Ep. 96 - Exploring Ocean Microbes: Dr. Julia Huggins On the Climate Effects of Warming, Acidification and Deoxygenation of the Oceans - Science 360

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
One degree warming on average across allthe oceans is a huge amount of change
when we think on a global level, keeping those numbers in perspective, But
yeah, and very obviously as ascientist, you do look more at the
long term, like the big timescales, and most of the average joes

(00:21):
on the street, we're thinking likecompared to last year, right, yeah,
exactly, And you don't think inthose terms automatically. Automatically, you
think in big terms, big times, exactly, and those are where the
changes really occur in sort of irreversiblechanges that might happen are on tens or

(00:42):
hundreds of years scale when we're talkingabout humans. But those are even different
than the really long term time scalesthat climate scientists would think in terms of
hundreds of thousands or millions of years, because when we think about past periods
of warming and cooling on the Earth, we're talking about millions of years.
Those are the numbers that we're throwingaround. Welcome back to another episode of

(01:02):
Science three sixty. This is TimStevison, your host. This is part
two of my discussion with doctor JuliaHuggins. Last week we talked about the
forest microbes. This week we're gonnatalk about the ocean microbes. These are
two of my favorite episodes I've everrecorded on Science three sixty And as Chris

(01:23):
Jansen said at the opening of mylast episode, doesn't it feel good just
learning things? Especially when the natureof the science is the science of nature.
This podcast is a proud member ofthe Teach Better podcast Network, Better
Today, Better Tomorrow, and thePodcast to Get You There. Explore more

(01:44):
podcasts at www dot Teach Beetter Podcastnetworkdot com. Now let's get onto the
episode. Okay, so today we'regonna learn about the oceans. To most
people, the ocean is the surfaceof the ocean. It's what you see
when you go to the shoreline andyou look at the waves and the sunlight

(02:05):
reflecting off the water. That,to most people is the ocean. To
a few others, maybe you've wadedin. You might even go swimming,
although I've heard many people say thatthey don't like going in the ocean because
they're afraid of what's below them.You know, what you can't see is
obviously going to hurt you. Youknow, our mind plays silly tricks on
us that way. But the oceanis the driver of the planet. It's

(02:28):
the provider of life and sustenance,and is the oxygen. It's the and
the chemistry of the ocean is changing, and Julia is going to explain so
much of this to us today.If you're a teacher, enjoy this opportunity
to listen to an expert teach youabout the oceans, the chemistry of the

(02:51):
oceans, the biology of the oceans, even the physics of the oceans.
Enjoy learning. This is what makesteaching so fun. This is what makes
good teachers, is you find enjoymentin learning yourself. And then the corollary
to that is you run into yourclassroom saying, I can't wait to tell

(03:15):
you what I've learned. This isspectacular information, and I hope half of
you end up going on to becomeoceanographers or marine biologists. You know,
like to be inspirational, you needfirst to be inspired, and this kind
of talk inspires me, and Ihope it inspires you. I'm tempted to

(03:35):
tell you all about the different experimentsI've done in my classes to do with
water and salinity and pH and howI've taken the regular science curriculum and sort
of spun it around the theme ofthe oceans and the forests. I'm tempted
to, but I don't think Iwill. I really want Julia to explain
the information herself, and I wantyou, the teacher, to create in

(04:00):
your own way ways that you canbring this information to your classes. But
a word of advice, teach yourlessons with a theme, have an end
in mind. Teach in such away that it's not for the sake of
the content, but for the sakeof the bigger picture. Beyond the content.

(04:23):
You have your science, and thenyou have your metascience, the overarching
reasons why we learn things and whywe know things. Let that be a
theme in your mind as you listento my discussion with Julia, and I
hope that it radically affects the wayyou teach your classes. This is how

(04:46):
I've taught for many years now,and I feel like it's been a success.
I'm not teaching it because I haveto. I'm teaching it because I
want these kids to know this stuff. I want to live on a planet
that's worth living on, and Iwant my students to be a big part

(05:08):
of the reason why it is.So we're going to jump right into the
discussion between myself and Julia, Andif you would do me a favor,
click rate and review on your podcastplatform and subscribe and share this episode with
your colleagues. Spread the word.Let's let this theme and this knowledge that

(05:30):
we're gaining in this episode today toreach as many people as we can.
I think, for the betterment ofour students' minds, for the betterment of
our planet, and for the bettermentof your career as a teacher. Love
what you do, do what youlove. And here's my episode with doctor
Julia Huggins Dirt and water. Butit's the microbiome in the dirt and water.

(06:00):
It really gets you going, yeah, exactly. So oceans, oceans.
I love the ocean, and Ilove learning about the way they affect
everything everything, yeah, weather andclimate. But there seems to be these
three kind of things that have croppedup, and that is ocean warming,

(06:25):
ocean acidification, and and this wholesort of a newer one, this hypoxic
anoxic problem, this losing the oxygenin the water. And I wanted to
know. See, I guess it'slike, well, let's just talk about
all the bad stuff, but it'sgood to understand the science and then we

(06:47):
can then start talking about solutions.Yeah, I mean we personally right now
may not be able to come upwith solutions because I get that part.
Yeah. I froze for a minutethere because I was like, I don't
know, we know, yes ingeneral, yes, yes, absolutely.
Do you want to tackle those threekind of one by one a little bit,

(07:08):
like start with me ocean warming.Let's go to ocean warming first.
Yeah, And of course they're allinterconnected, so it's a little challenging to
talk about one in isolation of theothers. But warming is the root or
at least connected to one of thefundamental processes that's connected to the other two.
So warming because everything is warming,and the oceans are a big part

(07:30):
of the Earth's surface, so they'regonna be impacted by a lot of that
warming. And the other important pieceis the oceans are water, and water
has a very high heat capacity,right, So those like physics and chemistry
teachers often talk about this with students, the amount of energy it takes to

(07:51):
heat something up one unit of heat. Water takes more energy to warm up.
So when the Earth's surface is warming, and we talk about those numbers
as averages, you know, wesay like, oh, one point five
degrees warming. That's a really averageterm. That's talking about temperature across the

(08:11):
globe on average, how much it'sgoing up. But if we have that
much warming on average, that meansa lot of heat energy is going into
the oceans because they can absorb somuch of that energy before they go up
too much in temperature. So thefact that we're seeing the oceans now warming
up is a reflection of just howmuch additional heat energy we are trapping on

(08:35):
the planet, and the oceans arethe biggest sink of that heat energy.
They take the biggest the brunt ofthat warming four point two jewels per degree
per gram per gram per degree.Yeah. I always think of how like
at a beach, you notice thatin the daytime the sand gets really hot,

(08:58):
it's hard to walk on. Watertemperature might feel a little bit cool
because compared to the air, itis a little bit cooler than the air.
But then if you come back tothe sand beach in the evening,
the sand is cooled off, butthe water is still warm. So the
heat capacity of the water is showingitself as being far greater than the heat
capacity of silicon dioxide. Exactly,Yes, and sort of on a larger

(09:18):
scale, we think about the climateof BC Coast, for example, it
gets colder in the winter, butnot as cold as if you just go
over the mountains to the interior,because we're near the ocean, and the
oceans, just like on your shorttimescale example of like, they stay warm
even through the evening time when thesun goes away, they retain a lot

(09:39):
of their warmth through the winter,And so being close to bodies of water
can help regulate temperature and keep youwarmer than you would be otherwise on a
longer term timescale as well. Andso when we think about our planet and
the warming that's happening right now,you can put two different spins on that.
You could say, well, onone hand, that's great that there's

(10:01):
a high heat capacity of water,because the temperature is not going up as
much as it would if it hada lower heat capacity. But on the
other hand, what it means isthat those oceans have already absorbed a lot
of heat energy and they have goneup in temperature. They are going up,
and even if we stop pumping newheat energy into the Earth's surface,

(10:24):
they are going to hold that heatfor a long time because it goes both
ways. It takes a lot ofenergy input to warm water up, but
then water holds that heat for along time for a long time. So
when we're thinking about climate and globalwarming and things related to that, the
oceans are huge regulators of the Earth'sclimate in general because of their ability to

(10:46):
sort of regulate and long term bufferheat exchanges and the reservoirs of a lot
of heat energy on the planet.So it's one of the main reasons why
oceans matter so much from a climateperspective strictly speaking, temperature wise, and
if you factored in air temperature increasing, that's obviously gonna melt land based ice,

(11:07):
Greenland, Antarctic. And if thatland based ice, which will be
cold fresh water, flows into warmersalt water, there's gonna be a great
upset in the circulation of that water. Yes, and we should probably talk
about some of those circulations in alittle bit more detail. Okay, But
before I do that, one thingI just learned about relatively recently related to
warming and ice melting. Warmer airmelting surface ice, and it turns out

(11:31):
that warmer ocean waters are also meltingice because they kind of get to the
underside of the glapy. Of course, like in Antarctica, the ice sheets,
large portions of those ice sheets areunderwater, right, more of the
ice is underwater than is above.And so as the water warms up across
the planet, they're melting the icefrom the underside as well. So it's

(11:54):
getting double whammy, right, hotterair on the surface and Antarctica melting it
warmer ocean water melting the underside ofthose ice sheets. And they are a
kid, you not. There's aproject already in motion that they're trying to
create huge barriers, like big underwatercurtains that they want to put up around

(12:18):
big ice sheets in Antarctica to preventthe warmer waters coming through the circulation of
these big ocean currents that come downto Antarctica and prevent that warm water from
hitting the underside of the size ofthis curtain is, yes, how can
you have These people never tried shovelingwater. You can't shovel water. So

(12:39):
what they want to do They wantto put these big curtains that would like
basically float in the water column.They'd have like a string of booies that
would hold them up. And theywant to put up curtains that will prevent
the warmer water from hitting the undersideof these ice sheets. This is entering
the realm of like geoengineering, oftrying to deal with climate change in an
engineering way. If we can't trackolit emissions wise, that's a long tangent.

