Friday, February 24, 2017

NOC News Round Up - 24 February 2017

Important submarine canyons ecosystems are at risk

An international team of scientists have contributed to recent review studies of submarine canyons, which identified they are at risk from human activities, and require better protection.

NOC scientist Dr Veerle Huvenne, and co-author of the review, said, "Submarine canyons are some of the most important environments along our continental margins, which can host very rich ecosystems and can support rich fisheries. However, as a result of their steep terrain and their complex oceanography, they have always been very difficult to investigate. Thanks to rapid technological developments, especially in marine robotics, we can now study these environments in much more detail."

Read more on our website and see the videos taken with our ROV on our YouTube Channel.

Pacific study reveals species new to science

Scientists at the NOC have discovered 34 new species of giant single-celled organisms living at depths of more than 4 km in the eastern equatorial Pacific.

Commenting on the study, which is published in Biological Conservation, NOC scientist and lead author Professor Andrew Gooday explains "These findings represent an unprecedented increase in the known global diversity of these very unusual protozoans. In comparison, an intensively studied site located at a similar depth in the Atlantic has so far yielded only seven species of xenophyphores. Moreover, analyses of the Pacific material by our coauthors at the University of Geneva has increased the global genetic database for xenophyophores by more than an order of magnitude. This part of the Pacific seems to be a hotspot for xenophyophore diversity."

NOC at Energy Sector Symposium

The NOC's Steve Hall presented at the Copernicus Symposium on Climate Services for the Energy Sector, in Barcelona this week.

The symposium brought together climate and energy scientists, energy industry practitioners and public decision makers to present new possibilities in climate predictions, and to discuss new ideas and better shape future public Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) products for the energy sector.

The symposium is a joint event organised by C3S and its energy proof-of-concept projects, the European Climatic Energy Mixes (ECEM) and the CLIM4ENERGY projects.

ORCHESTRA meeting in Southampton

On Thursday staff working on the ORCHESTRA project from NOC and BAS, together with CPOM and PML and UoS gathered in Southampton for the first of a sequence of workshops to discuss the progress of the work relating to large scale budgets of heat and carbon in the Southern Ocean. The planned observational setup was discussed for upcoming cruises in the far South Atlantic, together with recent results from Drake Passage, and progress in setting up a regional pan-Antarctic high resolution ocean model reviewed.

ORCHESTRA is a NERC-funded Long Term Science programme that involves scientists from many NERC centres. This ambitious five year project began in spring 2016 and will use a combination of data collection, analyses and computer simulations to radically improve our ability to understand and predict the circulation of the Southern Ocean and its role in the global climate, with particular emphasis on the way that the Southern Ocean absorbs and stores heat and carbon.