Net zero marine science: BAS' 10 year plan

海洋是全球面临的挑战,以及therefore require a global response. And that’s why the most important thing we can gather is data. You cannot make informed choices without proper data. The British Antarctic Survey has just launched their 10 year plan, ‘polar science for a sustainable planet’, and Geraint Tarling spoke about what they’re hoping to achieve.

Geraint - BAS has been working in the polar regions for over 60 years. And what we have is a strategy that we call 'polar science for a sustainable planet.' And it's all about trying to make those measurements but also in a way that is relevant to society, to actually show that the measurements that we are making really do make a difference in terms of how we understand and can get evidence for the changing of the planet and the way that we're going to get that done. And also put it into evidence that policymakers need.

Will - Which measurements exactly are you talking about when you put something into the ocean, what are you hoping to find out?

Geraint - So we measure all the physical things that an ocean has in terms of the way that we would describe it, the temperature, the salinity, also its biology, what colour it is, which is an indication of the amount of chlorophyll, the amount of phytoplankton in there. But also using really unique instruments to look at the biology beyond that, the things that feed on phytoplankton like zooplankton and fish. And we even have listening devices out there that can listen for the populations of whales as they travel by and they make acoustic sounds that we can then record and even identify which species are going in which areas.

Will - Are you looking at the physical geography as well, perhaps where areas peak and trough and how that might affect the planet's currents?

Geraint - Yeah, there's an extreme amount of topography in the Southern ocean. The area that we work in is the southwest Atlantic region of the Southern Ocean going into the Antarctic and the topography there really channels the amazingly large currents that circumnavigate the Antarctic, it's called the Antarctic circumpolar current. And that's guided by the topography there. But the other thing that's really important that happens in the Antarctic as well as in the Arctic, is that there is a descent of water from the surface right to the ocean depths. So what's amazing about the Southern Ocean is that 70% of atmospheric heat is taken up by the Southern Ocean as well as 40% of the carbon. And that's taken into the deep ocean and stored there away from the atmospheres that potentially would be warming even faster than they already are.

Will - And I couldn't help but notice, but in your name is the word Antarctic. So I'd assume most of the study is going to be heavily based on the South Pole, but presumably not all of it?

Geraint - That's exactly true. We are the British Antarctic Survey, but we are a polar organisation and we are actually really focusing quite a lot of our research on the Arctic as well. Now, for instance, in Greenland there are melting glaciers that are melting now six times faster than they were in the 1990s. We really want to know what's actually causing that, what the rates of change are so we can make better models to predict what's going to go on in the future. Also the Arctic is really important in terms of the amount of ice that's been retreating there. It's been predicted actually even by 2030 that you may have no summer sea ice in the Arctic. It was quite a frightening prospect. But that's gonna have huge implications on both the physics and the biology of that ocean.

Will - Once you've worked out what's going on at the poles, that affects the rest of the planet as well, doesn't it?

Geraint - Absolutely. So when I was talking about those waters descending into the deep parts of both the Arctic and the southern ocean, what they do then is they travel back in the deep parts of the ocean to the rest of the global ocean. And that actually this sort of conveyor belt of the currents as they go through the oceans is a really important process that drives a lot of the features that we see of the world's oceans. Also, what the Southern Ocean and Arctic do is that they provide most of the nutrients that the rest of the world's oceans rely on for their productivity. So they have a number of rolls in carbon, in nutrients and in ocean heat and currents. Once

Will - You've taken all this data, this salinity data, this chlorophyll data, the depths and the surveying of all the animals and plants and what have you, what do you then do with that data? Where does that go to hopefully make a meaningful change?

Geraint - Well, the first thing that we need to do with our data is to make sure that it's quality control, because lots of people are making measurements. We need to be absolutely certain that when we've made those measurements there to international standards that people can rely on them. And then the second part of that is to make sure that they're logged in a polar data centre that we have here or other data centres in the uk that they are both available to ourselves but then also available to the international science community so they can be analysed and put together with other data sets. And then the third thing, of course, is that we need to analyse it ourselves. We need to do peer peer review research. We need to actually get the analysis out in the scientific literature so that everybody else can scrutinise them and also that we can actually identify the patterns that really matter and also put them into models because models are really important to predict. Using these observations, constraining what they're predicting to make sure that they're as accurate as they possibly can be in their predictions.

Will - Is the final step of this to show this to some kind of policymaker and hopefully enact, hopefully global but potentially local ratifying change?

杰伦特,我们认为我们的角色是提供the evidence for policymakers the best available evidence so that when they are making decisions or they have to make choices between what decisions to make, but they have the evidence they need to make the choice that is the correct choice. But we try to engage as much as we possibly can. We regularly contribute to parliamentary inquiries about either the state of the climate or the state of the polls. We regularly talk to politicians or contributors to the IPCC and also the IPBS, which is about biodiversity and ecosystem structure in the oceans. And we try our best to be as outward looking as we possibly can to give as many lectures, to go to schools as well as to to to public forums, to actually talk about the things that we are seeing, the dramatic changes that we have witnessed in the the Southern Ocean and the Arctic. And to actually put that into a context of how rapid those changes are in relation to, you know, how things might look in the very near future.

Will - 10 years from now, where do you hope to be? What do you hope to know?

Geraint - What we want to do is to have Earth system models that are really accurate in predicting what the earth is going to be like in 10 years time. And that will take a lot of observation and a lot of modelling. We want to actually also be an organisation that, by 2040 and we hope to be sooner than that, we are net zero. Now doing oceanographic science means that you do have to take ships to sea and we want to make those as carbon neutral as they possibly can. And the way we are actually gonna combat that as well is to use lots of autonomous instruments that have very low carbon footprints that we can set out. As well as having a low carbon footprint, it measures oceans in unique ways that we haven't been able to do before. So we're gonna both become more carbon neutral, but also be amazing at observing the oceans in ways that have never been even considered even 10 years ago.