(13:03):
I don't want to go down rightnow because it'll take up too much
time to go into that, butit is it just to me demonstrates the
magnitude of importance of the oceans whenwe think about climate related issues, that
we are at the point where weare literally thinking about putting up curtains that
are hundreds and hundreds of miles longand many hundreds of meters deep deep to

(13:26):
try to I'm sure that I haveno effect on migratory fish or don't even
get me sorry, this is thewhole problem with you engineering. And when
it comes back to what we're talkingabout in the last episode of like understanding
the system before we jump too quicklyinto fixing things, this really for me
hits on that now whereas I usedto have this approach of like, let's

(13:48):
just come up with a solution,and now I realize that maybe the most
valuable thing I can do is contributeto a broader understanding of how it works
in the first place. And thisis the exact reason where things like that
matter, something like trying to messwith the system on that scale, Like,
yeah, it looks like a shortterm solution, but what else are
we messing with when we create abig change like that, and we don't

(14:11):
know because we still are trying tounderstand how these systems work in the first
place. I'm not a fan ofthis idea. There are many, many
more out there that every time Ilearn about them, I'm always like,
oh, boy, I bet thatcurbing emissions would be easier. It might
be a bit easier. I'm worriedabout Santa Claus all of a sudden,
because if the water's being warmed,if the water's warming and melting the ice

(14:35):
from below. Yeah, you know, Santa Claus lives in an area where
there is no land mass underneath hishouse. He should have gone to the
South Pool, where at least there'sa land mass there he could settle into.
But his waterfront property in Antarctica,yeah, he could you know,
migrate maybe. Yeah, Santa Clausgot bigger issues if all the ice caps

(14:56):
melt anyway, that's true. That'strue. So where are we going with
the warming water? Then? Sothe air is warming, and by the
way, there will be people whowill think, is the air really warming
because of us? Like the COtwo gas? Like maybe if you could
speak to the idea that CO twois measured in parts per million, what
do we have four hundred and foundand twenty five parts per million? Now

(15:20):
I haven't checked at reason that werearound there somewhere around there. I know
that when I first started teaching thisand a concerted effort was twenty ten ish
and it was about three seventy five. Ye And everything I've tried to do
is only as resulted. It justkeeps going up. So it's a potent
greenhouse gas, obviously it is.It's not the strongest in terms of its

(15:43):
individual impact, but it's the mostabundant, and it's the one that we
currently are creating the most of althoughother greenhouse gases that we are producing are
starting to be important as well.That's its own topic. But yeah,
it's I understand. I understand thecontroversy, and I know that that is

(16:03):
sometimes challenging for climate scientists to acknowledge, and I get it. Because we
are subjected to a lot of sortof what almost feels like collective gas lighting
on a societal level of like,we're working on this thing, and then
you know, society at large isjust kind of like, nah, that's
not happening, and we're like,yes, it is. And so it's

(16:26):
very wearing on your patients to be, you know, tackle those sort of
like arguments against what we're working onin ways that don't feel like they're coming
from a good place or are inI can't think of the term I'm trying
to think of, but I haveempathy, and I try to regularly return

(16:52):
to places of empathy for why therewould be confusion and controversy around climate issues.
It's a good strategy, and it'salmost necessary for maintaining a sense of
peace of mind and mental health whileworking in this field, because if you
don't have empathy, it just feelslike a constant battle and you're constantly under
attack. So I understand that firstoff, a lot of people are just

(17:18):
not fed information in a way thatin a way that they would be able
to decipher what's real and what's not, and they are fed information that's politically
biased and caters to very real fears, right, So when people are threatened
with their sense of livelihood and safetybeing taken away, if their career or
their field of work goes away becauseof climate movements, then that is an

(17:44):
appeal to a very real human needof security and safety. And whether that's
someone who works in the oil fieldsor someone who needs to drive a truck
for their type of work, orwhatever that is. I have a lot
of empathy for the fact that sometimesthe way that the climate conversations go is
not in a way that feels safeto people for some people, for sure,
And so I get that, Andthat's more of a matter of a

(18:07):
question of what they're willing to engagein, not the science itself being confusing,
but just whether they want to evenconsider it. But then on a
scientific level, people who are sortof maybe not climate scientists themselves, because
there's very little debate within the scientificcommunity, but people who are science adjacent,
informed in the sciences, but stillconfused about what the data is suggesting.

(18:30):
It's true that Earth's climate has changeddramatically throughout the geological past, and
not just in one direction. Ithas oscillated, it has gone through highs
and lows. It has been warmerthan it is today, it has been
colder than it is today, andthat is not wrong. And sometimes,
in an effort to sort of combatanti climate change narratives, people aren't willing

(18:55):
to acknowledge just how much earth climatehas changed. I think that I understand
why people don't want to acknowledge that, but I believe it's important. It's
important to acknowledge it because it hashappened, and that doesn't mean that what's
happening now isn't true also correct.And so where I come to when I'm
talking about these things and trying tomake the ideas feel less scary or easy

(19:21):
to engage with, I bring itinto a sense of perspective. So,
yes, the planet has changed alot, and it has has changed in
dramatic ways, but what we're talkingabout with those previous changes are big time
scales, and we don't want bigtimes big big time scales, And I
don't mean hundreds of years, Idon't even mean thousands of years. I

(19:45):
mean things like tens of thousands ofyears, hundreds of thousands of years,
and millions of years. These arethe time periods that we talk about when
we talk about past fluctuations in climate, and those big changes came with big
upheavals to life on the planet.And so we know that when these changes

(20:07):
occur in CO two levels and temperatureand all these other climate shifts, life
gets really messed up in that process. And that's when we have a lot
of time for those changes to happen. Right, So when these changes happened
over tens of thousands or hundreds ofthousands of years, there were still big
upheavals, mass extinction events and shiftsand evolutionary regimes of you know, transitioning

(20:30):
from dinosaurs to mammals and other exampleslike that where life went through big changes
when the climate changed. And sowhen we talk about modern climate change,
it's not to say the Earth hasnever done this before. What we're saying
is Earth has done this before,and because we know what happened last time,
that's why we're worried about it thistime. And it's happening faster now

(20:56):
than what we know about in thepast. In theory, there's no way
to definitively say that the climate neverchanged this rapidly. But from what we
know of we don't have any recordof something occurring this quickly compared to what
we are doing to the planet rightnow. Yeah. One of the first
units in the Grade twelve chemistry courseis rate of reaction reaction kinetics, And

(21:22):
in this instance, the rate ofthe reaction is what's most striking. Yes,
how fast is happening exactly, Soit's not about the fact that the
planet's warming, it's how quickly it'swarming, and what we know warming can
do to life and other systems onthe planet. Yeah, and so the
heat that's being stored in the atmosphereobviously is going to get absorbed by the

(21:45):
oceans. It covers what seventy percentof the surface of the planet is water,
So obviously that heat is going tobe stored a good chunk of it
anyway. And so what then isthe effect of a warmer ocean? So
many things, so many things.This affects so many things. The biggest
one that like primarily comes to mymind when I'm thinking about large scale systems

(22:10):
functioning is that the they're these bigsort of conveyor belts of water that are
moving relatively slowly but consistently across hugespatial scales, so big time scales and
big spatial scales we're talking. I'mnot talking about like waves or even like

(22:32):
not even like currents along the coast. I'm talking like huge conveyor belts of
water where water masses. For example, one that's well known is like water
moving up the coast of the eastside of North America reaches kind of the
polar area around Greenland and Iceland.That area, it cools down, it

(22:52):
sinks, sinks, and then itgoes to the bottom of the ocean,
and because new water is flowing intothat same area, it pushes that cold
water away and it comes back downthrough the sort of middle of the Atlantic
Ocean, but this time on thebottom. So it's like this big conveyor
belt where you have surface water goingnorthward and then sinking, and then water

(23:18):
coming down southward along the bottom ofthe Atlantic Ocean, and it kind of
turns its way along the bottom,and over time, this churning motion creates
like a big kind of like stirringa pot really slowly, like if you're
cooking soup or something like that,you need to you don't just let it
sit because then you get an unevencooking of things. You need this kind

(23:40):
of slow, consistent stirring of thepot and this conveyor belt does that,
and it's super super important for manyparts of the planet as a whole.
One of the things that it doesis it may It means that people can
live in Norway. Otherwise it wouldbe a froz and barren wasteland. It
would look like Antarctica. Okay.So the fact that we have, you

(24:04):
know, all of northern Europe rightis of mid Norway is like above the
ant the Arctic circcle, And soif it weren't for the introduction of warmer
waters being brought up on these currents, it would look something like, not
exactly necessarily like Antarctica, but itwould be very cold and frozen, because
Antarctica is below the Antarctic circle,right, And if you had the same

(24:25):
level of frozen climate north, thenmuch of northern Europe would not be habitable
the way that it is right now. And that's because the water is moving
north is carrying heat from the southernlatitudes, yep, and when it gets
up here to the northern latitudes,that heat radiates off the ocean and maybe
wind blows it. Yeah, it'sjust around it. It keeps just the

(24:47):
same way that the BC coast iswarm because we're in proximity to the ocean.
We don't have to have a homeon the waterfront, but to the
region is warm. It is,yeah, But the thing is the east
coast of can of the maritime provinces, Newfound Laborador, seems to have a
colder climate than we do. Sothat has to do with the prevailing winds.

