Alice Marzocchi – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Why should we care about what is going on in the cold and stormy subpolar North Atlantic? I can give you at least three very good reasons:

First of all, the dynamics of this region are crucially important for modulating climatic conditions in North-Western Europe. So basically this is what keeps the UK’s weather relatively mild for its latitudes.
Secondly, deep-water is formed in the Labrador Sea and this is a key process within the global thermohaline circulation.
The transport of heat and freshwater by the Subpolar North Atlantic has an impact on global climate, marine ecosystems, hurricanes, and even on rainfall in the African Sahel, the Amazon and parts of the US.

Main circulation patterns in the North Atlantic. Orange-yellow lines are
surface, warmer currents and blue lines are deep, colder currents.

How do we know what is happening up there?

Up until now, the subpolar North Atlantic has been inadequately measured and climate models largely fail to represent its features accurately. Last week, Dr Penny Holliday from the National Oceanography Centre (Southampton) visited Bristol to give a departmental seminar in the School of Geographical Sciences, titled “Circulation and variability in the subpolar North Atlantic”. From her talk we got to know more about the importance of long-term monitoring of the circulation in the subpolar North Atlantic and about two major ongoing monitoring programmes. These are providing precious observational data that will help scientists understand more about the interannual to multidecadal variability in these regions, in order to improve the skills of our predictions.

OSNAP (Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Programme) is an international programmed that started in 2014 and includes partners from USA, UK, Canada, China, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. OSNAP is designed to provide for the first time a continuous record of measurements across the entire subpolar North Atlantic, similarly to the RAPID observational system at 26°N which has been monitoring the subtropical gyre since 2004. Within UK-OSNAP, Penny is leading the observations being made in the deep western boundary current near Greenland.

Penny Holliday on the first UK-OSNAP (plus Extended Ellett
Line and RAGNARoCC) cruise in summer 2014

The Extended Ellett Line is a project led by the National Oceanography Centre (Southampton) and SAMS (The Scottish Association for Marine Science). It represents one of a small number of long-term, high-quality physical time series in the North Atlantic Ocean. This hydrographic section was started in 1975 by David Ellet, initially only in the Rockall Trough. In 1996 the section was extended up to Iceland. The expedition now runs once a year and the data collected includes physical (e.g. temperature, salinity, velocity), chemical (e.g. iron, nutrients, carbon) and biological (e.g. phytoplankton) measurements. Penny is one of the two Principal Investigators for the Extended Ellett Line.

Most recent findings

While some more time will be necessary before seeing the first results of the OSNAP project, the most recent significant discovery from the Extended Ellett Line is the importance of the episodic southward flow of the Wyville Thomson Overflow Water. Recent observations highlighted the necessity to include its contribution in the calculations of the heat transport through the Rockall Trough. In addition, after four decades of observations, it has been observed that the top layers (0-800m) of the ocean in these regions have warmed and exhibit shorter timescale variability.

Data from the 2014 cruise has also shown that temperature and salinity in 2014 were lower compared to the previous 10 years. This suggests that the North Atlantic subpolar gyre would have increased its circulation and expanded, bringing cooler and fresher water into the eastern regions.

Life at sea in the subpolar North Atlantic

The oceanographic cruises organised within these two programmes also offer the chance to several students and early career scientists to get a taste of what life at sea really means.
Penny was one of my supervisors during my MSc in Southampton, where for my research project I was analysing the results of a new simulation with a high-resolution ocean model in the North Atlantic subpolar regions (we have recently published those results). One year or so later, Penny was recruiting some extra people for one of the Extended Ellett Line cruises and she must have remembered our conversations about how I had always wanted to go on a research cruise. So there I was, ready to board the RRS James Cook as part of the physical oceanography team, sailing from Scotland to Iceland. It was such an amazing experience: I think I will be forever grateful to Penny for making my wish come true!

Myself (left) and Natalia Serpetti (right) taking sea water samples from the CTD
(conductivity-temperature-depth instrument) and looking very happy
during the Extended Ellett Line cruise in 2013.

Life at sea is actually pretty hard work and definitely not a holiday. Initial sea sickness aside, and ignoring the fact that I was waking up a 4 am every morning (yes, I had the unluckiest shift ever!), the memories that I will cherish the most are about all the things that I learnt, the awesome people I met, the breathtaking sunrises and sunsets over Iceland (at least due to the unlucky shift I got to see both of them everyday!), the pilot whales occasionally following the ship, and the power of the ocean which makes you feel so small and insignificant. Probably I will also always remember the entire night that some of us spent scooping up and sieving mud from a deep sea sledge, while listening to pretty bad club music: that was actually great fun!

