different buckets by what what organism they are. And NSF is the National Science Foundation right which presumably funded all of your research down there and do we have another slide I think this is just a really pretty few I mean anybody would love to go and see this kind of scenery I presume the weather wasn't always as good though. We were actually pretty lucky on this cruise that we had a lot of sunny days and we heard every day it's gonna be stormy and snowy tomorrow but it didn't happen until the very end. But that was I mean if you look at this picture you can see it's a very calm environment and so it's terrific. There's sudden wind burst coming up every now and then it can mix up the whole fjord and then it's when the nutrients are provided to the surface waters actually washed out of the fjord into us out into the ocean and this is when the nutrients get supplied. And of course the glaciers right in the middle of this field of view that's what presumably is advancing into the ocean. Yeah so you I don't know which glacier this is exactly but we have one glacier that is moving like five meters a day as an average so you see there's a lot of ice and fresh water budget coming in if it would be melting. It's moving forward five meters how thick is it or how wide. It can be up to a hundred meters above the surface. Thick and what's the width so we're seeing. I think it's pretty it's almost a kilometer wide. Huge volumes of water per day entering into the fjord and of course this is fresh water. Yeah but it doesn't mean that it melts right away in the fjord so you also have this huge icebergs they're just drifting out of the fjord. I'm thinking back to a few weeks ago when we had Matt Barbie come and talk to us about sea level waves in Hawaii. Yeah the glaciers advancing into the water presumably float but they displace more water so if they're moving faster now than they were in the past that's going to impact sea level waves as well. Yeah it's going to put more water. I think you've got an image next one up. Yes this is I guess a good starting point or a good ending point for us. This is showing where your study areas were and down in the bottom right of course is the constant of Antarctica but then the top left we've got a colored diagram. I'm not quite sure we've got is this the bathymetry? Yeah that's a bathymetry and I put this line in. That's the water depth right? That's a depth so it's kind of like the topography but in reverse to the ocean and this image shows the model domain that we are working with. Okay I'm afraid I'm being told in my left ear that we have got virtually no time left but Lisa I'd like to thank you for coming on the show and Amanda good luck with your graduate career I hope you can continue this later on. Well thank you for watching today's show just a reminder you're watching Think Tech Hawaii I'm your host Pete McGinnis-Mark and today we've been hearing all about the ecology in the ocean depths off of the coast of Antarctica. Remind you that we show every Monday at one o'clock Hawaii standard time so until next week thank you very much for viewing goodbye for now