It’s the rarest of rare conditions along coastal Newfoundland: a dead calm day.
By 7am, the crew aboard the fishing boat Belle of the Bay took full advantage of this, pulling out of the harbor at Heart’s Content in blinding July sunlight, with their eyes set on a prized catch in the middle of Trinity Bay.
They don’t chase fish. The object awaiting them looks like a cross between a torpedo, a banana, and a Dash 8, a type of underwater drone called a glider.
“It’s not the usual job I would recommend for people who don’t like to be challenged. It’s a mission,” said Nikolai von Oppeln-Bronikowski, head of planning operations at Memorial University.
“I think everyone who works with gliders sees themselves, in one way or another, on a mission.”
The Migaloo glider is waiting to be assembled on the surface of Trinity Bay after spending three weeks in July 2022 collecting data with a prototype PH sensor. (Lindsay Bird/CBC)
Today’s mission to retrieve this glider – nicknamed Migaloo, after the humpback whale – was a team effort. It combines the scientific lens of von Oppeln-Bronikowski and assistant Sarik Shaikh-Upadhye, with the father-son fishing duo of Doug and Kyle Piercy, who have lent their boat and expertise to Memorial University glider research for nearly a decade.
“It’s not light,” says Doug Piercy as he and von Oppeln-Bronikowski pull the 1.5m long Migaloo out of the bay. The two check it out, paying particular attention to a prototype sensor attached to it like a small science backpack.
“It’s the pH sensor right there that all the fuss is about,” said von Oppeln-Bronikowski.
At first glance, Migaloo and its sensor are intact, marking the first milestone in a year-long effort that everyone on the boat simply calls ACOP: the Atlantic Ocean Carbon Observatory Pilot Program.
“ACOP is kind of a little stepping stone in terms of advancing our ability to do more CO2 measurements [in the ocean]” said von Oppeln-Bronikowski.
Nikolai von Opeln-Bronikowski, left, inspects the Migaloo glider after taking it out of the water. Doug Piercy, center, and Kyle Piercy, right, are two fishermen based in Heart’s Content who lend their boat to scientific missions. (Lindsay Bird/CBC)
“Where is most of our planet’s carbon?”
These measurements are urgently needed as carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere continue to rise.
“If you ask the question, where is most of the carbon on our planet? The answer is that it’s in the ocean,” said Brad de Young, a physical oceanographer at Memorial University and lead researcher at ACOP.
The world’s oceans are a huge carbon sink—absorbing a quarter to a third of the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere.
Atlantic Voice26:10Migaloo’s Mission
Much of the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere ends up in our oceans, especially the North Atlantic. We’re heading out on an expedition to Newfoundland using underwater drones, trying to answer pressing scientific questions like: why is the North Atlantic so good at absorbing carbon, and how much more can it hold?
“What that means for us, in a planetary sense, is that the increase we’re seeing in atmospheric CO2 is much less than it would otherwise be if there was no ocean.” So the ocean plays a big role in mitigating and slowing down the pace of climate change,” de Young said.
But exactly how much carbon the ocean has taken up – and where its limit for doing so might be – are some of the many unknowns in this field of oceanography.
“Carbon in the ocean is strangely complex,” de Young said.
Unlike things like temperature, de Young said, “sensors to measure different aspects [ocean] carbon ones aren’t as easy to build, aren’t as reliable, and just aren’t as well developed. So the carbon observatory is basically a platform where we can test and actually use the instruments.”
Migaloo’s pH sensor, which measures acidity, is one such ACOP tool. Carbon makes the ocean more acidic, and checking the pH is one way to try to determine carbon uptake.
Brad de Young is a physical oceanographer at Memorial University and lead investigator in the Atlantic Carbon Observatory Pilot Program (ACOP). (Submitted by Brad deYoung)
Labrador Sea Lung
There’s an international scientific effort looking at these carbon issues, and ACOP — which includes a range of partners including Dalhousie University and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans — is focusing its attention for now on coastal waters off Newfoundland and Labrador.
Because, as it turns out, one thing science has found is that some areas of the world’s oceans are better at absorbing carbon than others. The North Atlantic is one such place, with the Labrador Sea—that remote stretch of water between Labrador and Greenland—a particular star, thanks in part to its often turbulent surface acting as something of a lung.
“Think of the ocean as reaching into the atmosphere in the Labrador Sea and breathing in and extracting carbon dioxide and oxygen from the atmosphere,” deJong said.
Uta Passow is a biological oceanographer at Memorial University and a member of the ACOP team. (Lindsay Bird/CBC)
DeYoung and his team would like to fly their gliders into the Labrador Sea to collect valuable data on ocean carbon. Although this can be collected by scientists aboard ships, there are major drawbacks to this work.
Research ships are in short supply in Canada and getting space for an outgoing mission is extremely expensive. Also, such missions in the Labrador Sea mostly happen in summer, and ACOP wants to know what happens in winter, when temperatures drop, winds rage and waves average 15 meters high – and carbon sinks are thought to be higher.
“It’s a very challenging place to make measurements… and at the same time it’s absolutely essential that we make measurements there. It’s a catch-22,” von Oppeln-Bronikowski said.
DeYoung recalled an infamous winter ship mission to the Labrador Sea where “in 65 days at sea, they got one day of useful work. That’s not a very good way to get work done.”
This is where autonomous vehicle technology, such as gliders, comes to the rescue.
“[They’ve] definitely changed the game,” said Uta Passow, a biological oceanographer at MUN and another member of the ACOP team.
Sarik Shaikh Upadhye, left, and Nicolai von Oppeln-Bronikowski inspect the glider while docked at Heart’s Content. (Lindsay Bird/CBC)
Gliders do have to surface to relay information back to waiting researchers, but they spend most of their time underwater and are able to avoid very rough waters in a way that ships simply cannot. In addition, they can roam the ocean, while ship-based measurements are limited to one location, at one point in time.
“These autonomous vehicles like … gliders or observatories, they will increase data input by orders of magnitude and hopefully allow us to make predictions,” Passov said.
“If we want to make predictions that are reliable, we really need to understand how the ocean will respond to climate change and whether it will continue to take up carbon, or take up more carbon in the future, or less carbon.” So we really need to understand the carbon cycle, and right now we don’t.”
In an era of climate anxiety and uncertainty, this lack of knowledge at the highest level of expertise is scary to think about. But for deYoung, hope lies in projects like ACOP.
“The question now is whether we should throw up our hands and say, ‘oh my gosh, this is such a big problem,'” deJong said.
“And that’s not a reasonable answer. I think part of what we’re arguing is, let’s document what’s going on so we understand where the critical spaces are and how we can adapt.”
Nikolaj von-Oppeln Bronikowski inspects a science device called the CTD that will make measurements that he and other researchers can use to double-check data from the glider. (Lindsay Bird/CBC)
The Atlantic Carbon Observatory pilot program runs through mid-2023; his team hopes that a permanent carbon observatory — one that will involve international teamwork — can emerge from it to continue chipping away at their ocean carbon questions.
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