News & Events

EOAS Colloquium - Dr. Pilar Lecumberri-Sanchez

Title: From provenance to precipitation: controls on fertility of crustal-derived magmas

Date & Time: Thursday, October 8th at 11:00am

Place: Zoom Room

EOAS Seminar - Dr. Stephanie Waterman

Title: Filling in the Map: How robots, data mining and interdisciplinary studies are revealing ocean mixing rates, mechanisms and impacts

Date & Time: Friday, October 9th at 11:00am

Place: Zoom Room

Abstract:

Mixing is a key control on the distributions of heat, salt, carbon and nutrients in the world’s oceans, and is critical to understanding ocean physics, chemistry and biology. However, despite its importance, our understanding of ocean mixing is limited, primarily due to an extreme scarcity of mixing measurements. In this talk, I’ll introduce you to our research program which aims to address this data gap and answer important questions about ocean mixing rates, their spatiotemporal distributions, mixing mechanisms and mixing impacts using robotic ocean-observing platforms, turbulence parameterizations, and climate model thought experiments. I’ll tell a story of our specific efforts to better understand the space-time geography of mixing in the Arctic Ocean, the most under-sampled of all ocean basins, where exceptionally low energy and high stratification make mixing mechanisms unique and not well-understood. I’ll also review other research efforts, including probing the role of ocean physics in setting preferred whale habitat, and integrating physics, biogeochemistry and molecular biology to better understand how ice-ocean interactions support productive marine ecosystems. Finally, I’ll look ahead to the future of the Canadian-Pacific Robotic Ocean Observing Facility, as well as to future ambitions of collaborations with Indigenous communities to co-design research, incorporate traditional knowledge and mobilize oceanographic data.

Geography Colloquium Speaker - Dr. Rob Jackson

Title: Restoring the Atmosphere

Date & Time: Tuesday, October 6th at 12:30pm

Place: Zoom Room

Abstract:

The drumbeat of doom marks today's climate news. It might track a Category 5 hurricane in Florida peeling roofs off houses like bananas, the latest Californian or Australian or British Columbian town incinerated in a fire fueled by record heat and drought - melted shoes and hubcaps puddled on driveways - or one more clip of the Great Barrier Reef bleached white and dying. Stabilizing the earth's temperature to some arbitrary value is no longer enough, rolling the dice on which catastrophes we'll avoid. We need to restore the atmosphere.

The Endangered Species Act doesn't stop at saving plants and animals from extinction. It mandates their recovery. When we see gray whales breaching on their way to Alaska each spring, grizzly bears ambling across a Yellowstone meadow, bald eagles and peregrine falcons riding updrafts, we celebrate life and a planet restored. Our goal for the atmosphere must be the same.

To do it, we'll need to squeeze greenhouse gas emissions like a vice. We'll need to provide more energy to at least a billion people laboring in energy poverty and injustice. We'll need to preserve species and habitats more actively than we've done to date, while expanding natural carbon solutions and improving working hands.

The path to restoring the atmosphere will be beautiful - and ugly. We'll save lives from cleaner water and air. We'll say goodbye to oil imports and cut trade deficits. We'll have more choices and control over local energy supply. We might even save money, depending on the path we choose. We'll also need to adopt technologies that each of us won't like. ("Oh no, not that one.") And we'll need to hack the atmosphere, removing greenhouse gases from the air after their release.

We can restore the atmosphere in a lifetime. We have to.