NOC News Round Up - 1 December 2017

Investigating the Antarctic peninsular This week NOC scientist Yvonne Firing has been in the Antarctic peninsula onboard the RRS James Clark Ross. Soon Yvonne and the team on board will be collecting measurements of temperature, salinity, and oxygen at 30 stations along the Drake Passage. These properties help scientists monitor water masses and investigate how they change. Ultimately, these processes are linked with the ability of the ocean to absorb and store heat and carbon from the atmosphere and buffer extreme changes in climate. This expedition forms part of the ORCHESTRA project and has a blog that features beautiful photos of the Antarctic peninsula.  The mission coincides with Antarctica Day (1 December) which celebrates the signing of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959. This international agreement designated Antarctica as a natural reserve and a continent for peace and science. Catching marine snow in the Antarctic This week NOC scientists on board the RRS Discovery have reached South Georgia and are deploying some of the 22 nets they are using to catch marine snow and small marine animals living in the ocean's twilight zone. Marine snow is a shower of dead marine plants and other carbon-rich detritus that falls from the upper ocean. The photo on the left shows some of the team being snowed on while deploying nets and systems to catch marine snow. This forms part of the COMICS project, which is investigating the role of ocean biology in the twilight zone on the global carbon cycle. Follow the expedition blog, which features photos of the small lantern fish and other marine life the team caught in the nets. You can also keep updated by following @COMICS_Carbon New CO2 detection device developed for unmanned ocean vessels Carbon dioxide in some of the most remote parts of the world's oceans will be measured by a new instrument being developed by scientists at the NOC. The CaPASOS (Calibrated pC02 in Air and Surface Ocean Sensor), created by the NOC in partnership with the University of Exeter, will be carried on unmanned autonomous vessels to locations including the Southern Ocean. Ship-borne sensors gather data in many parts of the world, but extreme and hostile conditions in some oceans, especially during winter, mean that few ships are able to go there. The new sensor will help improve our understanding of the relationship between carbon and the oceans. The ocean uptake of carbon dioxide slows climate change, but that process also causes ocean acidification, which can adversely impact marine life and the communities that depend on it for their livelihoods. The CaPASOS instrument will measure partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pC02) in the air and the surface of the ocean, both of which are vital to calculating how C02 moves between the air and sea. How do you know how many species are in the ocean? Answering this question in an article in The Conversation to mark a decade of the World Register of Marine Species the NOC's Dr Tammy Horton said: "In fact, we don't even know how many species exist in the oceans. Most estimates were made before we even had any inventory of how many had been scientifically named – they have ranged from 0.3m to an astounding 100m. "But we do know that 242,500 marine species have been described because their names are now managed in the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) by about 300 scientists located all over the world." WoRMS has now turned ten years old and Dr Tammy Horton (pictured) at NOC, chairs the Steering Committee of this globally recognized initiative, which aims to provide the most authoritative list of names of all marine species globally, ever published. Read the whole article here.   This email was sent using GovDelivery Communications Cloud on behalf of: National Oceanography Centre · Waterfront Campus · European Way · Southampton · SO14 3ZH · United Kingdom