Feeling the Heat by Jo Chandler

Author:Jo Chandler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

9

The Siren in the Sea

We scientists … are deeply concerned by recent, rapid changes in ocean chemistry and their potential, within decades, to severely affect marine organisms, food webs, biodiversity, and fisheries. To avoid severe and widespread damages, all of which are ultimately driven by increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), we call for policymakers to act quickly to incorporate these concerns into plans to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at a safe level to avoid not only dangerous climate change but also dangerous ocean acidification.

Monaco Declaration, October 2008, approved by 155 scientists from twenty-six countries, leaders of research into ocean acidification and its impacts

Flying out one day beyond the Shackleton ice shelf, we sight the bright red form of the Australian Antarctic research ship Aurora Australis stuck fast in a vast field of lingering summer pack ice. She looks like a bath toy, her great hull shrunk down to size by the immensity that has captured her. She’s been wedged several days, and our pilots swoop in to scope the crowded ice, hoping their bird’s-eye view might identify a weakness and a way out. Peering down from the portholes of our little plane, it’s easy to imagine the frustration of the scientists on the ship below, sweating on the captain finding a lead out of the grasping white so that they might resume their progress and their work.

Somewhere down there are a team of marine scientists from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (ACECRC) in Hobart—researchers right at the top of my interview wish list flying down to Antarctica. Their project is one of the most compelling on that summer’s scientific schedule. But I am entirely out of luck. I was supposed to catch the team leader, Donna Roberts, at Casey. But the weather muck-ups with the flight schedule mean that I passed her somewhere out at Wilkins runway—just another anonymous parka being rounded onto the plane for the return flight to Hobart as I was being hurried off. Meanwhile her colleagues are out on the Aurora pulling anchor, heading out of Newcomb Bay with a good-bye blast of the horn. All I could do was grit my teeth and join the other Casey villagers to wave the icebreaker off as the traditional volley of farewell flares exploded overhead. Now here we are again, tantalisingly close, still out of reach.

Roberts and her colleagues have spent the summer voyaging the Southern Ocean fishing for clues about the hidden worlds of the deep. As the ship ploughs through thousands of kilometres on a circuitous route from Hobart, stopping at the Australian stations punctuating the East Antarctic coast—Casey, Davis and Mawson—the scientists trawl fine mesh nets behind the ship at various depths, hauling in samples of sea water teeming with a prized catch barely visible to the naked eye.

The water samples they collect and catalogue contain microscopic populations of the shell-building creatures which sustain the marine food web—snail-like molluscs called pteropods, protozoan foraminifera, as well as abundant single-celled algae called coccolithophorids.

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