Autun Purser, 33, oceanographer, coral risk assessment, monitoring and modelling project, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany

“What we’re trying to do with this project is to understand how cold-water coral reefs in Europe work, and from there to discover how pollutants and sediment affect them. When we understand this better, we will be able to offer oil companies and fishing fleets better advice on how their activities affect the reefs and how they can minimise their impact on them.

“We know that fishing trawlers disturb the sediment of the seabed and that oil-drilling releases sediment when the sand and stone from digging holes are dumped into the ocean. We are trying to find out how far current flows carry that sediment before it drops back to the seabed. That way we can know what sort of exclusion zone should be set up around the reefs to stop sediment falling onto them.

“At the same time we are studying the coral itself to see if the sediment does actually have a negative effect on it. Not much is known about these reefs, so it might turn out that they don’t mind a moderate amount of sediment.

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“Doing this is a mixture of experimentation, measurement and analysis. It means that I spend a lot of time at sea – I spent the whole of September putting down long-term equipment like flow meters, which measure the movement of the water at different depths.

“We also have equipment that catches the naturally-occuring sediment – which is normally made up of things like dead phytoplankton, dead shrimps and fish excrement – so that we can work out what the reefs like to feed on. We can also see if it's “sticky” sediment, which means that pollutants stick to it and potentially end up being eaten by the coral.

“A lot of our work is done using robot submarines, but I do find myself in the water a lot doing things like retrieving marker buoys and cleaning algae and mussels off the bottom of the boat and our depth sensors. I get stung by jellyfish.

“After we’ve collected sediment and measurements we go back to the lab to analyse them. We go through the sediment to see what it’s made of and conduct tests to see how easily the stuff sticks to pollutants. Alongside this, we use computer models to work out what's moving where and when.

“I like the field work but I really enjoy being in the lab working with data and seeing how everything comes together. The most satisfying thing about what I do is simply understanding a natural process.”
www.irccm.org/coramm

Dr Andrew Yool, 35, oceanographer at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton

“I am an eco-system modeller, which means that I never get stung by jellyfish. I do most of my work on computers, apart from going for coffee. “I am in the third year of a three-year project, so much of the time-consuming work – which is basically getting the computer to do the sums – has been done and it’s now up to me to analyse what’s been produced and turn it into something publishable.

“We are trying to work out how much anthropogenic carbon dioxide – that’s carbon dioxide created by human activity – is being absorbed by the ocean. Every year the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere rises but by less than it should do, and one of the reasons is that some of it is being dissolved and going into the ocean. We want to know how much because that will help us to predict what will happen in the future.

“You can’t tell the difference chemically between anthropogenic and other CO2, you can just tell that there is CO2 there, but some people have worked out little tricks to tell where it is. For example they use information from CFCs, which also go into the ocean and also have a recent history but don’t occur naturally. They see where in the ocean they are distributed and use that to guess where we might also have anthropogenic CO2.

“What I am doing is testing their theories using my model. I’ve simulated the last 200 years, which is about how long we’ve been using fossil fuel, and anthropogenic CO2 has gone into my model ocean. I know where it is, because I can separate it out using an accounting trick, but I pretend that I don’t know. Then I use the methods that they use in the real world to see if they can find the CO2 in my model. This tests whether the assumptions they are making in the real world are accurate.

“Knowing that will help us to make predictions of what will happen in the future.

“Being more certain about where anthropogenic CO2 is now will let us work out how big a sink the ocean is for it, and will let us estimate how much CO2 that we make will keep going into it.”
www.noc.soton.ac.uk

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