Tag: University of Bristol

Should we engineer the climate? A social scientist and natural scientist discuss

Posted on by janet.crompton
File 20181207 128196 1nndt5c.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1
Ekaterina Karpacheva/Shutterstock.com

This is an article from The Conversation’s Head to Head, a series in which academics from different disciplines chew over current debates. Let us know what else you’d like covered – all questions welcome. Details of how to contact us are at the end of the article.


Rob Bellamy: 2018 has been a year of unprecedented weather extremes around the world. From the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Japan to the largest wildfire in the history of California, the frequency and intensity of such events have been made much more likely by human-induced climate change. They form part of a longer-term trend – observed in the past and projected into the future – that may soon make nations desperate enough to consider engineering the world’s climate deliberately in order to counteract the risks of climate change.

Indeed, the spectre of climate engineering hung heavily over the recent United Nations climate conference in Katowice, COP24, having featured in several side events as negotiators agreed on how to implement the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, but left many worried that it does not go far enough.

Matt Watson: Climate engineering – or geoengineering – is the purposeful intervention into the climate system to reduce the worst side effects of climate change. There are two broad types of engineering, greenhouse gas removal (GGR) and solar radiation management (or SRM). GGR focuses on removing anthropogenically emitted gases from the atmosphere, directly reducing the greenhouse effect. SRM, meanwhile, is the label given to a diverse mix of large-scale technology ideas for reflecting sunlight away from the Earth, thereby cooling it.

An engineered future?

RB: It’s increasingly looking like we may have to rely on a combination of such technologies in facing climate change. The authors of the recent IPCC report concluded that it is possible to limit global warming to no more than 1.5°C, but every single one of the pathways they envisaged that are consistent with this goal require the use of greenhouse gas removal, often on a vast scale. While these technologies vary in their levels of maturity, none are ready to be deployed yet – either for technical or social reasons or both.

If efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by transitioning away from fossil fuels fail, or greenhouse gas removal technologies are not researched and deployed quickly enough, faster-acting SRM ideas may be needed to avoid so-called “climate emergencies”.

SRM ideas include installing mirrors in Earth’s orbit, growing crops that have been genetically modified to make them lighter, painting urban areas white, spraying clouds with salt to make them brighter, and paving mirrors over desert areas – all to reflect sunlight away. But by far the best known idea – and that which has, rightly or wrongly, received the most attention by natural and social scientists alike – is injecting reflective particles, such as sulphate aerosols, into the stratosphere, otherwise known as “stratospheric aerosol injection” or SAI.

MW: Despite researching it, I do not feel particularly positive about SRM (very few people do). But our direction of travel is towards a world where climate change will have significant impacts, particularly on those most vulnerable. If you accept the scientific evidence, it’s hard to argue against options that might reduce those impacts, no matter how extreme they appear.

Do you remember the film 127 Hours? It tells the (true) story of a young climber who, pinned under a boulder in the middle of nowhere, eventually ends up amputating his arm, without anaesthetic, with a pen knife. In the end, he had little choice. Circumstances dictate decisions. So if you believe climate change is going to be severe, you have no option but to research the options (I am not advocating deployment) as broadly as possible. Because there may well come a point in the future where it would be immoral not to intervene.

SRM using stratospheric aerosols has many potential issues but does have a comparison in nature – active volcanism – which can partially inform us about the scientific challenges, such as the dynamic response of the stratosphere. Very little research is currently being conducted, due to a challenging funding landscape. What is being done is at small scale (financially), is linked to other, more benign ideas, or is privately funded. This is hardly ideal.

A controversial idea

RB: But SAI is a particularly divisive idea for a reason. For example, as well as threatening to disrupt regional weather patterns, it, and the related idea of brightening clouds at sea, would require regular “top-ups” to maintain cooling effects. Because of this, both methods would suffer from the risk of a “termination effect”: where any cessation of cooling would result in a sudden rise in global temperature in line with the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If we hadn’t been reducing our greenhouse gas emissions in the background, this could be a very sharp rise indeed.



Read more:
Time is running out on climate change, but geoengineering has dangers of its own

Such ideas also raise concerns about governance. What if one powerful actor – be it a nation or a wealthy individual – could change the global climate at a whim? And even if there were an international programme, how could meaningful consent be obtained from those who would be affected by the technology? That’s everybody on Earth. What if some nations were harmed by the aerosol injections of others? Attributing liability would be greatly contentious in a world where you can no longer disentangle natural from artificial.

And who could be trusted to deliver such a programme? Your experience with the SPICE (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering) project shows that people are wary of private interests. There, it was concerns about a patent application that in part led to the scientists calling off a test of delivery hardware for SAI that would have seen the injection of water 1km above the ground via a pipe and tethered balloon.

MW: The technological risks, while vitally important, are not insurmountable. While non-trivial, there are existing technologies that could deliver material to the stratosphere.

Most researchers agree that the socio-political risks, such as you outline, outweigh the technological risks. One researcher remarked at a Royal Society meeting, in 2010: “We know that governments have failed to combat climate change, what are the chances of them safely implementing a less-optimal solution?”. This is a hard question to answer well. But in my experience, opponents to research never consider the risk of not researching these ideas.

The SPICE project is an example where scientists and engineers took the decision to call off part of an experiment. Despite what was reported, we did this of our own volition. It annoyed me greatly when others, including those who purported to provide oversight, claimed victory for the experiment not going ahead. This belies the amount of soul searching we undertook. I’m proud of the decisions we made, essentially unsupported, and in most people’s eyes it has added to scientists’ credibility.

 

Moral hazard

RB: Some people are also worried that the promise of large-scale climate engineering technologies might delay or distract us from reducing greenhouse gas emissions – a “moral hazard”. But this remains to be seen. There are good reasons to think that the promise (or threat) of SRM might even galvanise efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

MW: Yes, I think it’s at least as likely that the threat of SAI would prompt “positive” behaviour, towards a sustainable, greener future, than a “negative” behaviour pattern where we assume technology, currently imaginary, will solve our problems (in fact our grandchildren’s problems, in 50 years time).

RB: That said, the risks of a moral hazard may not be the same for all climate engineering ideas, or even all SRM ideas. It’s a shame that the specific idea of stratospheric aerosol injection is so frequently conflated with its parent category of SRM and climate engineering more generally. This leads people to tar all climate engineering ideas with the same brush, which is to the detriment of many other ideas that have so far raised relatively fewer societal concerns, such as more reflective settlements or grasslands on the SRM side of things, or virtually the entire category of greenhouse gas removal ideas. So we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

MW: I agree with this – somewhat. It’s certainly true all techniques should be given the same amount of scrutiny based on evidence. Some techniques, however, often look benign but aren’t. Modifying crops to make them more reflective, brightening clouds, even planting trees all have potentially profound impacts at scale. I disagree a little in as much as we simply don’t know enough yet to say which technologies have the potential to reduce the impacts of climate change safely. This means we do need to be thinking about all of these ideas, but objectively.