(25:10):
So this is more atmospheric science orblowing in east. The heat comes
up and moves east towards Europe.Yeah, so most of the right the
prevailing winds come from. When you'reon the east coast of Canada, the
prevailing winds are coming from the continentwhere it's cold because you're not near the
ocean, and so you get morecold air going eastward. And so even

(25:30):
though they're near the water, ifyou're right on the coast, like Nova,
Scotia and some of those areas,it's it's warmer than if you're in
the interior at the same latitude.So there is still a warm is but
it's not as dramatic as when youare on a west coast and you have
the prevailing winds coming off the ocean, bringing that warmer air on shore,
which is what the coast of Norwayhas. For example, So in Norway,

(25:52):
the prevailing winds are still coming fromthe east and that's carrying warm moist
air off the oceans, and thoseoceans are warm because of those ocean currents
we're just talking about, right,So you get warmer moist air coming off
the coast onto land when you're inNorway, and as that warm air gets
pushed up over the mountains in Norway, it drops lots of moisture and you

(26:15):
have effectively the same climate we havehere on the west coast of BC.
They have a temperate rainforest in Norway, and it's because of a combination of
the atmospheric currents and the ocean currentsand how they interact in that little corner
of the world. And if thewater coming up from the southern latitudes gets
warmer, something bad is going tohappen. If it gets warmer, then

(26:40):
Norway would get warmer. But whatwe actually see happening is that climate change
in principle would warm that water more. But warming water is threatening that it
will shut down that circulation pattern.And we'll talk about maybe a little bit
about why. But before we getinto the y. If that conveyor belt

(27:00):
that I was describing before stops churning, then the water that's warmer from more
southern latitude stops getting carried up toNorway, and then Norway starts to freeze
over and looks more like what otherland based areas at that last degrees latitude
or if they're barren cold and exactly, yeah, And so that conveyor belt

(27:26):
is threatened because it depends on thispump of cold water sinking in the poles.
That warm water that's coming up frommid Atlantic regions on the surface cools
when it reaches the poles, andcolder water sinks, so it sinks down
and then pushes water along that conveyorbelt. And so the sinking that's happening

(27:51):
up at the poles is kind oflike the engine of the pumps. It's
what's churning the motion. Just likein a fish tank, right, the
whole water in the fish tank moveseven though the pump is just at one
location. So a lot of what'sfueling the movement of the water throughout the
Atlantic are these pumps at the poles. So what if it stays warmer,
then it doesn't sink exactly. Andif there's more freshwater input from melting ice

(28:15):
caps, fresh water is less densethan salt water. So a combination of
warmer poles and more fresh water meansless sinking in the polar region, which
is that pump. So if thatpump shuts down, then the circulation slows
and maybe stops, and that isgoing to throw off not just Norway.

(28:36):
Norway is my little case study,but so much of the global climate is
regulated by the circulation in the oceans, and that's a big one. It
makes me think of an experiment wedo in I've done it in junior science,
also in senior chemistry, where I'llsay the challenges make water float on
water, and so we use foodcoloring. So let's say use the red

(28:56):
to indicate warmer water. Blue willbe cooler water. And then here's some
salt, and here's some kettles boil, and of course you get cold water
out of the tabs. And surprisinglythey can actually make water float on water,
and there's a distinguishing line between thered water and the blue water.
Oh yeah, it's huge. Yeah, And they have to kind of figure
out, well, what one's moredense well, which one's heavier. The

(29:18):
salt and water will be heavier thanjust water, so maybe that's the more
dense one. And then what aboutthe temperature, How does that affect density?
And so we get into talking aboutthe motion of the molecules and they
figure out that the more dense waterwill be colder. Yeah. Absolutely,
And then what's cool is the interactionbetween these things. Saltiness and temperature both

(29:41):
affect density, and so you couldhave warmer water that's also saltier, and
then that might be the same densityas fresher water that's colder. And so
depending on playing with these different propertiesof the water, you can create different
dynamics in the ocean. It's socool that you do that in the classroom

(30:02):
because those are the principles that underliethese huge scale processes that are like the
basis of a lot of these climatescience this climate science work that we do.
Not to say that it doesn't getmore complicated when you get into the
advanced oceanographic physics, but at itscore, it really is these basic principles
and like scientists add lots of layersof nuance and complexity to it, but

(30:25):
a lot of people can grasp theseideas in a much more accessible way than
they think they can when presented withit like that. Well, the fun
thing that I didn't come up with. What the students did is they'll put
their cameras on it and record inslow motion and they'll run the water down
a stirring rod. Oh cool.And the question then is, Okay,
now we're going to try it pouringthe less dense one, and if it's

(30:52):
less dense, it should stay onthe top. But what if you poured
the more dense one, would itgo right through and sort of settle down
to the bottom. And then theyreplay these slow motion videos and it's very
clear that the water is going rightto the bottom and then just staying there.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, waterfloating on water, and those properties
turn out to be hugely important fora lot of oceanography. Like we see

(31:18):
in the oceans, these layers arevery defined. There's names for these layers
too, right, yeah, Anddepending on where they are, like you
can start to get very complicated interms of like I was just talking about,
there's like salty warm water which hasa name which is different than cold,
like less salty water, and youknow the terms that oceanographers come up

(31:40):
with are endless and complex and veryfascinating. I'd highly recommend it for people
who are interested in it, butI think it's probably okay beyond the scope
of what's like high school yeah,of general interest, but the properties are
what's definitely applicable and interesting, andthey're real, Like these are not just

(32:01):
abstract ideas that we do with likefood coloring to sea in a lab,
but that those phenomena happen in theocean. There are areas. So I
was just out on a ship,right, I just spent a month out
at sea studying a part of theocean. And in that part of the
ocean, there's about fifty meters ofsurface water that's mixed, and then there's

(32:25):
a really clear line that within likea couple maybe ten to twenty meters distance,
which is not very much compared tothe depth of the ocean. Within
about ten meters, you go fromone type of water to suddenly being in
a very different type of water.And this other body of water is sitting
right underneath the surface, but ithas very different chemical composition and different amounts

(32:47):
of oxygen. The temperature changes acrossthat boundary, so there's a lot of
physical and chemical differences between bodies ofwater that make up the ocean. Are
these delineated vertically or horizontally? MostlyI'm talking horizontally. I'm talking about layers
sort of playing on top of eachother. So you drop things sensors down

(33:08):
through these layers and pick up temperatureand salinity and various things of that name
exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it'scalled a CTD conductivity, temperature, and
depth. But we also put tonsof other sensors on it, so you
know, it could be a reallylong accuracy and the conductivity would belin for
salinity. Yeah, basically, sowe're measuring. There's many more sensors than

(33:30):
just those things. I don't knowwhy it's I guess they always have at
least those three, so we callthem CTDs, but they usually have,
like, I don't know, awhole bunch of abcs other sensors. Yeah.
We look at things like the amountof light. It's got a light
sensor on it. We look atwe have a sensor that basically picks up
how much junk there is in thewater, like how clear is the water,

(33:51):
a particle sensor basically turbidity. Yeah, turbidity. We look at oxygen.
We put oxygen on these instruments.There are depending on what you're studying,
you could put specialized sensors for otherproperties. But yeah, we're looking
at sort of trying to capture thefull range of the properties of these bodies

(34:13):
of water because they tell us somethingabout what's going on in the ocean.
And there's literally differences almost with thissharp line, yes, between this layer
and this layer. Yeah, oxygenis one of the ones you see most
clearly shift between. In the areathat I was just talking about, you'll
see like relatively high levels of oxygen, fairly homogeneous in the upper fifty meters,

(34:36):
and then all of a sudden itstarts to drop really rapidly. And
then within you know, like Iwas saying, like sometimes as little as
ten meters distance, you could gofrom having enough oxygen for a fish to
be able to breathe to suddenly therebeing almost no oxygen. Is that natural?
It is natural, but increasing inintensity due to climate change. So

(34:57):
the phenomenon itself is natural, butthe human an impact of it is increasing.
How rapidly that shift happens, howbig the areas are where that happens,
and how low the oxygen actually goeswhen it drops down. So we
can get into some of that ina bit, but yeah, it's it's
just to there's these like very clearexamples of these principles we would see in

(35:21):
a classroom happening in real time.While I'm out there on a ship.
I can see those layers, andI see them with sensors instead of with
food coloring. But it's the samething, and it's really real. That's
so cool. So these conveyor beltsof water, they're going to be circulating
nutrients as well. Right, they'reobviously circulating energy, which is affecting climate

(35:44):
on the continents. And it's beenfunctioning in a certain way probably for obviously
the history of the planet. They'vechanged, Okay, they've changed, but
we're very dependent on these things operatingin a natural way. Yes, and
the organ's animals in the ocean arealso dependent on it operating for migration and

(36:04):
for feeding. And yeah, theway that I would phrase it, and
the way that I typically phrase itto people is life as it currently exists
on the planet needs those currents tooperate the way they are currently operating,
because it's not that life inherently needsthis specific current in the North Atlantic there
have been. The North Atlantic Oceanitself is only about two hundred million years

(36:29):
old, right, like the AtlanticOcean didn't exist until Panteas split apart.
So we know that life has existedwith different states of currents and circulation on
the planet. But when those changeshappen, those that's when we see these
like mass extinction events and major shiftsin the type of life and the structure

(36:50):
of how life works on the planetcorrelate to these big system level changes on
the physical side of things. Sothe current life, the life that we
are familiar with that supports human civilizationas long as humans have been around,
and everything that we've co evolved withhas been within a timeframe that is dependent
on the climate functioning the way thatit functions now, which includes like that

(37:12):
conveyor belt for example. In theory, that could shut down and life itself
would not go away, but itwould not look like the life we know.
Okay, it would probably be amass extinction event and many many many
generations more than we could we probablywouldn't be humans anymore. Right by the

(37:34):
time we would see sort of thenext regime of biology come that would adjust
to whatever climate comes next. Wewould be looking at timescales of hundreds of
thousands of years, if not millionsof years before we would see like the
new life that dominates the planet.Yeah, and that's not going to look
like the planet we know. Sowhen I talk about climate change, I

(37:54):
don't say life depends on it.I say life as we know it,
and the ecosystems that support our wayof life and our species and everything that
we know in love depends on thesecurrents. And these currents are being affected
by warming warming. Yes. Infact, some scary news came out science
wise earlier this year that the climatemodels have predicted for a while that climate

(38:20):
change would affect this the specific currentthat I'm talking about in the Atlantic Ocean.
We just didn't know the details ofexactly when those changes might start to
take impact or have an impact onthe current, and the models sort of
suggested maybe somewhere in the couple hundredyear realm. And then recently some scientists
showed that there's evidence of it alreadystarting to slow down. So we're already

(38:45):
starting to see changes. It doesn'tit's not something that like switches on and
off overnight, and it's probably notirreversible to a certain degree. If it
shut down completely, we would probablyenter a regime of climate change that would
be hard to come back from.But if it starts to slow, it
doesn't mean it can't be we can'tcome back from that, but it just

(39:07):
the evidence shows that this is itis very real. The things we predicted
are happening, and they're happening evenfaster than we anticipated initially, so we
know that it has an impact andwe're starting to see signs of it.
Okay, yeah, that's some news. It is. Yeah, it's h
I haven't actually seen the latest fallout. This was like back in January and

