This is MOSAiC Mixdown, a series of mini podcasts about the Arctic expedition MOSAiC. I’m Sam Cornish. The ‘M’ in the MOSAiC acronym stands for multidisciplinary, and we heard in podcast number 2 how this multidisciplinary approach is core to the way the expedition is being conducted. Let’s listen back to the relevant clip.
The voices of Tim Stanton, Sebastian Rokitta and Vera Schlindwein there. In this episode though, we’re going to learn a bit more about some of the specific science questions that really motivate that approach. So my question to the scientists this time is: why is the multidisciplinary aspect important, and how does it benefit your research?
Bill Shaw
Well the multidisciplinary part is important because climate systems are tightly coupled systems, meaning one part affects the others.
That’s Bill Shaw [Bill Shaw, Naval Postgraduate School]
Bill is a physical oceanographer, which means a physicist of the oceans
So for example with MOSAiC, we’re kind of interested in if there’s a lot of biological growth in the summer, does that maybe affect how much heat is trapped in the upper ocean,
versus if there was no biology present at all.
Bill works with Tim Stanton, [Tim Stanton, Naval Postgraduate School] Tim is also interested in
Tim Stanton
the role of biological activity in increasing the trapping of that solar energy near to the ice,
And being part of this expedition offers Tim the opportunity to collaborate with biologists who will expand on my very simple biological measurements using bio-optic sensors, to what exactly is the biology responsible for increasing turbidity, for example.
Turbidity refers to the cloudiness of the ocean caused by tiny particles, and affects the way that light enters and is absorbed in the water
So the mechanics of the way the ocean takes up sunlight, gives it up through mixing and stores part of it, it’s far more intricate than you might first think.
This solar heating is complex, but vital to understand
well it’s very important, as a huge term in the heat flux that is actually melting the ice.
Bill and Tim are interested in the fluxes of heat from the ocean to the ice. They need to think about solar heating, but also the turbulence in the water that delivers that heat to the ice. It’s a process strongly influenced by the turbulence in the upper ocean, which is driven by winds. So it’s not just the ocean you have to think about…
Yeah the way that the wind couples into the ocean is modulated of course by the ice cover in fact its quite isolating. And that isolation is dependent on a whole bunch of factors including the actual roughness of the ice on the top and the bottom. So the way that momentum is imparted from the wind into the ocean is changing quite rapidly as the nature of the ice changes in the central Arctic.
And it’s the multidisciplinary nature of the expedition that makes it an ideal opportunity to approach these pressing questions
I’m looking forward to working closely with the ice physics crowd and the meteorology colleagues and we’ve colocated measurements very deliberately at the main site and these satellite distributed network sites, so that we can make these comparisons and link the processes through the ocean, ice and atmosphere and look at all the couplings that are occurring and changing as the nature of the ice changes
Daniel Watkins
Sea ice is a barrier between the ocean and the atmosphere. So the atmosphere communicates with the ocean through sea-ice and sea-ice in turn affects the way that the atmosphere behaves.
This is Daniel Watkins, [Daniel Watkins, Oregon State University] and his focus is on the atmosphere that's directly above the ice, and specifically how to represent that atmosphere in climate models.
The core of my current research is on representing a stable boundary layer… so this is where the air is coldest near the surface and it gets warmer as you go up, its an inversion layer. And when it’s over a city that keeps all the pollution near the ground. In the Arctic it can keep heat and moisture from the surface from getting up high, so you get a splitting between upper air motion and activity near the surface.
Daniel’s topic is ripe for a multidisciplinary approach
The boundary layer is affected by things that really are studied as separate areas, if clouds move in that completely changes things at the surface, and you can spend your whole career studying Arctic clouds. Turbulence is very different in a stable layer than it is in a typical mixed layer like you would get at home for me; think of the difference between rapidly stirring paint and letting two different colours sit next to each other and gradually drift together. So you can just spend your whole life studying turbulence. And with the other factors too there’s aerosols that play a part, atmospheric chemistry plays a part, the sea ice texture plays a part, the thermodynamics do, the way ocean currents move around. So all of these things are important to get right if you want to estimate something as simple as the temperature a couple metres off the surface in the air.
So scientific disciplines are in a big sense completely artificial. The world is not really split into different groups. So the Arctic climate system doesn’t really make sense if you only think about one part. We have to see the whole in order to understand how these single parts even work.
These traditional divisions start in schools. And it’s in schools that educator Katie Gavenus is hoping to ignite curiosity.
Katie Gavenus
and that curiosity… in order to fulfill that curiosity, things don’t need to simplified into tiny little pieces, but that there is something amazing about complexity and about recognising that all of this is connected and I think that’s what MOSAiC comes back to over and over again.
Every single topic in the Arctic is connected to all of these other topics. And that’s daunting but it’s also really amazing and really exciting, because it means there’s so much more that we can learn. And every piece we learn reverberates out and informs the way that we model sea ice and the way that we make weather predictions and the way that people decide when they’re going to go fishing. And all of these different pieces are linked together and can help us learn more about the places we live and work and can help us live better on this planet.
Thanks for listening to this episode of MOSAiC Mixdown. It was recorded and produced by me, Sam Cornish, and is a MOSAiC School Outreach project. You heard the voices of Bill Shaw, Tim Stanton, Daniel Watkins and Katie Gavenus. Original music by me. With big thanks to Ravenna Koenig for technical support. The MOSAiC School was supported by The MOSAiC School was supported by IASC, MOSAiC, AWI, ARICE and APECS.