Anyone that passionately backs a particular technology concerns me. If it could be conclusively proven that SAI did more harm than good, then we should stop researching it. All serious researchers in SAI would accept that outcome, and many are actively looking for showstoppers.

RB: I agree. But at present there is very little demand for research into SRM from governments and wider society. This needs to be addressed. And we need broad societal involvement in defining the tools – and terms – of such research, and indeed in tackling climate change more broadly.



Read more:
Why you need to get involved in the geoengineering debate – now

The question of governance

MW: Some people think that we should just be getting on with engineering the climate, whereas others feel even the idea of it should not even be discussed or researched. Most academics value governance, as a mechanism that allows freedom to explore ideas safely and there are very few serious researchers, if any, who push back against this.

A challenge, of course, is who governs the governors. There are strong feelings on both sides – scientists either must, or cannot, govern their own research, depending on your viewpoint. Personally, I’d like to see a broad, international body set up with the power to govern climate engineering research, especially when conducting outdoor experiments. And I think the hurdles to conducting these experiments should consider both the environmental and social impact, but should not be an impediment to safe, thoughtful research.

RB: There are more proposed frameworks for governance than you can shake a stick at. But there are two major problems with them. The first is that most of those frameworks treat all SRM ideas as though they were stratospheric aerosol injection, and call for international regulation. That might be fine for those technologies with risks that cross national boundaries, but for ideas like reflective settlements and grasslands, such heavy handed governance might not make sense. Such governance is also at odds with the bottom-up architecture of the Paris Agreement, which states that countries will make nationally determined efforts to tackle climate change.

Which leads us to the second problem: these frameworks have almost exclusively arisen from a very narrow set of viewpoints – either those of natural or social scientists. What we really need now is broad societal participation in defining what governance itself should look like.

MW: Yes. There are so many questions that need to be addressed. Who pays for delivery and development and, critically, any consequences? How is the global south enfranchised – they are least responsible, most vulnerable and, given current geopolitical frameworks, unlikely to have a strong say. What does climate engineering mean for our relationship with nature: will anything ever be “natural” again (whatever that is)?

All these questions must be considered against the situation where we continue to emit CO₂ and extant risks from climate change increase. That climate engineering is sub-optimal to a pristine, sustainably managed planet is hard to argue against. But we don’t live in such a world. And when considered against a +3°C world, I’d suggest the opposite is highly likely to be true.

If there’s a specific topic or question you’d like experts from different disciplines to discuss, you can:The Conversation

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This blog was written by Dr Rob Bellamy, Presidential Fellow in Environment, University of Manchester and Dr Matthew Watson, Reader in Natural Hazards, University of Bristol Cabot Institute. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rob Bellamy
Matt Watson

I won’t fly to your conference, but I hope you will still invite me to participate

Posted on by janet.crompton

I was really proud to see that the University of Bristol declared a climate emergency. It was one of those moments that makes you feel part of a worthwhile institution (despite its many other flaws, like all institutions). Inspired by the exploding #Fridaysforclimate movement and the speeches of brave activist @GretaThunberg, I had been thinking about what I could personally do to contribute to the needed paradigm change. It did not take much reflection to realise that the most effective change in my professional life would clearly be to cut down travel, specially by air. And so, the University’s announcement prompted me to ‘go public’ with it.

This tweet prompted a series of exchanges with colleagues from Bristol and elsewhere. The reaction was mainly in three directions. First, that such a personal ‘no travel policy’ may be impossible to adopt in the context of (UK) academia, where public and conference speaking is used as both a measure of ‘academic productivity’ and as a proxy for esteem/standing in the field for the purposes of eg promotion—so, either you travel, or you may be seen as not doing your job or/and not worthy of (further) promotion. Second, that this would reduce the likely impact of my research and cut me off from potentially relevant audiences. Third, that this would exclude some of the very enjoyable moments that come with academic conferences, where you end up socialising with likely-minded colleagues and developing networks of collaborators and, if lucky, friends.

All of these are important points, so I have given this a little bit more thought.

First, I have to concede that not traveling to conferences will be an issue in terms of justifying my engagement with the academic (and policy-making) communities unless I manage to find a way to still participate in conferences. But this should not be too difficult. Today, there is large number of options to organise webinars and to allow for remote participation in meetings, so there is really no excuse not to take advantage of them. The technology is there and most institutions offer the required equipment and software, so it is high time that academics (and policy-makers) start using it as the default way of organising our interactions. This can even have secondary positive effects, such as the possibility of recording and publishing all or part of the conferences/meetings, so that different people can engage with the discussion at different times.

I also concede that not traveling to conferences and workshops can have a negative impact on ‘CV-building’ and that this will reduce any academic’s prospect of promotion. But I can only say that, to my shame and regret, I have been burning too much CO2 to get to my current academic position. In current lingo, I have exhausted (or, more likely, exceeded) my CO2 budget for conferences, so I can no longer afford to do it. If this means that my employer may not consider me deserving of a higher academic position as they may otherwise have, then I will have to accept any delays that come from implementing a no travel policy. In the grand scheme of things, this is a tiny sacrifice.

I acknowledge that this is something I can do from the very privileged academic position I am lucky to have, so I have no intention of proselytising. However, I do plan to try to change the system. I will work with my local trade union branch to see if we can make specific proposals to reduce the CO2 footprint of the promotions procedure. I will also organise webinars and non-presential conferences and offer every opportunity I can, in particular to early career researchers, so that academics can carry on with ‘CV-building’ (and, more importantly, knowledge-exchange) despite not traveling. These are the remedial actions I can and will implement. If you can think of others, please let me know. I would be more than happy to chip in.

Second, I must say that I have generally reached the audience for my academic work online. Only very rarely have I spoken at a conference or workshop where participants did not know my work from my SSRN page and this blog. With the partial exception of Brussels-based policy-makers (when I have been member of expert groups), every other policy-making body and NGO that has engaged with my work has done so remotely and, oftentimes, without any sort of direct conversation or exchange. There are plenty opportunities for academics to share their work online on open access and this has made the need for last-century-type conferences and workshops largely redundant for the purposes of knowledge and research dissemination. We need to realise this and use it to the advantage of a lower CO2 footprint for knowledge exchange.