(39:30):
February some of these work got published, and I think there's some new more
recent fallow ups that I haven't actuallylooked into. But it's happening. In
a lot of areas of climate science. We have more advanced models, they're
getting more detailed in the in termsof our understanding of the system, and
we're able to predict changes in amore specific way rather than like general predictions,

(39:52):
which is what we've been limited to. We're able to start seeing real
time changes and we're seeing evidence ofthings happening quickly. There'd be ships like
the one you're on dotted all overthe oceans around the world, probably doing
this sort of research, yes,as well, probably satellite imagery that's picking
up the data as well. Yep. And then we have a ton of

(40:15):
automated sensors out there in the oceanright now, which is a relatively new
thing in oceanographic science. It's prettycool. Is like these little floats,
they're like two or three feet long. They're like equipped with sensors, many
of the same ones we're just talkingabout before, and some of them are
solar powered and sort of have theability to just on autonomously sink and float

(40:37):
up and down and sort of becarried around on currents while they're repeatedly sinking
and floating, so they're kind ofmapping. And they were just deployed,
probably taking out on a ship andjust released and they follow the current.
We've been putting them out into theoceans over the last couple decades, and
the and the sensors themselves are gettingmore advanced for creating more complex sensors setups

(41:02):
that can do more in terms oftransmitting real time data back to scientists and
the types of data that they cancollect, the sensitivity of the sensors on
them is improving. But collectively we'rethis this use of sort of autonomous equipment
in the oceans is helping us rapidlyunderstand way more about the oceans than we've

(41:22):
ever been able to because prior tothat we're just limited to individual research ships,
you know, cruising around and droppingthe sensors, and those are still
great for certain types of science,but in terms of monitoring the activity of
the oceans and whatever's going on,Yeah, there's a lot of cool work
now happening in that area of science. So have we kind of hit the

(41:43):
ocean temperature thing. Is there somethingelse that we should know about? I
think will come it's related related,Yeah, especially the oxygen one that we'll
talk about. Yeah, But Ithink in a general sense, those are
the main ways to think about temperatureand the oceans and how it relates to
things we care about and the temperature. Not just to mention that these conveyor
belts, but they wreak havoc onthe coral reefs. Yes, And I

(42:08):
guess I should say I've been thinkingbig picture, big time scales and spatial
scales when I'm talking about temperature,but on smaller scales, temperature matters a
lot for fisheries and inner tidal organismsand organisms that sort of like are exposed
to pockets of high temperature, andthose are sort of stressor events that organisms

(42:34):
are capable of dealing with to acertain degree. But as ocean temperatures heat
up generally, and as air temperatureincreases, there's longer and more intense heat
events, and so those can bemore intense stressors that either add to the
demise of organisms or straight out killthem in some cases if it's just too
hot. Yeah, and I've heardseven degrees celsius is sort of an average

(42:59):
increase that we've seen over time.Have you heard this sort of number that
would make sense maybe in like coastalareas or something not, I think not
on a global level. We're stilldealing with things in the one to two
degrees, because we talk about onepoint five degrees That was the Paris Agreement,
right, and that's in the airwe've passed that. Is there a

(43:21):
number like that for the oceans?Yeah, so that temperature, that number
is the global average temperature, soit includes the temperature in the oceans.
Oh okay, it's like, ifyou could average all of the temperatures on
the planet, they've gone up onepoint five degrees, and now more than
that, we've gone past that.But the oceans as a whole are not

(43:42):
increasing by multiple degrees of celsius.And that's something that's sometimes hard for non
climate scientists wrap their head around becausethey're like, well, when I go
outside, if it's twenty one degreesor twenty two degrees, that doesn't really
matter that much to me. Butwhen we're talking about global processes, even
fractions of degrees matter. So eventhough I'm saying the oceans haven't gone up

(44:02):
by multiple degrees, one degree warmingon average across all the oceans is a
huge amount of change when we thinkon a global level. So keeping those
numbers in perspective, But yeah,and very obviously as a scientist, you
do look more at the long term, like the big time scales, and

(44:23):
most of the average joes on thestreet, we're thinking like compared to last
year, right, yeah, exactly, And you don't think in those terms
automatically. Yeah, automatically. Youthink in big terms, big times,
exactly, and those are where thechanges really occur in sort of irreversible changes

(44:44):
that might happen are on tens orhundreds of years scale when we're talking about
humans. But those are even differentthan the really long term time scales that
climate scientists that think in terms ofhundreds of thousands or millions of years,
because when we think about past periodsof warming and cooling on the Earth,
we're talking about millions of years.Those are the numbers that we're throwing around.
So there's a bunch of ranges ofnumbers, and they're hard to wrap

(45:07):
your head around, like just youand me, Like I say these numbers,
but even still, I'm like onehundred thousand, a million, ten
million, one hundred million. Thoseare all just big numbers. Every one
of those is big. But howmuch bigger are they than the other ones?
I deal with them all the timein my astronomy class. Yeah,
and it's hard to make them tangiblesometimes too. It's sort of like a

(45:30):
professor Brian Cox was giving a lecture. I was at it actually in Vancouver,
and he was telling the story abouthow he was talking about astronomical time
scals and somebody had asked them astory Professor for Cox, did you say,
five million or five billion, Andhis answer was, does it really
matter? Yeah, exactly right,because either way it's a long time.

(45:53):
Yeah, exactly, many more yearsthan what you or I could ever wrap
our heads around, and much furtherthan what's relevant to our day to day
lives. Yeah. Yeah, doyou want to hit the acidification thing,
then yeah, let's talk about thata little bit. It's what's funny about
acidification and deoxygenation, so those arethe other two. Is that acidification is

(46:15):
really well known about comparatively. Imean, maybe not in the general public,
but more and more I think itis, because there's so many documentaries
being put out about it. Yeah, exactly, And it's great that there's
awareness about it. But what's almostparadoxical from a scientific point of view is
I don't want to downplay acidification,but I'm going to downplay it a little

(46:37):
bit. Okay, from a scientificpoint of view, it's not as big
of a deal as deoxygenation. Andit's funny how much more attention it gets
compared to deoxygenation. And I knowthat that's partly just a result of the
fact that we've been aware of oceanacidification longer than we've been aware of the

(46:57):
issue of deoxygenation and it kind oflike caught everybody's attention first, so it's
gotten more attention. But again,I'm not downplaying it or saying it's not
an issue. But it's kind offunny because it gets like all this attention
and people will kind of get reallystressed out about the impact it's going to
have on ocean life. And thoseare real, but they're not nearly as

(47:17):
impactful as what oxygen changes are probablygoing to do in terms of impacting ocean
life and chemistry. So let's talkabout both of them a little bit.
But I'm coming in with this biasof, yeah, I'm always careful not
to try to downplay acidification. Weshould care about it, we should learn

(47:37):
about it, but the scale ofthe impact it has is medium, okay
level. Yeah, Well, that'sa good perspective for me to have because
I use that as the way Iteach acids and bases in my chemistry class.
And it's a great example and it'simportant, and it's like not at
all to say that this is notan issue. It's just funny to me,

(48:00):
the like relative popularity of concepts orlike the degree that some of them
are known about, and you arenot alone. In fact, it's what
you're the situation you're in is almostuniversal. That is the narrative of oceans
is ocean aseridification. That's what mattersis, that's what we should talk about.
That's what we should be concerned about. Blah blah blah. But from
the scientific community, if you're reallyto like scale those they would say like,

(48:22):
yeah, we should study it.But like, we really got to
pay attention to this oxygen stuff becausebecause that oxygen stuff I didn't know about
until I would say, just thelast eighteen months or so, just through
my own research, just following differentrabbit holes that usually are burrowed by students'
questions, and it makes me think, oh, dang, that's probably something

(48:44):
I should look into. And thenwe've I've just started learning about the hypoxic
problem because prior to that it wasalways like, oh, we got to
talk about ocean aeridification. Yeah,absolutely, And this is the narrative.
And I'm not upset said about it. I think it's great that people are
concerned about oceans in general. I'lltake any interest is great interest. It's

(49:06):
just sort of like one that I'vethought about myself and I've puzzled over,
is how do we broaden the narrativeabout what is happening in the oceans to
include more of the oxygen stuff.Okay, Yeah, it's important because people
listening to this will bring it intotheir classrooms. I've only just started bringing
the oxygen thing into my classrooms justlast year. Yeah, I'm glad to

(49:29):
hear it even is in classrooms becauseI never learned about it. I've never
even heard about it till I startedgrad school. To be honest, well,
it's not really in classrooms. It'sin my classroom, Okay. And
I'm always wherever I can encouraging teachersto open yourself up to these ideas and
bring them in like branch off fromthe mainstream science literature and science textbooks,

(49:51):
and yeah, this is the source. This is chemistry that we need to
understand. Yeah. Absolutely. Andwhat's interesting about the oxygen piece is that
that it affects the chemistry of theoceans, just like acidification does, but
the oxygen piece has a bit moreof a broader impact in terms of other
parts of ocean ecosystems that it affects, and so it has sort of a

(50:15):
more complex and wide reaching impact,whereas ocean acidification impacts important pieces of the
ecosystem, but not everything. Right, So we talk about ocean acidification,
we're talking about fractions of a pHunit of change. And I just said

(50:35):
that fractions of a degree can matter, So I don't want to downplay the
fact that fractions of a unit arenot to say, especiallygithm right, But
from the organism's perspective, there arerelatively few of them that are directly impacted
by that change in pH. Solike the mollusks, so anything that makes
shells and relies on the chemical processesdirectly impacted by the pH. They it

(51:00):
matters to them, and it mattersin an indirect way to anything that's higher
up on the food chain. Buta fish, for the most part,
most fish are not impacted directly verymuch by those units. That amount of
pH change in the realm, whereit's changing from like low like eight point

(51:21):
one to eight point four like thatrange is not going to directly impact a
fish, especially since it's still onthe basic side. Right, it's just
acidifying, right exactly, not actuallyyet acidic exactly. But those units from
a chemistry point of view can definitelyhave a big impact on the like precipitation

