Leo emerges from ocean
“Leo” the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling (SOCCOM) float adopted by Albany Junior and Senior High School last year has resumed sending data after being trapped beneath ice in the Southern (Antarctic) Ocean for several months.
SOCCOM is a multi-institutional study designed to try and unlock the mysteries of the Antarctic Ocean and its influence on climate. One of the ways the group is collecting data is through the use of oceanic floats that are launched into the Southern Ocean to collect and send back data.
Researchers working for SOCCOM reached out to students and teachers across the nation, involving them in the project through an Adopt-a-Float program. One of the researchers, Princeton University research oceanographer Dr. Robert Key, a 1965 graduate of Albany High and son of former local physician Luther Key, teamed up with AHS science instructor André Raymond to get Albany included in the Adopt-a-Float program.
Float WMO #5905374 and UWID #12782 was decorated with a crude drawing of a lion and inscribed as Albany Jr/Sr High School “Leo the Lion,” before it was loaded onto a research vessel and transported to a location off of Antarctica for its six-year deployment.
“Leo” sent back data from Jan. 29, 2018 until June 10, when it became trapped under the ice. On Dec. 17, with the coming of spring in the southern hemisphere, “Leo” finally found open water and once again began sending data to SOCCOM.
Key brought a float simulator with him when he came to Albany and visited with AHS students at an assembly last fall. He demonstrated how the various monitors work and explained how the float ascends and descends in the ocean.
“The whole school was in attendance for the presentation,” said Raymond. “Dr. Key did a good job of helping the students to understand that the data collected will always be associated with AJSH.”
Everyone, including local students, can go online and look at the readings recorded by Leo the Lion, and all of the 200 floats included in the project by going to soccom.princeton.edu.
“Leo’s” last known transmission was on March 8, and at that time the float was off of the Antarctica coast, on the Australian side of the continent at latitude -64.278, longitude 145.933.
SOCCOM Results
Key currently serves as the data manager for the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling (SOCCOM) project, and he recently summarized some of the findings that have been published by two of the post-docs, Alison Gray and Seth Bushinski, who have worked on the project.
1. The Southern Ocean takes up a large fraction of the man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
2. Because of #1, temperature rise and other surface earth changes are not as fast as they would have been otherwise.
3. CO2 taken up in the Southern Ocean is sequestered for hundreds of years if goes into bottom waters, only a few decades if it goes into intermediate waters.
4. The magnitude of #1 was primarily based on summertime data from ships.
5. Because there was almost no winter data, year-long estimates of CO2 uptake were based on the summer data.
6. The new data derived by SOCCOM floats indicates that the wintertime CO2 uptake into the Southern Ocean is less than previously estimated (from summer data).
7. Odds are that the total amount of CO2 going into the global ocean is about what has been estimating from measurements. If it is not going into the Southern Ocean then it must be going in other oceans (it hasn’t been found on land).
8. #7 sounds like a compensation. The problem is that CO2 entering the ocean elsewhere has almost no pathway to reach deep/bottom waters. That means:
A. It will raise the concentration of surface waters faster.
B. It will increase acidification rates of surface waters (which is very bad for coral, and bad for some fishes, bivalves, and phytoplankton.)
C. It will cause the ocean uptake to stop much sooner (simple solubility chemistry).
D. When #C occurs, things get nasty in a hurry.
According to Key, the ocean has been buying us time for hundreds of years, but when it stops its uptake of CO2, climate change/global warming will occur significantly faster than what has been seen so far.
Key added that researchers have to rely on models to predict what that world will resemble if the oceans stop taking up CO2.
“Fortunately the ocean has taken up something like half of the man-made CO2 produced since 1870,” said Key.
Key earned his bachelor of science in chemistry from Southwestern University and his Ph.D. in oceanography from Texas A&M University.
He has worked at Prince-ton since 1988.