Third, the social component is more difficult to address. There is no question that socialising at conferences and workshops has value in and of itself. It is also clear that, once you establish a network, you do not need to meet regularly with your collaborators and friends (however nice it is) to keep it going. So this may be the only aspect of conference travel that could justify going to a very specific event eg to establish new connections or to rekindle/deepen existing ones. But maybe this can be done without flying—eg in the case of UK-based academics like me, to prioritise conferences in Europe and convincing our employers and ourselves to take the extra time to travel by train or bus (anecdotally, most academics I know love train trips).

So, all in all, I have reaffirmed myself in the commitment to minimise my conference travel and, from today, I plan to not accept invitations to speak at or attend any conferences that require me to fly (although I will still fulfill the few prior commitments that I have). I will always ask for a ‘virtual alternative’, though, and I am really hoping that this will be acceptable (or even welcome).

Thus, in case you organise a conference on a topic within my expertise, here is my message: I will not fly to your conference, but I hope you will still invite me to participate. I hope you will because we have the technology to do this and because I value of our exchanges.

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This blog is written by Dr Albert Sanchez Graells, Reader in Economic Law at the University of Bristol. This blog was reposted with kind permission from Albert. You can view his original blog post here.

Dr Albert Sanchez Graells

Bristol is Global Competition 2019 – a student response to the global food crisis

Posted on by janet.crompton
Bristol Is Global finalists

Food – not one of us would be able to live without it and crucially, this obvious fact is understated. In the global north, with fast food delivery services available at our fingertips and supermarkets stocked with shelves of tinned cans, frozen meals and fresh fruit and veg, it is unsurprisingly easy to take food for granted. In an increasingly globalised world, where much of our food travels miles across oceans and roads, it is ever more common to find ourselves alienated from the cycles and processes that start in the soil and end up at the tip of our knives and forks. Our disconnection to food is significant given that the global food industry is in a hidden environmental crisis: a crisis of social, cultural, historical, economic, political, and geographical significance. As students, we recognise that if climate demands are not met within our lifetimes: water scarcity, diseases, droughts, floods, and the acidification of oceans will impact the security of our food in irrepressible ways (Empson 2016: 77-8).

And so, this year, Bristol is Global (BiG) asked students to address the question:

How can the university, students and the wider public address the problems with the local and global food industry?

Focusing on three sub-categories:

  1. Food waste
  2. The hunger-obesity paradox
  3. Single-use plastic packaging.

BiG is an annual, university-wide competition organised by students that is themed around a different global socio-political challenge each year, with the winning team being awarded £500. The competition provides an opportunity for students from different disciplines to collaboratively develop a solution to a global problem on a local scale, founded on the belief that no global challenge will ever be resolved by one person, but rather a collective effort of countless individuals each making small actions.

To introduce the theme, Joy Carey, an expert in sustainable food planning who is currently a member of the Bristol Food Policy Council along with Natalie Fee, an environmental campaigner against plastic pollution, gave inspiring talks to launch the competition. This was followed by a panel debate to help students better understand the complex issue at hand a panel event took place. Representatives from Bristol Waste Company, Fair Trade Network, Community Farm, as well as our own Professor Jeffrey Brunstrom engaged in a thought provoking discussion with the students.

This year, the four finalist teams came up with four creative and diverse ideas that could potentially have a significant impact on the Bristol community:

  1. RecycleWise: A comprehensive information pack distributed to second year flats educating students on good recycling practices.
  2. Bright: An all-inclusive app with tutorial videos, interactive maps and reward schemes to encourage people to follow more sustainable eating habits.
  3. Eat Well Bristol: Student-volunteer run holiday cooking sessions in primary schools to make organic and healthy eating more accessible to underprivileged families in Bristol.
  4. Green Brewery Initiative: Growing indoor crops and herbs using plastic bottles rather than pots and used coffee grounds instead of fertiliser to engage the University community in reducing waste.

Members from LettUs Grow, a successful University of Bristol start-up developing vertical farming technology met with the teams to help them refine their pitch. In the final event, each team presented their ideas to a panel of judges. The quality of research and originality in each proposal was truly impressive, as well as the passion and enthusiasm shown by all four teams. The judges ultimately decided to chip in an extra £100 and fund two teams, the Bright App and RecycleWise, as well as providing continued support to all four teams to carry on with their projects. With Bristol Going for Gold (Bristol’s ambition to become the first Gold Award Sustainable Food City in the UK by 2020), each proposal has tremendous potential to help the city reach its goal.

As organisers of BiG we would like to thank the Cabot Institute for providing invaluable support throughout the competition. We would also like to extend our thank you to the Alumni Grant Foundation for funding to further help the teams implement their ideas.

Next year BiG will return with a different socio-economic issue, challenging students to come up with solutions that can truly help the Bristol community in different ways. We hope to engage more students and encourage the entire university community to engage in the issues we face.

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This blog was written by Lina Drozd, Usha Bholah and Smruthi Radhakrishnan, all students at the University of Bristol.

How University-city partnerships can help us tackle the global climate emergency

Posted on by janet.crompton

 

Image credit: Chris Bhan 

Climate scientists have made it clear: we are in a global state of emergency. The International Panel on Climate Change report published late last year was a wake-up call to the world – if we don’t limit warming to 1.5 degrees, 10 million more people will be exposed to flood risk. If we don’t, it will be much, much harder to grow crops and have affordable food. If we don’t, we’ll have more extreme weather, which will undoubtedly impact the most vulnerable. If we don’t, the coral reefs will be almost 100% gone.

And yet… National governments are failing to act with the urgency demanded by our climate crisis. The commitments each country made to reduce emissions under the Paris Agreement won’t get us there – not even close.

How can we make progress in the face of political paralysis?

The answer is local action. Specifically, it’s action at the city-scale that has excited and inspired a plethora of researchers at the Cabot Institute in recent years.  Cities are complex places of contradiction – they are where our most significant environmental impacts will be borne out through consumption and emissions, whilst simultaneously being places of inspirational leadership, of rapid change, and of innovation.

City governments across the world are increasingly taking the lead and recognising that radically changing the way our cities are designed and powered is essential to reducing carbon emissions [ref 1; ref 2]. They are standing against national powers to make a change (see for example We Are Still In, a coalition of cities and other non-state actors responding to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement). And they are forming innovative partnerships to galvanise action quickly – both in terms of lowering emissions and planning for adaptation to climate change (see for example C40 Cities or 100 Resilient Cities).

