Most people don't ever get to see the deep
sea, but I'm really lucky.
I get to see pigs and
fish swimming around and jellyfish.
It's a really vibrant and active community.
I'm just lucky enough to get to see
the ocean and the climate are directly
linked. In order to understand the massive
impacts of climate change on our ocean,
we're drawing data from
a robotic lab on the deep seafloor
at station M.
Our ocean is vast, covering more
than 70 percent of the planet.
Abyssal plains, the flat, muddy, wide
open stretches of the deep ocean floor cover
more than 50 percent of the earth's surface
and are an important part of the carbon
cycle. Station M two hundred
and ninety one kilometers off the coast of
Santa Barbara is four kilometres
deep, and it's provided an unprecedented
window into important abyssal ecosystems
for the past 30 years.
My name's Chrissy Hufford, I'm a research
specialist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium
Research Institute, where I study
the amount of carbon making its way to the
deep sea and what it does once it gets there.
Studying carbon at Station M is important
because if we want to understand how much
carbon makes it into the deep sea
and is being taken up from the atmosphere,
we want to know how much is consumed
in the ocean, and we also want to know how
much might be actually stored in the
sediments on geologic time scale.
My name is Ken Smith.
I'm a senior scientist here at MBARI.
Deep Ocean has been ignored
primarily because it's so difficult
to explore.
Station M, you're dealing with 4000
meters depth, crush depths, that are
astronomical, and to build
instrumentation to survive
that, and to actually make measurements,
is pretty astounding.
My name is Paul McGill and I'm an electrical
engineer at MBARIi.
Station M is this amazing, undersea
laboratory operates 24 hours
a day, 365 days a year.
It's about a 12 hour cruise from shore,
but it's very expensive to have people out
there. So we have several robotic platforms
we use to collect data.
The first thing you might see is you approach
Station M is the wave glider.
It visits Station M three to four times a
year, checking to make sure all the robots
are functioning properly. MBARI's
remotely operated vehicle, Doc Ricketts,
visits once a year to capture a video of deep
sea communities.
The Benthic Rover is a mobile laboratory
that moves very slowly across the sea
floor, taking photographs of the animals
and sediment in its path.
Every 10 meters, the rover stops
and takes measurements of organisms living
in the sediment.
The sedimentation event sensor estimates
carbon supply taking pictures
of the marine snow, which scientists analyze.
A time-lapse camera allows scientists
to see exactly when pulses of marine snow
occur and how animal communities
respond to changes in food supply.
For many years, oceanographers
and biologists modeled this marine snow
as a very consistent thing.
And what we've learned in our studies at
Station M is that it's anything but
consistent. Sometimes there's barely
a trickle and other times there's a huge
snowstorm and piles of
organic material land on the bottom
of the ocean.
By studying Station M for so long, for 30
years, we've been able to understand and
measure this amount of carbon making its
way to the deep sea is changing at station
M, it's increasing and has been increasing
pretty rapidly for the past 10 years.
The ocean has taken up about 25 percent
of the carbon dioxide that we have put into
the atmosphere and it's taken that up
through a number of processes.
One of those processes is the biological
carbon pump.
The biological carbon pump starts when
single-celled algae take up carbon dioxide
dissolved in surface waters and use
it for photosynthesis.
A lot of these algae are eaten by small
animals which poop out little carbon rich
pellets.
Clumps of these algae, bits of poop and
parts of tiny dead animals make up marine
snow.
Most marine snow gets eaten as it sinks
through the water column.
But some of it sinks to the deep sea where
the carbon in it is unlikely to reach the
atmosphere again any time soon.
Animals and microbes eat most of the marine
snow that reaches the deep sea.
This is their main source of food.
But a tiny fraction evades consumers
and its carbon can be stored in marine
sediments for geologic time.
The ocean's carbon cycle is a critical buffer
for the impacts of climate change to humans.
There would be a lot more carbon dioxide
acting as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
If it weren't for the ocean taking it up.
The ocean is facing many threats right now,
such as plastic pollution, overfishing,
deep sea mining and climate change
impacts the ocean health in a way
that makes animals and ecosystems
less healthy and less able
to face those other onslaughts.
And station M provides us an extraordinary
window into the changes in the deep sea
caused by climate change.