(51:44):
of certain minerals, such as theones that many shelled organisms build their shells
out of, and those on largerscales can cumulatively have meaningful impacts. So
it's again it's not to say thatocean assification is not an issue. It's
just more that it has a reallyspecific type of impact. Whereas oxygen change
affects not only the chemistry and thesmall scale and the bottom of the food

(52:07):
chain, but it can directly impactfish and other animals, so it can
kind of have a broader impact thatchanges the whole ecosystem at once, whereas
when we think about acidification, we'rereally thinking more about shifts that happen at
the baseline and then how they trickleup through the food chain and affect other
parts of the ocean. Okay,I had doctor Ovolgldberg. He's from the

(52:29):
Australian Marine Research Center. He's theone who wrote a paper in nineteen ninety
nine that said the way the oceansare going with acidity and with temperature that
by the year twenty fifty the planetwill be devoid of all coral reefs.
And he told the story during thatpodcast discussion how he got death threats from

(52:52):
people saying you can't say that,and he was saying, look, I
don't want to say that. I'mjust making it. I want to be
wrong. But Unforcnate, his researchis playing itself out. Yeah, it's
on track, unfortunately, more probablyfrom the temperature in many cases for the
coral reefs. But partly I saythat because I've done a lot of podcast

(53:15):
episodes on ocean acidification, but Ihave not done any on this oxygen issue.
Well, maybe let's touch on theasidification briefly, but talking about oxygen
in the case. Yeah, Imean again, that's also I feel more
comfortable in that realm because that's thecurrent area of my work is on topics
related to ocean deoxygenation. So Idon't study it directly, but I study

(53:37):
many of the impacts that it has. So, yeah, do you want
to lead with any specific questions orwant to dive in? Well, the
acidity thing, I mean I thinkyou kind of hit it. It is
in the eight point two range,and dropping it is it is logarithmic,
so the changes sound small, buton a per mole of hydrogen ions it

(54:00):
is a large increase, something likethirty percent increase in acidity, even though
dropped by a point one of apH value. Yeah, and the calcium
carbonate thing, I feel that we'veactually hit a lot of it. I
almost say to you, did wemiss anything? No? And I think

(54:20):
of it in this sort of likecumulative effect, So instead of thinking of
it as an isolated phenomenon that isjust strictly ocean acidification, it is one
of many changes that is cumulatively addingto the stressors on marine ecosystems. So
it's just one more thing on topof temperature and fluctuations in oxygen and maybe
the amount of salinity changing and otherthings that could stress out a marine organism

(54:44):
that's used to one way of thingsbeing acidification is just yet another thing making
it slightly harder, especially for organismsthat rely on the precipitation of calcium carbonate
to exist in these places. Andthe unfortunate thing is that one of those
organisms among many of the more charismaticbivalves like clams and things like that that

(55:05):
we know about, but some ofthe ones that really matter are tiny diatoms
exactly. Yeah, Well, tinysingle celled organisms that photosynthesize and form the
base of the food chain in theoceans. An oxygen in our air and
much of the oxygen yes as well, and so that's the biggest place where

(55:25):
from my point of view, notthat I don't care about clams and snails
and things like that, but whenI think about system level changes, if
acidification has some of the impacts we'reafraid that it could have on the precipitation
of calcium carbonate, then those photosyntheticorganisms, not all of them, some

(55:47):
some of them make their crusts theirshells out of other compounds like silica based,
So not every single photosynthetic organism,but many of them that use calcium
carbonate will be affected by a cidificationand that could dramatically shift the base of
the food chain. Which of thesemicro microorganisms have a calcium carbonate basis for

(56:09):
their shell Diatoms are silica based,so they're actually not going to be directly
impacted by peach in that way,right, because they're made of silicon dioxide,
right. Coco lithophores, on theother hand, are photosynthetic organisms that
have little crusts on the outside oftheir cells. They are these like little

(56:31):
round plates, and they are madeout of calcium carbonate, cocothfms, cocolithophors.
I've never heard of those. Yeah, so they are in some parts
of the ocean they're the dominant photosyntheticorganism, and other parts of the ocean
than diatoms would be the dominant form. And yet in other parts of the
ocean there's cyanobacteria that would be thedominant photosynthetic organism. So it's not universally

(56:57):
going to affect all parts of theocean the same. But areas where cocolithophores
are the dominant photos photosynthetic organisms,then acidification could shift that food chain if
it makes it harder for them togrow. So honestly, guilty as charged.
When I would talk about ocean acidification, I would be thinking about the
muscles and the clams and the corals. Yeah, but I'm gonna make it

(57:20):
all about microbes. Yeah. Butthis is why I wanted you to come
on, because it's pushing my knowledgebase. This is good. And the
fact is these little guys are generatingnot only a basis for the food chain,
but they're also generating the oxygen thatwe breathe. Yes, yeah,
and so if it's harder for them, even if it's just slightly harder,
Right, So a little shift inthe pH might not make it impossible for

(57:44):
them to live. They're not necessarilygoing to die right away, but it
might just make it slightly harder forthem to grow. And slight changes when
you add them up across big scales, accumulate in big changes. So even
if it's just slightly harder for theseto grow, it might make them weaker
competitors, and another type of organismmight outcompete them for resources, and overall,

(58:06):
you just might get a smaller productionof photosynthetic material, and then that
would feed fewer zooplanked in and krill, and then that would mean fewer you
know, intermediate size fish and thingslike that that feed all the other charismatic
organisms that we love so much.So these effects really do trickle their way

(58:27):
up. And so when I goout and like I was talking about previously,
about working with other naturalists, andthere's always like the whale expert and
people who are talking about the charismaticmegafauna that everybody has come here to see.
Exactly. I love them as muchas the next person, but I'll
be the person who's like, youknow, the only reason we got those
orcas up here in the first placeis because of microbs, and I,

(58:50):
you know, I try to repeatedlybring back, bringing the idea back to
the systems behind the scenes, theinvisible processes that are making it possible for
us to see a whale in thefirst place. Whales don't just come out
of nowhere, right, We needa healthy, productive food chain to support
it. Because the reality is,if the pH drops from eight point three
to eight point two, hump backwhale is going to honker exactly, except

(59:12):
that below him, in the tropiclevels, it does affect him exactly.
Yeah. So those are the thingsthat I think about when I think about
pH as a system or system scientistlevel. That's good because I didn't think
of that particular aspect of it.But then again, I don't have my
PhD in microbiomes and you do.Yeah, It's almost all I think about

(59:37):
most of the time is how isthere a microbe behind this? I'm more
microbe than I am human. Youare, I learned that. Yeah,
I'm just out to convert the worldto microbiology. My hands are clean,
he said, no, they're not. They're covered in microbes. Yeah.
A good friend of mine has ashirt that says mainly microbe on it and

(01:00:00):
she wears that because she is mainlymicrobe. Got a nerd? Yeah,
I love it. Yeah, Okay, so that's uh, that's uh ocean
warming and ocean A certification. Yep. And I learned a lot in the
Ocean A certification thing, a wholenew angle. I got to look up
that Coco lithophore Coco lithophoor. Yeah, there's a lift, there's a litho

(01:00:21):
in there somewhere. That's the upperlayer. There's crust that's those spheres up.
It refers to like a crust,and so it's actually the name comes
from the fact that these organisms.Look them up if you're listening google Coca
lithophre. They look so cool.There's this round sphere, which is the
coco part of the word means likec h O co c c o cauca

(01:00:43):
Okay, but then staff the caucus, Yeah, yeah, exactly, caucus.
Yeah, it just means it's around bacteria. Yeah, strecto caucus.
Yes, yeah see. I didsome biology, of course, got
it. And so these are littleround, single celled organisms and they are
cover in these spherical plates. Soit's just like almost like a shield.

(01:01:04):
Like they have these picture like alike a knight in armor, right with
a shield out front. But ifyou were just like plated with those all
around, and they are kind ofslightly curved, and they just form layers.
They're stacked on top of each other, these little round plates, and
they form a crust on or shellon the outside of this organism, which

(01:01:27):
is the crust being litho right,so Coco lithum for like the lithosphere,
the crust of the Earth. Yeah, so they have a little crust layer
and that's made up of these littleplates, these little round spheres largely calcium
carbonate that are calcium carbonate exactly.So their ability to build their bodies,
which is largely the structure of them, as these calcium carbonate discs on the

(01:01:49):
outside heavily affected by the presence ofthe hydrogen ion in an acidic ocean.
Yeah, So the relative abundance ofthose hydrogen ions, whether that's a or
a reactant in your reaction, pushesyour reaction one way or the other.
So as you acidify the oceans,it pushes the reaction away from the formation
of the solid form shotly as principleexactly. And so that's the twelve Yeah,

(01:02:14):
Grade twelve chemistry. There you go. And so that's the concern with
the cidification is that if it again, it may not make it impossible for
the I'm not going to say it'snot necessarily that these coco lithophors can't grow
at all immediately. It's not likewe're going to make calcium carbonate impossible to
precipitate. It can still precipitate atslightly slightly more acidic phs, but it

(01:02:37):
might be a little bit more difficult, so more energy is involved on their
part, more energy. Maybe theactual material itself is a little weaker,
because if it's dissolving slightly more,maybe it's a little bit like more fragile
dissolves a little bit. So thesethings that might seem like trivial small level
scales could add up over enough timeand space to me that it's just harder

(01:03:00):
in general for those organisms to live. And that's where we would start to
see shifts. Okay, yeah,do you say la chatelier or the chatelier?
I think I would say that often, but that's how I don't say
that often either. But when Iteach the course. I walked into a
classroom one time and I heard theteacher say, today we're going to learn
about the chaliers. Have I beensaying it wrong? I went to the

(01:03:22):
French immersion exactly. That's French immersionover there. Ye. Yeah, okay,
that's very very important. H COOlit those And I understand the word
now because of the way you brokeit down. Yeah, which is what
I try to do when I ifI bother to drop in a big science
word, I usually want there tobe some kind of meaning behind it.
Yeah, diatoms, coca lithophores,and then one other cool one to learn

(01:03:45):
about our dino flagelets. But thosehave a different chemical composition to their the
structure of their cell walls. Soand and then the diatoms the other ones
we talked about. Those are silicabased and they're beautiful. Yeah. Highly
recommend googling those two because they're basicallylittle glass structures and they're really intricate little
glass crystals. So it's I lovelooking up marine microbe, especially the charismatic

(01:04:14):
microbes of the ocean. The diatoms, the cocolithopors, and some of the
other photosynthesizers. But the key isthere, they're all photosynthesizers. All the
ones I mentioned just now are groupsof types of photosynthetic organisms. Yeah,
and then there's cyanobacteria, which areyet another group of photosynthesizer, typically found
in coral reefs, isn't it sometimes, but actually in the big open parts

(01:04:35):
of the ocean. So if you'rejust like PLoP yourself in the middle of
the Pacific Ocean, like you know, just far away from all the continents,
right in the middle, picture thatlike big empty space. Areas like
that are actually where the dominant photosyntheticorganisms are, often cyanobacteria. So kind
of like my hands are covered inmicrobes, My gut is full of microbes,

(01:04:56):
The ocean is full of microbes,The dirt is full of microbes.
Yeah, okay, picture a milliliter of ocean water. That's not very
much so for people trying to listeningtrying to imagine what that is, like
a marble, like a small marble. Okay, okay, that volume of
ocean water. Don't tell me howmany microbes? Do you think? How
many microbial cells are in that tento fifteen okay, a hundred million?