Bristol is among them. It was a combination of grass-roots leadership and City support that led to Bristol being the first and only UK city to be awarded the title of European Green Capital in 2015. In November 2018, Bristol City Council unanimously passed the Council Motion to declare a Climate Emergency in Bristol and pledge to make the city Carbon neutral by 2030. It was the first local government authority to do so in the UK.

Today, the University of Bristol is the first UK university to stand alongside its city and declare a Climate Emergency. Far from being a symbolic gesture, these declarations reflect strong local political will to tackle climate change, and they are backed up by action at all levels of the University – from committing to become a carbon neutral campus by 2030, to making education on sustainable futures available to every student.

What’s clear, and potentially even more exciting, is that Universities and cities have a unique opportunity collaborate to innovate for change in truly meaningful and cutting-edge ways.

Within the Cabot Institute for the Environment, we’ve been fortunate to build research partnerships with the many inspiring individuals and organisations in our city. Whether it’s collaborating with the City Council to evaluate the economics of a low carbon Bristol, or with We the Curious to create street art on the impacts and solutions to climate change, or with Ujima Radio and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership to improve inclusion in the city’s sustainability movement – we’ve seen that we can achieve more when we recognise and value knowledge from within and outside the walls of the institution, and make progress together.

Bristol City Council has been working closely with both academics and students at the University of Bristol to explore ways to deliver the highly ambitious target of carbon neutrality by 2030. Cabot Institute researchers have also been working alongside the City Office to embed the UN Sustainable Development Goals in the recently launched One City Plan, which reflects a unique effort to bring together partners from across the public, private and non-profit sectors to collectively define a vision for the city and chart a path towards achieving it. There are many organisations and citizens working to make Bristol more sustainable. The One City Plan is designed to amplify these efforts by improving coordination and encouraging new partnerships.

The good news is that Bristol has already begun reducing its carbon emissions, having cut per capita emissions by 1.76 tonnes since 2010. However, we need to accelerate decarbonisation to avert a crisis and make our contribution to tackling the climate emergency.

We can achieve this in Bristol if we work together in partnership, and we must. We simply cannot wait for our national governments to act. We look forward to standing with our city to meet this challenge together.

This blog is written by Dr Sean Fox and Hayley Shaw with contributions from Dr Alix Dietzel and Allan Macleod.

Dr Sean Fox, Senior Lecturer in Global Development in the School of Geographical Sciences and City Futures theme lead at Cabot Institute for the Environment.

Hayley Shaw, Manager of Cabot Institute for the Environment.

The social animals that are inspiring new behaviours for robot swarms

Posted on by janet.crompton
File 20190326 36252 wdqi1n.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1
Termite team.
7th Son Studio/Shutterstock

From flocks of birds to fish schools in the sea, or towering termite mounds, many social groups in nature exist together to survive and thrive. This cooperative behaviour can be used by engineers as “bio-inspiration” to solve practical human problems, and by computer scientists studying swarm intelligence.

“Swarm robotics” took off in the early 2000s, an early example being the “s-bot” (short for swarm-bot). This is a fully autonomous robot that can perform basic tasks including navigation and the grasping of objects, and which can self-assemble into chains to cross gaps or pull heavy loads. More recently, “TERMES” robots have been developed as a concept in construction, and the “CoCoRo” project has developed an underwater robot swarm that functions like a school of fish that exchanges information to monitor the environment. So far, we’ve only just begun to explore the vast possibilities that animal collectives and their behaviour can offer as inspiration to robot swarm design.

Swarm behaviour in birds – or robots designed to mimic them?
EyeSeeMicrostock/Shutterstock

Robots that can cooperate in large numbers could achieve things that would be difficult or even impossible for a single entity. Following an earthquake, for example, a swarm of search and rescue robots could quickly explore multiple collapsed buildings looking for signs of life. Threatened by a large wildfire, a swarm of drones could help emergency services track and predict the fire’s spread. Or a swarm of floating robots (“Row-bots”) could nibble away at oceanic garbage patches, powered by plastic-eating bacteria.

A future where floating robots powered by plastic-eating bacteria could tackle ocean waste.
Shutterstock

Bio-inspiration in swarm robotics usually starts with social insects – ants, bees and termites – because colony members are highly related, which favours impressive cooperation. Three further characteristics appeal to researchers: robustness, because individuals can be lost without affecting performance; flexibility, because social insect workers are able to respond to changing work needs; and scalability, because a colony’s decentralised organisation is sustainable with 100 workers or 100,000. These characteristics could be especially useful for doing jobs such as environmental monitoring, which requires coverage of huge, varied and sometimes hazardous areas.

Social learning

Beyond social insects, other species and behavioural phenomena in the animal kingdom offer inspiration to engineers. A growing area of biological research is in animal cultures, where animals engage in social learning to pick up behaviours that they are unlikely to innovate alone. For example, whales and dolphins can have distinctive foraging methods that are passed down through the generations. This includes forms of tool use – dolphins have been observed breaking off marine sponges to protect their beaks as they go rooting around for fish, like a person might put a glove over a hand.

Bottlenose dolphin playing with a sponge. Some have learned to use them to help them catch fish.
Yann Hubert/Shutterstock

Forms of social learning and artificial robotic cultures, perhaps using forms of artificial intelligence, could be very powerful in adapting robots to their environment over time. For example, assistive robots for home care could adapt to human behavioural differences in different communities and countries over time.

Robot (or animal) cultures, however, depend on learning abilities that are costly to develop, requiring a larger brain – or, in the case of robots, a more advanced computer. But the value of the “swarm” approach is to deploy robots that are simple, cheap and disposable. Swarm robotics exploits the reality of emergence (“more is different”) to create social complexity from individual simplicity. A more fundamental form of “learning” about the environment is seen in nature – in sensitive developmental processes – which do not require a big brain.

‘Phenotypic plasticity’

Some animals can change behavioural type, or even develop different forms, shapes or internal functions, within the same species, despite having the same initial “programming”. This is known as “phenotypic plasticity” – where the genes of an organism produce different observable results depending on environmental conditions. Such flexibility can be seen in the social insects, but sometimes even more dramatically in other animals.
Most spiders are decidedly solitary, but in about 20 of 45,000 spider species, individuals live in a shared nest and capture food on a shared web. These social spiders benefit from having a mixture of “personality” types in their group, for example bold and shy.

