Things are looking up in some parts of the world. Down here, the helicopters were finally able to fly out. SCINI, the underwater cameras, and more food is on its way to our ICE AGED team at their New Harbor field camp. Kamille is settling in and whizzing through the training. Since she was here last year, she can go through the refresher courses a lot faster. I have enjoyed time with another science team from Santa Barbara, California that is studying urchins and ocean acidification. Gretchen and her team, Paul, Lydia, Emily, Mary, Pauline, and their teacher, Peggy, have the lab next to us and they're always a joy to check in with. Today I got the treat of accompanying them on their daily outing.
This is a road on the sea ice. Every day Gretchen's group drives for more than an hour to get to their study site.I’ll let Lydia, one of the researchers, tell the story. She goes out regularly and recently took a WATER DROP from the 5th graders at Sacred Heart School in Saratoga, Ca with her.
My name is Lydia Kapsenberg. I am a graduate student. I study climate change and its effect on marine animals. I go to school in Santa Barbara, CA, but now I am in Antarctica studying sea urchins. I study how they are affected by ocean acidification. Ocean acidification means the seawater is getting more acidic. This is bad for animals that have shells like sea urchin and brittle stars. It is more difficult for them to make their shells.
It is my first time to Antarctica. Every day we go out onto the sea ice. We sample water from a drilled hole in the sea ice that is covered by a small hut. Sometimes we have a Weddell seal visit us in our ice hole. Today we took your Water Drop with us!
A WATER DROP from the 5th graders at Sacred Heart School in Saratoga is perched by Lydia's hole.We use a gray Nisken bottle to collect the water sample. Nisken bottles are bottles that are open on the top and the bottom. They can be triggered to be closed once they are underwater where we can’t reach it. First we attach the Nisken bottle to a rope so we can lower it down to 40 feet. Then we drop a weight down the rope that hits a trigger. When the weight hits the trigger, the lids snap shut. We now have water that we can study in our lab.
The WATER DROP watches as Lydia and Emily get their Nisken bottle ready.But first we pull up the Nisken. We then pour water from a nozel at the lower end of the Nisken bottle so we have water we can take to the lab to measure.
Emily pours water into a little bottle so she can take it back to the lab.In the lab we measure the pH of the water. We want to know how acidic it is.
WATER DROP with water that is ready to be tested.We also run experiments where we grow urchin babies, called urchin larvae, in different climate change conditions.
This sea urchin is spawning. That means she's releasing millions of eggs into the water.Some urchin larvae are in seawater that is very acidic. Some are in water that are not that acidic. We want to measure how the urchins respond to the different kinds of water. We look at their breathing, their skeleton, and something in their bodies called proteins. We hope our research in Antarctica will help us better understand how this species of sea urchin will respond in the light of future climate change.
Each bottle has water that is more or less acidic. Gretchen's group will put urchin larvae in them to see what will happen. This will help us see will happen to them in the future.