(01:05:23):
Okay, that's that's too much.About a million million more or less.
I mean, it totally depends onwhat part of the ocean you are.
Sometimes there's an million micros though inthat there are they Like if I jump
into the ocean, are they gonnagive me pink eye or anything? It
depends on if there's a harmful bloom. But no, most of the time,
not at all. I ingest them, no, because these are microbes

(01:05:45):
that are used to living in theocean and not your gut, okay,
right, So they're not the kindsthat can make you sick. Are pathogens
that have evolved to live in ahuman body, and the things that are
in the ocean are almost never thatunless there's like pollution from a wastewater treatment
plant coming out into the water,which can happen. You can have like
ecal lie contamination, and that's whysometimes you can't go swimming in the water

(01:06:09):
right around the city and Foss Creekand whatever it happens. But if we're
just talking about like the normal openocean, nothing there is human pathogens.
Some of them create toxins that canbe poisonous, so like red tide if
you've heard of that, right,that's just a microbe that gets into like
it's in the water, and thenit concentrates in filter feeders like clams and

(01:06:32):
bi valves like that. So ifyou eat them, you get a bigger
dose of that microbe, and themicrobe produces of toxin that can hurt you,
but it's not the same thing aslike infecting you and making you sick.
Yeah, you hear about it,you know the oysters. Don't Yeah,
don't eat the oysters. Yeah,depending on maybe it's usually someone's done
some research and they put up asign. Yeah, exactly. They're monitoring
the water quality frequently. Fun fact, if you hear about a red tide

(01:06:56):
alert, it's a good opportunity togo look for bioluminescence. Not exclusively every
single time, but most of thespecies that are the bread tide that create
those problems are also biluminescent. Sousually around the same time you have lots
of bioluminescence in the water, getred tide alerts, and don't eat the
clams. Yeah. Yeah. Wegot up in the middle of the night

(01:07:17):
one time when we were up inthe Broughton Archipelago, just because we knew
that where we were it was reportedto be a lot of bioluminescence. So
we thought, oh, we'll getwe'll put on our headlamps and we'll launch
our kayaks and we'll paddle around thecove and watch. But we didn't.
We thought this is ridiculous. Itis twelve o'clock at night, and you
know, so we took our paddlesdown. We just sort of stirred the
water and sure enough you could see, Yeah, it's pretty sometimes it can

(01:07:39):
be really bright and amazing. Wehad bow riding dolphins one time on a
different research trip that I went onoff the coast of Mexico was also another
one. I was out at seafor about a month at a time,
and we had bow riding dolphins thatlike to surf the wave at the front
of the ship. And the boatwas moving day and night, so at
night time the dolphins would come outand surf the wave, and the biluminescence

(01:08:02):
would light up from the stimulation ofthe dolphins, and you couldn't see the
dolphin. You could see a glowingoutline like a torpedoes or yeah, just
like Peter Pan you know, ohyeah, yeah, yeah, the little
sparkly trail coming off behind them,and you could just like see them tinker
Bell. Yeah, exactly, likelittle Tinkerbell, dolphins and bioluminescence that.
Sorry, I'm on a far oceanstuff ocean microbes, I can talk about

(01:08:25):
them all apparently. Yeah, Inoticed that about you. Yeah, so
okay, so I think you've hitit really well. Now. The one
that remains is your specialty, whichis the oxygen thing. Yeah. So
it's kind of like the least wellknown in general populations of people, but

(01:08:45):
it's one that's really important and kindof becoming increasingly uh an alarm going off
within the scientific community and a littlebit now in the general public as people
learn more about it, which isthat the oceans are pretty rapidly losing oxygen,
and so as an important I knowyour audience probably knows what I mean
I say that, but I've learnedthat an important disclaimer here is or clarification

(01:09:10):
is I'm talking about O two,the molecule O two oxygen dissolved in the
water, not the O in theH two O. Yeah. Okay,
because I didn't clarify that the firsttime I was on Ross's podcast and we
had a little clip went viral onthe internet, and we had all these
people coming out of the woodworks,being like, oh, you're staying there's

(01:09:30):
no more O in H two Ooh no. And it was one of
those things where at first I thoughtit was a joke, and then I
was like, oh, right,you kind of have to remind yourself where
baseline knowledge is. And I triednot to get frustrated with it, to
be more empathetic with the fact that, yeah, baseline knowledge about chemistry and
oceans and waters dissolved oxygen. Yeah, so we're talking about O two.

(01:09:55):
The stuff we breathe is a gasthat's soluble in water. You measure it
in the creek out back. Yeah, we take water samples and we can
do an experiment and it comes aroundten or eleven milligrams per liter. Those
aren't units I typically thinking, butyeah, I mean that it should be
like oxygenated water on the surface,especially in creeks where the water is churning

(01:10:17):
about and interacting with the air,And well, eight to twelve is healthy
for the fish in a fresh waterstream environment. So we're probably thinking.
The units I tend to think inare like micromolar concentration, So that would
be like one hundred to two hundredmicromolar is like standard two hundred and fifty
would be like higher. I coulddo the conversion. Yeah, I just

(01:10:39):
need a pencil a few minutes towork it out, a calculator, pants,
I can work it out. Sixteengrams from mole come on, yeah,
thirty two actually right for two?Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah.
So yeah, now I'm mult sidetracked. I doing my little dimensional analys

(01:11:00):
that's in converting my use. Oxygenin the ocean is decreasing, Yeah,
it's decreasing. So we're talking aboutdissolved oxygen resolved oxygen. Yeah, And
organisms need oxygen just like we doto breathe, even though they're in the
water. Right, So we thinkbreathing and that's something you do in the
air. But organisms that live inthe water, they breathe, oxygen moves

(01:11:23):
across the membranes and the gills andgets into their blood exactly, and they
metabolize it in very much the sameway that we do, and they use
it to, you know, carryout chemical reactions in their body with carbon
most of the time to live.Right. That's the main primary metabolism that
most complex organisms do. And Isay that specifically because I'm about to make

(01:11:45):
it about microbes. Right, ofcourse you are, because when we learn
about biology, we have a verylike human centric, or at least like
you carry out centric perspective about metabolism. We think metabolism is either photosynthesis,
which you know, creates sugars andoxygen, or respiration, which reacts sugars

(01:12:13):
and oxygen and reverses it. Right, And that's sort of metabolism most of
the time from a biological from likea basic biological education, even at the
university level. That's often the complexityof it. But the truth is metabolism
is way more diverse than those tworeactions. It's just that all of the

(01:12:35):
other metabolisms are carried out by microbes. So at a larger scale, what
you said is the way it isfor metabolism. But there's more metabolism happening
by the microrobes within the organism,not just in the guts, but I
mean like just free floating organisms outin the oceans or in the soils or

(01:12:56):
things like that. There's so manyother chemicals that can other chemical reactions that
could be used to support life.It just happens that all the life we
can see only do those two reactions. So if it's a plant, it
does the photosynthesis, and if it'san animal, it does the other.
Yeah, And so we think aboutreally just those two reactions most of the

(01:13:18):
time, but there's there's dozens.There's dozens of other chemical reactions that are
used metabolically. It's just that microbesare doing them instead of us. But
they matter. It's not just sortof like, oh, fun fact,
you could use this other thing.When you do other types of chemical reactions
for your metabolism, you change thechemistry of your environment. And when I

(01:13:40):
say you, of course I meana microbe. But they do other types
of chemical reactions that dramatically shift thechemistry of the environment where they're living.
And that's what happens when oxygen runsout. So that's why this matters.
That's kind of where I'm going withthis whole, Like, why would it
be a big deal of the oxytionruns out on the on the short term

(01:14:02):
timescale, it has a direct impacton things like fish and any other big
complex organism that needs to breathe oxygen, and that matters for those organisms.
But once the oxygen runs out,those organisms die and then microbes take over
because they can do other types ofreactions. They don't need oxygen the way

(01:14:25):
that more complex organisms do. There'ssome organisms, some microbes need oxygen.
I don't want to say all ofthem. We hear about extremophiles metabolizing with
hydrogen sulfide. Yeah, that's oneof the metabolisms that can happen without as
Okay, there you go. There'sone I know, and nitrogen maybe factors
in. There's a lot of nitrogenin the air. Would it not get

(01:14:46):
into the water and offer up somesort of metabolism. So the one I
mentioned a while back about ammonium,Remember ammonium getting oxidized to nitrate. That's
a metabolism that involves oxygen, butis sort of different because it doesn't involve
sugars, so there's no carbohydrates involvedin that metabolism. So it's metabolism as

(01:15:06):
a broad category is really more oflike a mix and match, Like you
just need you need two things.One is reduced, the other is oxidized,
and they need to react with eachother and yield energy. And as
long as you can mix and matchthe right combo of something that will yield
an output of energy. So anexothermic reaction in principle, that could be