Social spider (Stegodyphus) spin collective webs in Addo Elephant Park, South Africa.
PicturesofThings/Shutterstock

My research identified a flexibility in behaviour where shy spiders would step into a role vacated by absent bold nestmates. This is necessary because the spider colony needs a balance of bold individuals to encourage collective predation, and shyer ones to focus on nest maintenance and parental care. Robots could be programmed with adjustable risk-taking behaviour, sensitive to group composition, with bolder robots entering into hazardous environments while shyer ones know to hold back. This could be very helpful in mapping a disaster area such as Fukushima, including its most dangerous parts, while avoiding too many robots in the swarm being damaged at once.

The ability to adapt

Cane toads were introduced in Australia in the 1930s as a pest control, and have since become an invasive species themselves. In new areas cane toads are seen to be somewhat social. One reason for their growth in numbers is that they are able to adapt to a wide temperature range, a form of physiological plasticity. Swarms of robots with the capability to switch power consumption mode, depending on environmental conditions such as ambient temperature, could be considerably more durable if we want them to function autonomously for the long term. For example, if we want to send robots off to map Mars then they will need to cope with temperatures that can swing from -150°C at the poles to 20°C at the equator.

Cane toads can adapt to temperature changes.
Radek Ziemniewicz/Shutterstock

In addition to behavioural and physiological plasticity, some organisms show morphological (shape) plasticity. For example, some bacteria change their shape in response to stress, becoming elongated and so more resilient to being “eaten” by other organisms. If swarms of robots can combine together in a modular fashion and (re)assemble into more suitable structures this could be very helpful in unpredictable environments. For example, groups of robots could aggregate together for safety when the weather takes a challenging turn.

Whether it’s the “cultures” developed by animal groups that are reliant on learning abilities, or the more fundamental ability to change “personality”, internal function or shape, swarm robotics still has plenty of mileage left when it comes to drawing inspiration from nature. We might even wish to mix and match behaviours from different species, to create robot “hybrids” of our own. Humanity faces challenges ranging from climate change affecting ocean currents, to a growing need for food production, to space exploration – and swarm robotics can play a decisive part given the right bio-inspiration.The Conversation

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Dr Edmund Hunt, EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Edmund Hunt

UK Climate Projections 2018: From science to policy making

Posted on by janet.crompton

On a sunny day earlier this week, I attended the UK Climate Projections 2018: From science to policy making, meeting in Westminster on behalf of the Cabot Institute. Co-hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group and the UK Met Office, the main purpose of this event was to forge discussions between scientists involved in producing the latest UK Climate Projections (UKCP18) and users from various sectors about the role of UKCP18 in increasing the UK’s preparedness of future climate change.

Many people in my constituency come and ask about climate change every day.

The event began with an opening remark by Rebecca Pow, the MP for Taunton Deane in Somerset. Somerset has seen some devastating floods over the years, and a new land drainage bill was passed a week prior to manage flood risk in the area. Constantly faced with questions from her constituents about climate change, Rebecca is particularly interested in regional climate change, both at present and in the future, and any opportunities that may arise from it.

Everyone would like a model of their back garden.

Prof Sir Brian Hoskins, the Founding Director and Chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, and Professor in Meteorology at the University of Reading, gave an overview on climate projection. He listed three main sources of uncertainty in 21st century climate projection: internal variability, model uncertainty, and human activity uncertainty. Climate scientists deal with these uncertainties by using large ensembles of simulations, a range of climate models, and a range of climate scenarios. However, there is always tension between model resolution, complexity and the need for many model runs in global climate projections due to constraints in computer resources. Regional climate models can be embedded in global domains to provide local weather and climate information, but they cannot correct large scale errors. The peer-reviewed UKCP18 provide both the statistics of global climate by combining data from different climate models and runs, and regional daily data for the UK and Europe.

A greater chance of warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers.

This was one of the headline results from UKCP18 shown by Prof Jason Lowe, Head of Climate Services for Government at the Met Office Hadley Centre. UKCP18 is an update from its predecessor, UKCP09, but with constraints from new observations and data from more climate models from around the world. The horizontal resolution of regional climate projections for the UK and Europe has increased from 25 km in UKCP09 to 12 km in UKCP18, with an even higher resolution (2.2 km) dataset coming out in summer 2019. UKCP18 results show that all areas of the UK are projected to experience warming, with greater warming in the summer than the winter. Summer rainfall is expected to decrease in the UK, whereas winter precipitation is expected to increase. However, when it rains in summer it may rain harder. Sea-level rise will continue under all greenhouse gas emission scenarios at all locations around the UK, impacting extreme water levels in the future.

Heat and health inter-connections are complex.

Prof Sarah Lindley, Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester, shared how UKCP18 could be used to study the health effects of climate change and urban heat in the UK. Many of us would remember how hot it was last summer; by 2050, hot summers of that type may happen every other year, even under a low greenhouse gas emission scenario. The most extreme heat-related hazards are in cities due to the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI), i.e. urban areas are often warmer than surrounding rural areas. For instance, Manchester’s UHI intensity (difference between urban and rural temperatures) has increased significantly since the late 1990s. By the end of this century, the city of Manchester is projected to be 2.4ºC warmer than its surrounding rural area in a UKCP09 medium emission scenario. With an aging population, UK’s vulnerability to heat may increase in the future. Both exposure and vulnerability to heat contribute to heat disadvantage. High-resolution UKCP18 data, together with social vulnerability maps of the UK, provide new opportunities to heat disadvantage and adaptation research.

European birds will need to shift about 550 km north-east under 3ºC warming.

The next speaker was Dr Olly Watts, Senior Climate Change Policy Officer for the RSPB, the largest nature conservation charity in the UK. Climate adaptation is an important aspect of nature conservation work, as it should be in everyone’s work. The Climatic Atlas of European Breeding Birds finds that not only will European birds shift 550 km under a likely 3ºC increase in global average temperature, but also a quarter of the bird species will be at high risk. Currently 5000 bird species are changing species distribution, and they face an uncertain future. The UKCP18 data of 2-4ºC warmer worlds could be used to derive qualitative strategies to build wildlife resilience against climate change. Adaptation strategies including informing nature reserve management will be in place across the RSPB conservation programme. The RSPB will also use UKCP18 data to raise public awareness of climate change.

Water demand can increase by 30% on a hot day.

