SEWARD, Alaska, May 26 (U.S.): In the choppy cold waters of Alaska’s Resurrection Bay, all eyes were on the gray waters, looking for only one thing.
It wasn’t a mouthful of humpback whales that force across this picturesque fjord, or a sea otter lazing on its back, chewing a king crab, The Associated Press reports.
Instead, everyone on board the University of Alaska Fairbanks research vessel Nanuq was looking for a spot that appeared on the sea surface 5-foot-tall (1.52 meters), bright pink underwater.
The glider – believed to be the first to be configured with a large sensor to measure carbon dioxide levels in the ocean – has just completed its first mission overnight.
Designed to dive 3,281 feet (1,000 meters) and cruise into remote parts of the ocean, the autonomous vehicle was deployed to the Gulf of Alaska this spring to provide a deeper understanding of ocean chemistry in an era of climate change.
The research could be a big step forward in monitoring ocean greenhouse gases, because until now, measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations – a measure of ocean acidification – have been mostly done from ships, buoys and anchors anchored to the ocean floor.
“Ocean acidification is a process by which humans release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through their activities of burning fossil fuels and changing land use,” said Andrew McDonnell, an oceanographer at the School of Fisheries and Oceanography at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The oceans have done humans a huge favor by taking in some carbon dioxide. Otherwise, there would be too much in the atmosphere, trapping the sun’s heat and heating the Earth.
“But the problem now is that the ocean is changing its chemical composition because of this uptake,” said Claudine Hoery, an oceanographer with the university’s International Center for Polar Research.
The vast amount of data collected is being used to study ocean acidification that can harm and kill some marine organisms.
Rising ocean acidity affects some of the marine organisms that build shells. This process can kill or make the organism more vulnerable to predators.
For several weeks this spring, married Horie and McDonnell worked with engineers from Cyprus Subsea Consulting and Services, which provided the underwater glider, and 4H-Jena, a German company that supplied the sensor inserted into the drone.
On most days, the researchers took the glider farther and farther into Resurrection Bay than the coastal community of Seward for the tests.
After her first night mission, a crew member spotted her swaying in the water, nunook — the Inupiat word for a polar bear — backed up to allow people to haul the 130-pound (59 kilogram) glider aboard the ship. The sensor was then removed from the drone and rushed into the ship’s cabin to download its data.
Think of the 1-foot (0.30 m) by 6-inch (15.24 cm) sensor as a laboratory in a tube, where pumps, valves, and membranes move to separate gas from seawater. It analyzes carbon dioxide, records the data, and stores it within a temperature-controlled system. Many sensor components use battery power.
Since it is the industry standard, the sensor is the same as found in any ship or laboratory that works with CO2 measurements.
Hauri said that using this was “a huge step to be able to accommodate such a large and power-hungry sensor, so this is something special on this project.”
“I think she’s one of the first people to actually use[gliders]to measure CO2 directly, so that’s very exciting,” said Richard Felly, NOAA’s chief scientist at the agency’s Pacific Marine Environment Laboratory in Seattle. . He said Hori was a graduate student in 2007 when she accompanied him on his first acidification cruise.
The challenge, said Fili, is to make the measurements on a glider with the same degree of precision and accuracy as tests on board ships.
“We need to have confidence in our measurements and confidence in our models if we are going to release important scientific data about how the oceans will change over time and how that will affect our important economies that depend on food from the sea,” he said.
He noted that the effects of acidification have already been observed in the Pacific Northwest on oysters, non-aquatic crabs, and other species.
Researchers in Canada had previously attached a smaller carbon dioxide sensor to an underwater drone in the Labrador Sea, but found that it had not yet met its ocean acidification monitoring goals.
“Tests have shown that the glider sensor operates in a harsh environment but needs further development,” said Nikolai von Opelen Bronikowski, director of the gliders program at the Ocean Frontier Institute at Memorial University of Newfoundland, in an email.
Horie said the two teams “only use two different types of sensors to solve the same problem, and it’s always good to have two different options.”
There is no GPS module inside the underwater self-driving plane. Instead, having been programmed, it heads out on its own to navigate the ocean according to navigation directions — knowing how far to go down the water column, when to sample, and when to surface and send a locator signal so that it can be like that. recovery.
While conducting drone tests, the US research vessel Sikuliaq, owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the university, conducted its own two-week mission in the bay to sample carbon and pH as part of an ongoing work each spring and summer and fall.
These methods are limited to collecting samples from a fixed point while the glider will be able to roam around the ocean and provide researchers with a wealth of data about the ocean’s chemical composition.
The vision is to have a fleet of once robotic gliders operating in oceans around the world, providing a real-time glimpse into current conditions and a way to better predict the future.
“We can … understand a lot more of what’s going on in the ocean than we did before,” McDonnell said.