(01:15:30):
a metabolism. So there's no reasonit has to just be carbon and oxygen
reacting with each other. It's justthe one that happens to be dominant and
common. But there's many, manyother types of reactions that can happen without
oxygen or without carbon, or insome cases without either of them. Okay,
And that's what starts happening in theoceans when the oxygen runs out,
is all this other chemistry, andthat has big implications for marine environments,

(01:15:56):
nutrient cycling, and even climate changedirectly. Like are the organisms these microorganisms
sounds like they'll be fine, there'sstill surviving. Yeah, they'll be fine,
but they yeah, they are sucha small fraction of the life that
we like, remember saying, likelife as we know it depends on these

(01:16:18):
systems working the way they are.The bacteria will be fine. I'm not
worried about life on Earth as awhole going extinct, like microbes will be.
In fact, many microbes are goingto have a heyday with the types
of climate changes that are happening.But what will change is the type the
bigger organisms. And like the fisheriesand the whales and you know, you

(01:16:41):
and me and the plants on landthat we rely on to eat. So,
yeah, microbes will be okay whenthe oxygen runs out, some microbes,
but what kinds of changes that'll haveon marine chemistry, marine nutrient cycling,
and the climate will start to impactall the other organisms. Okay,
so oxygen levels are going down.That can we just establish why it's going

(01:17:03):
down? Yeah, let's talk aboutthat a little bit. A couple different
processes and one is related to temperature. Remember I said temperature kind of factors
into all this. So back toour conversation earlier about different layers and things,
you know, mixing and temperature beinga big piece of that. That
can affect density. When the surfacewaters get warmer, they are less dense

(01:17:29):
than that layer underneath it, right, and water floating on water, and
when you get a bigger difference indensity, there's less and less mixing.
Of course, So what's one ofthe main factors, not the only thing.
One of the main things is thatthis surface water is in contact with
the atmosphere, so there's lots ofoxygen in the surface waters. But as
that surface water gets warmer because ofclimate change, then it mixes less with

(01:17:53):
the underlying waters. And one ofthe main ways to get oxygen down to
the depths of the ocean is mixedmixing between the surface and the underlying waters.
So as we warm the planet,we warm, the surface layers warm
faster than the deeper layers, andyou get less mixing between those oxygen layers

(01:18:14):
at the surface and the deeper layers. And they're all connected. It is
all connected. Yeah, good grief, okay, And so that's one of
the main ones. The other bigone is the conveyor belt that we talked
about at the beginning. Okay,So that's a different that's mixing, but
it's a bigger scale mixing. That'swhere we're talking about mixing on a planetary
level, not like mixing like overkilometers of depth. Oh yeah, many

(01:18:38):
klumter. We're hundreds of klometers alongthe entire coastlines. And but I mean
depth depth wise, right, likethousands of meters of depth. Is there's
mixing going on, right. Theseconveyor belts are going not just horizontally,
but they're also going vertically exactly.Yeah. So this is where cold water
at the poles is sinking down andthen being pumped along the bottom of the
ocean. And what's important And Ididn't talk about oxygen before. We're talking

(01:19:01):
about this conveyor belt, but theother thing that happens at the poles.
When that water gets cold, italso gets oxygenated. Cold water holds more
oxygen, it holds more oxygen,and there's just more turbulence, there's more
churning in the waters at the poles. They mix more consistently, there's less

(01:19:21):
stratification like that effect I was justtalking about. So you get really high
amounts of oxygen in polar waters becauseof temperature and mixing. So when the
water on the conveyor belt gets makesits way up toward Iceland, it now
becomes cold, oxygen rich water thatthen gets pumped down as it sinks and

(01:19:42):
then flows along the bottom of theocean. And that is on a global
scale. The main way to getoxygen into the depths of the ocean are
these polar pumps. It happens inthe Arctic and in Antarctica, and they're
really important. So these two points, the North Pole and the South Poles,

(01:20:02):
where most of the auction at thebottom of the ocean. That's how
it's getting there exactly. Yeah,there's not enough mixing from surface just down
to get oxygen all the way tolike the deepest parts of the ocean.
So the only way we keep thedepths of our ocean oxygenated are these polar
pumps. That's how you pump cold, auxygened water down into the bottom of

(01:20:24):
the ocean. And the circulation ofthese big conveyor belts continuously moving are key
to keeping that flux of oxygen.Just like a pump you have in a
fish tank that needs to always berunning, and the reason is because if
it doesn't, then the lower partsof the water the fish tank, all
the auction gets used up and thefish well, you can see this.

(01:20:45):
If your fish tank, ever like, runs out of power, the fish
will come up to the surface andstart gasping at the surface because there's not
enough oxygen for them in their water. And the same things would happen to
our ocean if we didn't have thatpump circulating the water all the time.
So as the warming is slowing downthose pumps at the poles, you're getting

(01:21:06):
less supply of oxygen to the depthsof the ocean, and then simultaneously you're
also getting less mixing near the surface, which is the other main way to
get oxygen down into the oceans.So it's far more than fertilizer runoff from
agriculture. I mean, that's thethird driver. I'm sure it is,

(01:21:27):
But it sounds like those will alsobe localized, like at the mouth of
the Mississippi or the mouth of theFraser River. Yep, they're localized problems,
yes, but you're talking about ona grand scale of the planet.
Yeah. And I just want toclarify here. So those localized areas like
the mouth of the Mississippi and themouth of the Fraser, those are hypoxic
zones where you get really intense periodsof low oxygen, really localized to that

(01:21:53):
area, and usually due to periodsof high rain that bring a lot of
fertilizer out into the water. ButI'm talking about with low oxygen concentrations globally,
I am talking about huge regions ofthe ocean. So there's a couple
areas of the ocean that have suchlow oxygen. We call them anoxic zones

(01:22:15):
because the oxygen is effectively undetectable toour sensors. It's probably fully anoxic in
these areas, I know, nothistorically it hasn't been historically anoxic, or
do we know if it has.It has fluctuated throughout Earth's history, but
the intensity of them is growing withclimate change. And the areas that we're

(01:22:36):
talking about are so like, picturethe coast of Mexico right the west coast,
all the way from Baja down tolike where it becomes Central America.
If you were to sort of drawa big triangle out into the ocean,
in fact, you include some ofCentral America in that, including Costa Rica.
If you're to draw a big trianglethat is about that same distance on

(01:22:58):
that side and make like a bigequilateral triangle, that area has really really
low oxygen and in some places iscompletely anoxic. Wow. And then there's
another zone like that off the coastof Peru and Chile, that is,
you know, about half of thelength of Chile and some of Peru or

(01:23:19):
most of Peru and part of northernChile. And draw another big triangle out
into the Pacific Ocean off that coast, and there's a huge zone there that's
low oxygen. It has to dowith the currents and the way that those
are really warm areas, so thateffect of surface water not mixing with the
lower depths. That effect is intensifiedthere because it's near the equator and they're

(01:23:45):
areas of upwelling. So upwelling whichis its own whole thing, and I
don't know how many hours around rightnow, I don't want to go too
long, but upwelling is a phenomenonthat brings nutrients from deeper parts of the
ocean to the surface and that fuelsgrowth of organisms. So just like fertilizer
runoff can fuel growth that leads tooxygen consumption, you get upwelling that fuels

(01:24:09):
more growth in the surface waters,and so you also get high rates of
oxygen consumption while reducing oxygen supply becauseof mixing. So it's just one of
these like it's a combination of factorsthat results in these areas being particularly low
oxygen. But other areas that inthe ocean aren't completely anoxic, but they

(01:24:34):
have areas that are low oxygen,and that oxygen is getting lower, and
the areas in the ocean that havelow oxygen is expanding. So when I
talk about ocean deoxygenation, I'm talkingabout both of those pieces bigger. The
areas that are low oxygen are growinglarger and larger, and the amount of
oxygen is dropping. So combined wesee a cumulative effective, pretty rapid oxygen

(01:25:01):
loss in our oceans. How farback does the data go? How many
years back does the data go?In some places, we have several thousands
of years of data from sediment records, and you can go into the rock
record and you can see larger timescales. You can see things like hundreds
of thousands of years or even millionsof years in the rock record. You

(01:25:21):
can't see detailed fluctuations in the rockrecord. So when it comes to knowing,
like detailed fluctuations in oxygen concentration werelimited to the relatively recent history geologically,
just from sediment layers. But weknow from the rock record that periods
of in the past periods of Earth'shistory, the oceans, or at least

(01:25:45):
large areas of the oceans have gonecompletely anoxic. So I'm not talking about
part of the water column going anoxic, but like entire basins of the ocean
having no oxygen left in the water, and so all those chemical changes that
I was talking about that start tohappen because of microbes when the auxygen runs
out, those happened in the past. We know it, we see evidence

(01:26:09):
of it in the rock record,and we know that the oceans can go
completely anoxic, and we know thatthose events usually correlated with mass extinction events
in the oceans. So that's whywhen I talk about like the amount of
attention that climate scientists are kind ofgiving this issue versus acidification, there's a

(01:26:32):
bit more of like, Ooh,we really need to talk about this topic
with oxygen, because we have weknow the oceans can go anoxic, and
we know that that has potentially catastrophicevents on marine chemistry and climate as a
whole, and we see those changesstarting to happen now on the planet,
and we don't know enough about thetipping points with that system. It's very

(01:26:56):
new to us scientifically in terms ofwhat control oxygen in the oceans and what
happens when it runs out, Sowe're still trying to figure that out,
and that's where a lot of theattention and concern is is like what are
we dealing with here? So whenwe talk about ocean warming, we kind
of say, well, yeah,that's because of climate change, And if
you happen to know something about oceanacidification, you learn that well, that's

(01:27:18):
actually related to the higher concentration ofCO two mingling with the water, so
it become more acidic. But itturns out that on top of that,
there's also the deoxygenation of the ocean. But that's also related to climate change
because we're affecting the temperature of theocean, which is affecting this conveyor belt.
The mixing of the water is limitedbecause the water on the surface remains

(01:27:40):
warm and therefore won't sink because it'sless dense and warmer water holds less oxygen
in general, in general, that'strue, just lower solubility of oxygen.
So cold water animals, well,I guess if they're cold water animals,
they they they're looking for more oxygenrich water, but it may not be