Dr Geoff Darch, Water Resources Strategy Manager at Anglian Water, began his talk by highlighting the inherent climate vulnerabilities in water management in the East of England. It is a “water stressed” region that has low lying and extensive coastline, sensitive habitats, and vulnerable soils. On a hot day, water demand can go up by 30%. Climate change alone is expected to have a total impact of 55 Ml/day on water supplies in the region by 2045. A growing risk of severe drought means an additional impact of 26 Ml/day is expected, not to mention the impacts of population growth. The water industry is proactively adapting to these challenges by setting up plans to reduce leakage and install smart meters for customers. UKCP09 has been used extensively for climate change risk assessment across the water sector; the latest UKCP18 could be used in hydrological modelling, demand modelling, storm impact modelling, flood risk assessment, and sensitivity testing to assess the robustness of water resources management solutions under a range of climate scenarios.

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Dr Eunice Lo, from the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. Her research focusses on climate change, extreme weather and human health.

Dr Eunice Lo

 

Interrogating land and water use change in the Colombian Andes

Posted on by janet.crompton

Socio-ecological tensions, farming and habitat conservation in Guantiva-La Rusia

Highlighting the Cabot Institute’s commitment to growing the evidence base for water-based decision making, Dr Maria Paula Escobar-Tello (Co-Investigator) and Dr Susan Conlon (Post Doctoral Research Assistant) introduce the social science component of an exciting three-year project called PARAGUAS, an interdisciplinary collaboration between UK and Colombian researchers to investigate how plants and people influence the water storage capacity of the Colombian Páramos…

In June 2018, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) jointly awarded funding to five UK projects under the Newton-Caldas funded Colombia-Bio programme. The Colombian Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (Colciencias) subsequently awarded funding to 24 smaller Colombian projects under the same programme. PARAGUAS – How do the Páramos store water? The role of plants and people” is one of the five UK-funded projects.

Páramos are crucial for the livelihoods and wellbeing of millions of people (Photo © María Paula Escobar-Tello, University of Bristol)

Crucial source of land and water

The páramos are tropical mountain wetlands found between 3000m and 4500m of elevation in the Andes. Known for their extreme water storage and regulation capacity, they generate exceptionally high and sustained water supplies to farmland, settlements and cities downstream. They are also an important repository of biodiversity. Páramos have been historically inhabited; first by pre-Colombian indigenous communities and nowadays by heterogeneous campesino communities who depend on them as a primary source of water crucial for their livelihoods and wellbeing.  In the last few decades, several political, economic and armed conflict dynamics have pushed the agricultural frontier to increasingly higher elevations. The combined pressure of land use and climate change has already degraded many páramo areas and their potential demise has generated widespread concern across all levels of governance in Colombia, as well as within the NGO sector and research community.

Growing tensions in water conservation

A diversity of actors – government, NGO, community organisations, farmers – are interacting in the conservation of water in the Guantiva-La Rusia páramo, each with their own knowledges and understandings of the water storage function of the páramo, as well as contrasting views on who should benefit from this function and on the political economy of conservation efforts. Our team began to explore two sets of dynamics where these contrasting views were manifest during a pre-fieldwork campaign in January 2019.

In the first dynamic, local populations experience national and regional conservation efforts to address land and water degradation through the delimitation of the páramos – a controversial ongoing land management process whereby government authorities seek to map the areas they believe should be conserved to protect the páramos. One approach in these new land management policies and plans is to extend national park land under protection through land acquisition, which overlaps with complex pre-existing land ownership arrangements. In addition, the Ley de Páramos 233, 2018 (Páramos Law 233) prohibits farmers from carrying out productive activities on formerly-used land, which is now defined as páramos by authorities, and tasks local authorities with negotiating with farmers and supporting them in finding alternative economic activities.  While this ban may sound ecologically necessary, multiple actors question the processes that have defined the páramo borderline for several reasons including its implications on farmers’ livelihoods, identities and ecosystem knowledges.

In the second dynamic, water conservation policies and plans prioritise the channelling of water from the páramos to the aqueducts that supply the populations downstream through land purchases that lead to changes in land use and the piping of springs and streams. These processes are equally contested and have led to community-level forms of organisation, representation and resistance; as well as to multi-scale and multi-issue conflicts between different campesino sectors; between local, regional and national-level political and environmental authorities; and between different discourses about environmentalism and modernisation.

Our project goals

As the social science component of PARAGUAS, we want to explore these different sets of socio-cultural and political tensions. We will do this by investigating how and why land and water use has changed in the Guantiva-La Rusia páramo and how this is related to public policy decisions that have shaped (or not) how local páramo inhabitants, particularly crop and livestock farmers, interact currently with the páramo through their day-to-day farming practices. Our aim for this part is to expose lesser heard voices in the conservation debate and listen to how local inhabitants articulate their understanding of the water regulation function of the páramo.

We are busy preparing for the first round of fieldwork in May 2019 and are designing our methodology of interviews, focus groups and digital storytelling techniques in close collaboration with our colleagues at Loughborough University. Watch this space for further updates!

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The PARAGUAS project is supported by the Newton-Caldas Fund and funded by the NERC and AHRC [grant number NE/R017654/1].  PARAGUAS is led by Principal Investigator Dr France Gerard (Centre for Ecology & Hydrology) and Co-Investigators Dr Ed Rowe (Centre  for Ecology & Hydrology), Mauricio Diazgranados (The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), David Large (University of Nottingham), Wouter Buytaert (Imperial College London), Maria Paula Escobar-Tello (University of Bristol), Dominic Moran (University of Edinburgh), Michael Wilson (Loughborough University) and supported by the research group ‘Biología para la conservación’ of the Universidad Pedagógica Tecnologica de Colombia (UPTC) – Dr Liliana Rosero-Lasprilla and Dr Adriana Janneth Espinosa Ramirez, the Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt (IAvH) – Dr Susana Rodríguez-Buriticá, The Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UN) – Prof Conrado de Jesus Tobon Marin and the Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM) – Dr Liz Johanna Diaz.
NERC Programme: Exploring and Understanding Colombian Bio Resources
Newton-Caldas Fund
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute members Dr Maria Paula Escobar-Tello nd Dr Susan Conlon from the School of Veterinary Sciences at the University of Bristol.

Dr Maria Paula Escobar-Tello

 

On the lively materiality of soil: A Somali Drylands artistic collaboration

Posted on by janet.crompton
© Sage Brice, 2018.

The WIDER-SOMA project was a cross-disciplinary and multi-institution research collaborative project headed by Dr Katerina Michaelides at the University of Bristol, investigating the effect of warfare on dryland environments in Somalia. I was excited to be invited to join the project in its later stages as artist in residence, supported by a small grant from the Cabot Innovation Fund. As an artist-geographer, my work explores the potential of drawing as a research methodology. I am interested in the unexpected things that happen in cross-disciplinary encounters, and the hazy zones where categories and definitions begin to break down.

