These last few days have been great for science. Last night, we had an ice breaker on a huge research vessel which would put the Oceanus to shame. The G.O. Sars is rented out by the University of Oslo for a lot of it's research I later found out. The reception was good and we got to meet a lot of people even though it was broken into 3 different icebreakers (it's a huge conference). I'll admit, we snuck into the ice breaker on the ship and later went to our assigned icebreaker. Aboard the vessel we met many people including liminologists from Finland, polar bear biologists from Denmark and tundra ecologists from Russia. It was then that we realized how much of a minority America and undergraduates were at the conference.
By the time we went to the other icebreaker, the festivities were dying down; however, we were able to see traditional Norwegian customs in a dance and music performance. Then I tried my luck at an old Norwegian game to no avail.
The conference started early the next day and unfortunately, we missed the opening ceremonies as we did not realize the train ride to the conference was 30 minutes! Luckily, IPY posts many of the major going ons on its website: http://ipy-osc.no/live. We split up in order to see more talks as a whole, and I went to the phytoplankton talks. I caught the end of one talk about krill dispersion off the coast of south Georgia in the Weddell Sea. She found that rates of dispersion of krill are increasing and transporting from west to east. This is bad because there is a lack of krill in the west and the krill in the east is underdeveloped due to quick transport. The first talk of the next session was on phytoplankton dynamics by G.O.A.L led by Virginia Garcia from Brazil. They looked at the waters of the Patagonia shelf off the southeastern tip of south america which is very similar to antarctic waters thanks to the circumantarctic current. They used remote sensing and found areas of high productivity. Then they went to sites and took water chemistry and pelagic data. What they found was two separate peaks of phytoplankton; one in early spring dominated by large diatoms and dinoflagellates, and the other in mid to late summer by a coccolithophorid lag. With these blooms, they saw high chlorophyll and oxygen levels as well as low CO2 levels. This aids in the developing CO2 sink in Antarctica. They also found high levels of aerosols and DMS's which may be associated with the blooms, but this is a preliminary suggestion. The next talk was hard to understand and was quite dry so I had a difficult time following but it essentially went through the carbon budget for the phytoplankton blooms associated with antarctica. The next talk was by a young scientist from SCRIPPS who was probably better than most of the old greyhairs which was quite reassuring. He used remote sensing as well to figure out the affects of ice break on phytoplankton in the larson ice shelf. He fount that after the ice break there was an increase in chlorophyll in the broken region. The bloom raised the temperature of the ocean and may have sparked melt, which in turn sparks blooms, leading to a downward spiral effect. He also transected the area and found an increase of phytoplankton, peaking at 50m offshore. The longshore transect also was gradiented although this could be the result of advection between sites.
The Main talk today was by Steven Chown, Invasion biologist from South Africa and winner of the Muse award from IPY presented by Prince Albert II. The speech was inspiring and moving. I encourage you all to watch it on: http://ipy-osc.no/live. Titled "12:15 Plenary Lecture- Prof. Steven Chown Biodiversity change: an unintended legacy
The afternoon sessions we saw were quite uneventful. The majority of the talks were about populations of the arctic foxes and how they are dwindling. Their populations are being impacted by invasion of red foxes, limitations on the lemming populations(food source) and the shrinking and fragmenting tundras, which make up their habitat. One scientists suggests and implicates shooting of the red foxes as a means of replacing their primary predator, the wolf (which humans got rid of). That particular scientist ran experiments where he gave food to foxes and provided them with good shelters and found that 50% of arctic fox survival was dependent on lemming populations, 25% on shelter, 15% on the extra food and 10% on red fox shootings. My main question is why not increase the lemming population (unless it is at carrying capacity), that way the foxes can come out of endangerment naturally. If you ask me, we shouldn't be killing one species to save an endangered species that is on the brink of annihilation, soon we'll be talking about remediation of the red fox population! It seems like a wasteful allocation of time and resources (just like those silly pandas!). Leave natural selection be. Related Links:
Pandas 1
Pandas 2
The Animal Review
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