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Alice Marzocchi, School of Geographical Sciences, at the University of Bristol. Follow Alice on Twitter @allygully.

Twitter contacts: @np_holliday @uk_osnap @osnap_updates

Read Alice’s other blog: The conference crashers! What are a geophysicist, a climate modeller, and a geochemist doing at a Social Sciences conference?

On 5th November 2014 the South West Doctoral Training Centre organised their third annual conference for postgraduate students at the University of Bath. Students and staff from the Universities of Bath, Bristol and Exeter filled the conference venue with a vibrant atmosphere throughout the day, giving great insight on different methods of collaboration. The theme of the conference was in fact “Integrating Perspectives”.

Alice, Jan Peter and Dirk

The three of us – Jan Peter, Dirk, and Alice – are three PhD students part of an EU-funded Marie Curie Training Network (MEDGATE) and within our project collaboration is key. Dirk, normally based at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, is currently visiting us in Bristol to make this collaboration even more active. Even if we are not exactly social scientists, we thought that this conference would represent a great occasion to introduce the dynamics of our interaction to a broader audience. We presented a poster (“How did the sea get so salty?”) outlining the collaboration within the MEDGATE project, but we were also selected for an oral presentation. This was centred on the collaboration between the three of us and we performed it as a three-person act. Preparing and rehearsing it together was actually great fun! The presentation was then followed by a lively panel discussion and a very active Q&A session.

Even though our own climate-related disciplines may seem far away from the Social Sciences realm, we had great interactions with the other participants and this proved to be a very interesting day. We all definitely got something useful out of it!

A multidisciplinary approach

“The collaboration between us and other scientists consists of social interactions and we want these cooperations to be as rewarding as possible for both parties. A great aspect of this conference was the major focus given to the benefits that collaboration and dialogue can bring to research in every discipline. Professor Hugh Lauder (University of Bath) and Professor Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol) also found the time to actively participate in the meeting and they gave two inspiring keynote speeches. The first keynote focused on the deveopment of graduate wages in the context of a high unemployment rate. This structural problem will continue to concern future generations unless an efficient solution can be found. The second keynote dealt with the perception of climate change in the general public. Despite the general consensus among scientists on the evidence that climate change is happening, how can this still be widely perceived to be a hoax in some parts of public life?” — Jan Peter

Interaction and discussion

“The day set the scene well for interaction and discussion on three levels. (1) Each of the student presentations were actively put into perspective by the keynote speakers and the audience. (2) The poster display allowed time for more in depth discussion. (3) Personal experiences could be shared over coffee, lunch or evening drinks, but were, further, successfully enforced in the so called “fish bowl” discussions. During these, the participants sit around an inner circle, in which the discussion takes place. All members can drop in and out of that inner circle, depending on whether they want to contribute to the current discussion topic or not. This gave the opportunity for almost the whole audience to be involved, but in a very casual environment”. — Dirk

Make it happen!

“Most people seemed intrigued by how the interaction between the three of us (and the rest of the project) happens and one of the main questions that was raised was “Do we need facilitators to make these collaborations happen and how do we find the time to make them work?”. These and other aspects were also tackled during some final Skills Workshops. Representatives of the Career and Graduate Development at the University of Bath reminded us of the importance of keeping an open mind during the PhD, be ready for whatever gets thrown at us, and find a way to turn that into what we want it to be. This was defined as “Planned happenstance”, which on our side involves five main steps: curiosity, persistence, flexibility, optimism, and risk taking”. — Alice

A common language

The final panel discussion, including the keynote speakers and Professor Anne Barlow (University of Exeter), summarised the main themes of discussion that emerged throughout the day and gave rise to more interesting reflections from both the panellists and the audience. One key issue that immediately became clear to all of us is the need for a “common language”, which is fundamental to improve interdisciplinary cooperation. The MEDGATE project is specifically based on multidisciplinary collaboration, so we have been tackling this challenge from the very beginning. Throughout the duration of the project, skill-specific workshops were organised by the participants specialised in each of the different disciplines. This allowed us to train each other and therefore create a background understanding, in order to facilitate communication.

The importance of pushing these interdisciplinary boundaries is of key relevance in the context of collaboration between the social and natural sciences, which need each other to convey their respective messages to the society.

From the conference twitter feed:

Everything from how the dead live to how the sea got salty at the amazing #SWDTCconf poster display!
— SWDTC (@SWDTC) November 5, 2014

So maybe we didn’t crash this conference after all?
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This blog is written by Alice Marzocchi (School of Geographical Sciences), Jan Peter Mayser (School of Chemistry), Cabot Institute, University of Bristol and Dirk Simon, visiting from Utrecht University.

Read Alice’s other blog: Unravelling the mysteries of the subpolar North Atlantic