The brief was to produce an artwork responding to the range of research specialisms involved in the project, to celebrate the ‘liveliness’ both of the collaborative research processes, and of the Somali Drylands themselves. We wanted to push back against the idea of drylands as ‘dead spaces’, drawing on the knowledge of people who engage closely with these landscapes in different ways, and appreciate their rich and complex ecologies.

© Sage Brice, 2018

I took as my starting point the lively materiality of the soil itself – its vibrant colours, varied textures, and characteristic dispositions offered a tangible way of engaging with the remarkable diversity within the research site. I was prompted by a comment from Dr Marianna Dudley, head of Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities, and a key contributor to the project:

I love the way the soil gets loose and wanders. When we had the exhibitions in London and Bristol we found that the soil got everywhere; even though it was displayed in petri dishes, and when it hadn’t been moved – still the soil got out.

The messy, wandering, sideways processes were what interested me: how did ideas and inspiration cross between researchers in different disciplines, or between researchers and the materials they encountered? Could I, as an artist, enrich, facilitate, or make tangible those processes?

I decided to create two large drawings with the earth pigments, using layers of imagery relating to the different strands of research, and letting them overlap and disrupt each other on the surface of the paper. I was interested in everything – in my e-mail to participants I asked for

photographic imagery of microbial life, soil colour-charts, scribbles and sketches from the margins of your notebooks, graphs and maps, snapshots, postcards from sites you visited, random finds, slide presentations, logos and letterheads, gifts and mementos – anything and everything.

Thus I set out in a quest for incidental imagery – seeking out the visual traces of process, and looking to see where they might differ from the formalised imagery of presentations.

© Sage Brice, 2018.

I met and interviewed many of the researchers involved in the project, to hear about their specific strand of the research, and what about it had been most animating – but also to explain more clearly what I was after. To scientists used to presenting only clean, clear, and coherent findings, it seemed counterintuitive to ask for scribbles, notes, sketches, and first attempts. Many of the processes were more fully digitised or highly sanitised than I had imagined – in some cases there was little to work with visually, and I instead sourced imagery from internet searches, based on keywords the researchers helped to define.

© Sage Brice, 2018.

Once I had collected what I needed, I set about sifting through the material, sampling and experimenting with the soils themselves as pigments, feeling my way into an encounter with the various strands of material and practice. Working with the soils was a joy – as pigments they produced a richly clouded medium, with a range of textures and tones. I worked vertically with a water-based medium, allowing the pigments to dribble and disturb each other. Some were sandy or gritty and difficult to work – others sleek, fluid, and vibrant. I used each soil to draw imagery relating to its source of origin, and layered them over each other by colour to differentiate the strands of the work.

© Sage Brice, 2018.

The two drawings are arranged to echo and contrast with one another – a digitally plotted map against a hand-drawn one; the frenetic lines of cyanobacteria and a delicate web of roads, the sharp line of a mounted machine gun and a goat’s left horn. The drawings are large; seen close up the textures of the soils are on an equal standing with the content of the imagery.

The different threads of the project come together here in a messy collision – sometimes speaking to each other, sometimes disturbing each other. As a practice-based researcher with a special interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration, I am interested in how art processes can help to draw unexpected connections and enliven relations across conventional disciplinary divides. Coming in towards the end of a project, my role here was to look back at what had been done, to draw out and enliven an account of the collaborative process. I believe this way of working is important, and has a lot to offer for building connection, right from the start. Teasing out resonances between different disciplines of practice can help encourage people to work together and to step outside their comfort zones, in order to think afresh with new tools and approaches. I learned a lot about diverse kinds of research from interviewing the different participants – but what they consistently valued most from the process was what they learned from encountering and learning to understand each other’s work.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Sage Brice, Artist In Residence with the support of the Cabot Institute Innovation Fund. Sage is an internationally exhibiting artist and an SWW DTP doctoral student in human geography at the University of Bristol. More on her work can be found at Sagebrice.com. Her doctoral research blog is cranecultures.wordpress.com.

All images © Sage Brice, 2018.

Sage Brice

 

Reflections and insights on COP24

Posted on by janet.crompton
COP24 plenary. Image credit Wikimedia Commons Doman84.

The topic of climate change has fascinated me ever since the age of 17 and I haven’t looked back since then because it is something that is beyond my passion. I completed my Bachelors in Environmental Science at the University of Nottingham and now here at the University of Bristol I am enrolled in Climate Change Science and Policy MSc.

I am also part of a youth-based Climate Change NGO, Malaysian Youth Delegation (MYD), which constantly pushes for more ambitious national and regional climate policies and liaises with the government. The organisation also represents youth climate movement on national and International platforms, educates Malaysian Youth on UNFCCC in relation to Malaysian climate policies and holds Malaysian leaders accountable for their promises. Being in the organisation has taught me about the intricacies involved in climate policies such as the global north-south divide, climate adaptation, mitigation, finance and capacity building.

Being at the University of Bristol has made me intrigued to know more about the science-policy interface that occurs in climate negotiations like COP. I was also intrigued to find out more about how negotiations took place and the role of politics being part and a consequence. I am thankful for Cabot Institute for assisting and funding me with the logistics to my trip to Katowice. During my time at COP24 and aside from tracking negotiations, I was predominantly taking the youth narrative and was working with the organisation I represented – the Malaysian Youth Delegation (MYD) and Youth NGO constituency (YOUNGO).

My experience at COP24 was a profound one, primarily because I saw the subject of climate change coming to life through the form of formal and informal negotiations, high-level meetings and other side events in the premises. This COP was an important one since the draft text for the Paris Agreement Working Programme was supposed to be completed by the end of the conference – the document is vital for the implementation of the Paris Accord that took place in 2015. The two weeks that I’d spent at the COP were some of the most exhilarating and engrossing adventures in the world of climate policy – days often started at 6 am and completed around 2 to 3am the next day leaving a short time to rest each day. At the conference, I attended and observed negotiation sessions, youth constituency meetings, side events related to other aspects of climate change during the day and helped to produce position papers, proposals and write reports for MYD and YOUNGO in the evenings and overnight.

