Heather relaxes on the R/V Belgica before the next core comes on deck |
So onto my first “willing” people post guinea
pig......Heather Stewart.
Heather works as a Marine Geoscientist and has been with BGS for 13 years. I asked Heather how she would describe her job – “Wonderful” came the reply. I think we need a little more digging here (excuse the pun) to describe what a Marine Geoscientist does.....!
Heather works as a Marine Geoscientist and has been with BGS for 13 years. I asked Heather how she would describe her job – “Wonderful” came the reply. I think we need a little more digging here (excuse the pun) to describe what a Marine Geoscientist does.....!
Now I work as a Marine Geoscientist as well, and describe it
to people as working with wet rocks – Heather was more descriptive
(thankfully). Her work ranges from deep water environments to the surface of
the seabed. This work covers so many areas including;
- Biological Habitat Mapping – how do the sediments on the seabed vary, does this influence the biology that grows there, and are any aspects such as cold water corals endangered and need protecting;
- Glacial Geomorphological Mapping – by mapping the features left behind by the last ice age, we can begin to understand how the ice sheets and glaciers that covered much of the UK grew and decayed, and what that meant in terms of a changing climate. It also helps us understand what once used to be land and how that affects the sediments left behind;
- Distribution of the different sediment types on the seabed – since 1955, offshore extraction of aggregates (sands and gravel) have supplied >600 million tonnes to the UK construction industry. Aggregates have been used to combat coastal erosion by shoring up coastline defences and beach replenishment. Mapping of the sediments offshore also helps The Crown Estate manage mineral licensing and prospecting, benefitting the UK economy whilst protecting the flora and fauna unique to our waters.
Mapping Mini-Mounds
So onto a current project led by the Universiteit Gent
investigating mini-mounds. Mini-mounds are colonies of cold water corals that
grow up to 10’s of metres in width and up to 11 metres in height. Heather and
colleagues are looking at three areas where mini-mounds are growing, or have
grown, in the Bay of Biscay. So why are these coral growths important?
Cold water coral reef habitat (Image Crown Copyright 2006) |
Sea-bed photograph of a mini-mound from the South West Approaches (UK) showing coral rubble and squat lobsters which are commonly found living among the coral fragments |
Cold water corals grow during interglacial periods – times of warmth when ice caps are smaller and vegetation changes on land. However, during glacial times when global temperatures drop and ice extends across much of northern Europe and Scandinavia, these coral communities stop growing, and become covered in layers of sediment. So if you go and investigate these coral mounds, you are effectively looking at large clocks that record climate change events like a living stopwatch.
Heather and PhD candidate Tim Collart (UoG) looking over a new core |
Some of the questions they are attempting to answer using some cores collected from the Bay of Biscay earlier this year investigate the activity of these mounds in more detail, including why and how does their growth switch off, why do they sometimes die completely instead of going into “hibernation” and how do they start growing in the first place. It is hoped that the answers to these questions will tell us something about changes in ocean currents and environmental triggers that occur as the climate changes.
Heather then came up with a sentence that sums the work we do up so well;
”You can find cool things in everything you do”.
And to put
into context the epic task ahead of any of us working to understand our marine
environment, the following facts are taken from an article published in
Scientific American from October 2014: We have mapped the entire surface of the moon and 98% of the
surface of Venus at 100m resolution, and 60% of Mars at 20m resolution. However
our own oceans are only mapped at 5 km resolution.....we have a long way to go
and a lot of cool things still to discover!
By Carol Cotterill
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