VENUS Team Member Visits the Arctic on NASA Cruise

VENUS Observational Data Specialist, Marlene Jeffries, is team leader of the Inorganic Carbon group on a NASA sponsored cruise from Dutch Harbor to Seward Alaska, via the Bering Strait, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas to study the impacts of climate change on the arctic ecosystem. Being the first NASA oceanographic cruise, this is also a rare field meeting between ice scientists and open ocean scientists to quantify the changes in the arctic in the ice and out of the ice.

Her group, representing Dr. Nick Bates of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, is sampling dissolved inorganic carbon/total alkalinity (DIC/TA) measurements from CTD rosette casts and underway pCO2/DIC/TA from the seawater input. Inorganic carbon measurements in the arctic are important because an ice-free arctic is hypothesized as a sink of co2 from the atmosphere. While this is important for moderating atmospheric greenhouse gases, the other ramification is ocean acidification.

Previous sections in the area (SBI cruises) show that there are large chunks of corrosive water on the shelf that can alter the benthic ecosystem (mollusks, crustaceans) by limiting the amount of calcium carbonate available to build their shells. This is a major source of food for megafauna (walrus, seals and whales to name a few) and if the community changes or disappears altogether, these animals will be in crisis.

The arctic environment is responding faster to climate change than any other environment on earth – and Marlene’s group is there to document these changes and hopefully understand the true impact climate change will have on the life that this region supports.