Highlights

One of my main highlights was that I got the chance to meet the Malaysian Minister for Energy, Science, Technology, Environment and Climate Change, Ms. Yeo Bee Yin, and Dr. Gary Theseira, the special functions officer to the minister and a highly experienced negotiator in the UNFCCC. We, the MYD team, attempted to shadow the minister while she was at the conference. Unfortunately, we couldn’t follow the minister as many of her meetings were predominantly “closed door” meaning those meeting not being open to observers. However, the initial purpose of tracking the minister at the conference was to know her views on her unprecedented attendance of a climate conference and how she would take back any outcomes to Malaysia. We also had the opportunity to transcribe Ms. Yeo Bee Yin’s COP speech which can be read here.

Another highlight was having the opportunity to meet my tutor, Cabot Institute theme co-lead for Environmental Change research, Dr. Jo House, at the conference too.  We visited the Polish “coal exhibition” center together where chunks of coal were stacked up. They were termed “clean coal” which were made to supposedly reduce the environmental impact of its combustion as compared to regular coal.

I was also presented with an opportunity to deliver an intervention (a term used in COPs where non-country stakeholders provide their expressions to the chair of a respective meeting) on behalf of YOUNGO. Due to time constraints and other internal reasons, this fell through but the position paper I was about to present was handed over as a written draft to the respective chair of the meeting.

The most important highlight of the conference  was the production of the 133-page rulebook for the implementation of Paris Agreement, which was unanimously adopted at the conference.  This contains the framework for the various articles and implementation modalities mentioned in the Paris Agreement.

The next COP will take place in Chile from 11-22 November 2019 with the pre-COP happening in Costa Rica at an earlier date. COP25 and the intersessional meetings before 2020 will make the rulebook less ambiguous to enact the Paris accord. The United Kingdom has also officially submitted a bid to the UNFCCC to host COP26. This conference would be crucial since it would be the first COP during the implementation period of the Paris agreement – the UK would have to successfully host nations and lead it to a productive outcome considering the interest of various parties.

The most deliberate question in our minds, as youth representatives, is that after the publication of the IPCC’s Special Report, will the Earth’s average surface temperature stay below 1.5C since pre-industrial levels?

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This blog is written by Varunkanth Muralikanth, a Climate Change Science and Policy masters student at the University of Bristol.

Varunkanth Muralikanth

 

Why we’re looking for chemicals in the seabed to help predict climate change

Posted on by janet.crompton
File 20190128 108370 ansjbe.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1
Alex Fox, Author provided

Hidden in even the clearest waters of the ocean are clues to what’s happening to the seas and the climate on a global scale. Trace amounts of various chemical elements are found throughout the seas and can reveal what’s going on with the biological reactions and physical processes that take place in them.

Researchers have been working for years to understand exactly what these trace elements can tell us about the ocean. This includes how microscopic algae capture carbon from the atmosphere via photosynthesis in a way that produces food for much marine life, and how this carbon sequestration and biological production are changing in response to climate change.

But now scientists have proposed that they may also be able to learn how these systems were affected by climate change long ago by digging deep into the seabed to find the sedimentary record of past trace elements. And understanding the past could be key to working out what will happen in the future.

Trace elements can teach us an amazing amount about the oceans. For example, ocean zinc concentrations strikingly resemble the physical properties of deep waters that move huge quantities of heat and nutrients around the planet via the “ocean conveyor belt”. This remarkable link between zinc and ocean circulation is only just beginning to be understood through high-resolution observations and modelling studies.

Dissolved zinc concentrations in the oceans.
Reiner Schlitzer, data from eGEOTRACES., Author provided

Some trace elements, such as iron, are essential to life, and others, such as barium and neodymium, reveal important information about the biological productivity of algae. Different isotopes of these elements (variants with different atomic masses) can shed light on the types and rates of chemical and biological reactions going on.

Many of these elements are only found in vanishingly small amounts. But over the last few years, an ambitious international project called GEOTRACES has been using cutting-edge technological and analytical methods to sample and analyse trace elements and understand the chemistry of the modern ocean in unprecedented detail. This is providing us with the most complete picture to date of how nutrients and carbon move around the oceans and how they impact biological production.

Carbon factories

Biological production is a tangled web of different processes and cycles. Primary production is the amount of carbon converted into organic matter by algae. Net export production refers to the small fraction of this carbon bound up in organic matter that doesn’t end up being used by the microbes as food and sinks into the deep. An even smaller portion of this carbon will eventually be stored in sediment on the ocean floor.

As well as carbon, these algae capture and store a variety of trace elements in their organic matter. So by using all the chemical information available to us, we can get a complete view of how the algae grow, sink and become buried within the oceans. And by looking at how different metals and isotopes are integrated into ancient layers of sedimentary rock, we can reconstruct these changes through time.

Sampling the seabed.
Micha Rijkenberg, Author provided

This means we can use these sedimentary archives as proxy records of nutrient use and net primary production, or export production, or sinking rates. This should enable us to start answering some of the mysteries of how oceans are affected by climate change, not only in relatively recent Earth history but also in deep time.

For example, as well as enlightening us on active processes within the modern ocean, scientists have analysed what zinc isotopes are in seabed fossils from tens of thousands of years ago, and even in ancient rocks from over half a billion years ago. The hope is that they can use this information to reconstruct a picture of how marine nutrients have changes throughout geological history.

But this work comes with a note of caution. We need to bring our knowledge about modern biogeochemistry together with our understanding of how rocks form and geochemical signals are preserved. This will enable us to be sure that we can make robust interpretations of the proxy records of the prehistoric seabeds.

Collecting the samples.
Micha Rijkenberg, Author provided

How do we go about doing this? In December 2018, scientists from GEOTRACES met with members of another research project, PAGES, who are experts in reconstructing how the Earth has responded to past climate change. One approach we developed is to essentially work backwards.

First we need to ask: what archives (shells, sediment grains, organic matter) are preserved in marine sediments? Then, which of the useful metal and isotope signatures from seawater get locked up in these archives? Can we check – using material from the surface of deep-sea sediments – whether these archives do provide useful and accurate information about oceanic conditions?

The question can also be turned around, allowing us to ask whether there new isotope systems that have yet to be investigated. We want to know if GEOTRACES uncovered interesting patterns in ocean chemistry that could be the start of new proxies. If so, we might be able to use these ocean archives to shed light on
how the uptake of carbon in marine organic matter responds to, and acts as a feedback on, climate in the future.

For example, will a warmer world with more carbon dioxide enhance the growth of algae, which could then absorb more of this excess CO₂ and help to act as a break on man-made carbon emissions? Or will algae productivity decline, trapping less organic matter and spurring on further atmospheric warming into the future? The secrets could all be in the seabed.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Katharine Hendry, Reader in Geochemistry, University of Bristol and Allyson Tessin, Visiting research fellows, University of Leeds.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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