(01:28:04):
there because the water is warmer,which is going to release more oxygen.
Yeah, So it really is.It really is all connected back to our
really our our energy sources. Weburn things. Yeah, and it all
comes back to that. And soI usually get this question of like,
well, what do we do aboutit? What's the solution? And this

(01:28:24):
is a hard one because you cannotgo there's no geoengineering you can do like
a big curtain. Yeah, there'sno equivalent of that to stir the oceans
on the scale that we're talking about. And even if we could, the

(01:28:44):
problems that would create would be waymore than just simply directly dealing with the
source of the issue itself instead oftrying to engineer our way out of it.
Unfortunately, this is one of thoseproblems. It doesn't have a quick
fix to it. The solution isto dramatically and on a large scale address
emission issues. And this is ona scale that goes beyond like individual consumers

(01:29:10):
too. And this is something Irepeatedly come back to you with people who
kind of feel climate anxiety around thesetopics when I'm talking talking about them myself.
Included is that this is not arecycle your bottles level issue. This
is not something that the individual consumerlevel could fix. Even if everybody switched
to electric vehicles or something like that, we would still not be tackling the

(01:29:33):
emissions on the scale we need to. These are the solutions to These are
system level, government level issues likethat could only be solved through dramatically shifting
like energy sources on a broad scale, because it's you know, it would
come down to like the shipping freightships that we use that are fossil fuel

(01:29:58):
to ship materials around the planet.Those are a huge source of emissions,
and those are not determined by individualconsumers. You know, you can't,
No, you can't choose to consumesomething and look up whether or not it
was shipped on a freight shipper likeor an electric Exactly, it's a coal
powered mode of transportation. And soI often remind people that it is important

(01:30:19):
to think about your individual impact,but it is not your responsibility to fix
the whole climate change through your ownchoices. The really the way to engage
with this is to engage on apolitical scale and organize to kind of think
about shifting our energy levels on amuch bigger scale, because that's the only
way that you can really tackle issueslike this that are the whole planet.

(01:30:44):
Yeah, it's a governmental thing,and we know that governments are really interested
in other things like wars, right, that keeps them busy. But there
are changes that can make tangible differences, right, so like shift like making
legal changes that can at oil lobbyingout of politics can have dramatic changes that
are much larger scale in terms ofthe emissions compared to like, you know,

(01:31:08):
advocating for not driving as much towork or something like that, right,
or making electric vehicles mandatory by twentythirty five, that kind of thing.
I mean that those are gonna havesome impact. I think in a
lot of ways, those things makepeople more consciously aware of their behaviors.
Yeah, thinking about your actions hasan important place. It's just I remind

(01:31:30):
people it's not the end all solution. Another thing that I find kind of
interesting. Ross and I just talkedabout this recently a little bit on one
of his episodes. Do you knowthis that the concept of the individual carbon
footprint is a concept created by andlargely pushed by big oil. This is

(01:31:55):
I heard you guys talking about this. They have pumped millions and millions of
dollars over the last couple decades topush this narrative of the individual carbon footprint
because it puts a focus on youand not on them, and not on
that, and not on large systemlevel transitions that would simply make alternative solutions
easily accessible. So instead of makingalternative options just as easy to choose as

(01:32:18):
the oil, instead that all thefocus goes on the individual consumer. You
have to go out of your way, make your life more difficult, to
try to avoid using fossil fuels insteadof let's shift the system so that everyday
people can simply live their life easilywithout using fossil fuels. And the oil
companies know that by pushing a narrativethat puts the focus on individuals, it

(01:32:41):
takes the focus away from system levelchanges that are more likely to shift.
Are were they're good at being nasty. Oh, they are so good,
And it makes it's like one ofthese things that makes me like a quote
unquote like bad environmentalists sometimes because I'moften trying to remind people like, yes,
your individual choices matter, but onlyto a degree, and be careful
because you might be accidentally doing thework of those oil corporations for them by
pushing the propaganda that they created andthey want us to think in those ways.

(01:33:06):
So that's my piece, especially witheducators and thinking about young people and
like how you shape your world oryour worldview around what your role is and
what you can do, especially withan issue like this that feels like un
manageable. It's so scary, it'sso big. This oceans are losing oxygen
and there's nothing I can directly doabout that, but there are things you

(01:33:28):
can do in terms of how youengage with the political system and like how
you m Yeah. Well, mymessage has always been that schools are the
place where this sort of information wherechanges start. The example I always use
if people listen to my podcast,they've heard this a dozen times. When

(01:33:50):
Spotnik went up, they automatically turnedto the schools to change the curriculum because
we needed engineers and scientists who couldkeep up with the Russians space technology.
Yeah. And what's even more addressingabout it is when spot NK went up
in fifty seven, NASA was formedin fifty eight, the curriculum changed.

(01:34:14):
In sixty nine, Neil Armstrong abuzz Aldron land on the Moon and the
average age at ground control in Houstonwas twenty eight Wow, which means twelve
years earlier in nineteen fifty seven,they were in high school. Yeah,
and they were the ones who werereceiving this new, updated, invigorated math
and science curriculum, and they wereon board right on, let's do this.

(01:34:34):
Yeah, absolutely, And in twelveyears they put a man on the
moon. Yeah. That's a greatreminder of how rapidly. Shifts can occur
when we, like on a largescale as a society, shift our attention
toward that and say this is apriority for us. Yeah. Yeah,
it just hasn't been put as apriority right, which for whatever reason,

(01:34:55):
it's psychological, it's social, whoknows what the reason is. But the
people me and this podcast, peoplelike you and the work you do,
and Ross and the work he does, un Nerdy about Nature and so many
others. We just keep putting thissort of content out there. And that's
part of the puzzle. Yeh isthe education and people go, man,

(01:35:15):
I gotta think about that. Ithink it's a really important piece of that
puzzle. And I think it's somethingthat scientists my colleagues lose sight of sometimes
and there are moments where I feellike we're sort of yelling into an echo
chamber, like we do science foreach other, but it doesn't always get
translated in a meaningful and tangible wayto the general public. And it's very

(01:35:40):
important that it does, because wedon't need to convince each other that these
issues matter. We already know,which is why we've dedicated our lives to
working on them. And so thatoutreach piece is very important. It's not
just a minor like, oh,we should do this on the side,
and yeah, do some outreach,which is typically has treated. I think
it's fundamental to the continuation of ourto keep doing science that the general public

(01:36:01):
engages with it, thinks about it, and cares about it as much as
any and there needs to be scientistswho can communicate on a level that they
understand. The expression I like touse is rocket science doesn't have to be
rocket science. So let's explain itlike we're talking to a grade five class,
so we all understand this. SoI've had a lot of people come
on, I say a lot.Really, I've had a second think of

(01:36:25):
two or three who have said theneat thing about science communication is it is
changing because they recognize that the onlypeople reading the scientific papers were scientists and
nobody else is really that interested inreading it. So there has been a
shift towards writing for the average reader. And you have to think that guys
who you know. I was thinkingof al Gore and Inconvenient Truth. All

(01:36:47):
of a sudden we're seeing these reallywell done productions pushing a message that gets
the science into the hands of theaverage person and that education piece is key.
The scientists do need to leave thelab and go into the community centers
and talk to the people in away that they'll understand and they'll go,

(01:37:09):
oh, okay, now I startto understand this. Yeah, absolutely,
I advocate for that strongly. Ithink it's an underappreciated piece of the scientific
process, is the broader communication part. And we put a lot of value
around some of the traditional roles inthe scientific career, like becoming a post

(01:37:30):
doc, starting a lab, beinga PI and those things. We say
those are valuable careers to have,sure, and I think we forget to
place equal amounts of value on peoplewho do things like get a PhD,
but then choose to use that todo scientific communication using their strong knowledge base,
but to translate information outward, ratherthan focus on the creation of new

(01:37:53):
knowledge themselves, use their background tohelp disseminate that new knowledge to the general
public. That's not appreciated, Iwould say, almost at all within the
sciences. It's sort of treated asthis like annoying side thing you got to
do, and like it's like thehockey players have to talk to the media
exactly literally quite literally, We're like, okay, yeah, well I'll do
a little outreach thing, or I'llgive a public talk or something like that.

(01:38:15):
It's not seen as like a fundamentalcore piece of the career, and
maybe it's not for everyone, andthey're you know, there should be space
for scientists who are really great atdiving deep on their topic and creating new
knowledge, and maybe other people who'syou know, are oriented toward Everybody has
their own skill, right, Imean, give me the information. I
love doing public outreach. I getit. I get a real blast of

(01:38:38):
just talking to people and teaching people, and and people seem to really enjoy
learning it too. People are hungryfor information. I think we do live
in a in an era of education, as like people are spending their money
on taking courses, so there thereis a reception were receptive to to learning.

(01:38:58):
We just need the we need theridge. Yeah, we need that bridge.
Yeah exactly. Well I'm very gratefulthat you are part of that bridge.
This has been really awesome. Ohmy goodness, so Julia, thank
you for all of this. I'mlooking at my clock here and I've never
recorded a podcast this long. Ifeel a little bit like Lex Friedman right
now. You know Lex Friedman,his podcast are three to four hours,

(01:39:19):
but we'll split this we'll split thisone up. Yeah, but thank you
for coming out. That was alot of effort on your part and I
really appreciate it. Oh absolutely,I've had a blast and I'm really grateful
for what you're doing, So thankyou as well. Be sure to check
out part one of this discussion withJulia, where we talked about the forest

(01:39:39):
microbes equally as compelling and interesting asthis one, and as well scroll back
through the almost one hundred episodes Ihave on Science three sixty and see what
else there is that you can learnfrom the various experts I've had on this
show. Continue to listen, continueto share, rate, review, and

(01:40:00):
I'll see you on the next episode.

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Ep. 96 - Exploring Ocean Microbes: Dr. Julia Huggins On the Climate Effects of Warming, Acidification and Deoxygenation of the Oceans

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 96 - Exploring Ocean Microbes: Dr. Julia Huggins On the Climate Effects of Warming, Acidification and Deoxygenation of the Oceans