Tim O’Hare
observations, thoughts and useful stuff…Archive for oceanography audio
BBC Radio 4 Oceans: what lies beneath
BBC Radio 4 is currently running a four part series “Oceans: what lies beneath” in which the author and broadcaster Gabrielle Walker “looks at how little we understand the waters on which human life depends, and talks to the scientists who are making some extraordinary discoveries deep beneath the ocean waves”. The four parts are titled “Ocean Life”, “The Deep”, “Ocean Resources” and “Oceans and Climate”. Each episode is 30 minutes long and can be listened to online at the BBC Radio 4 Oceans webpage.
Extreme ironing
I used to teach a student who listed Extreme Ironing as one of his leisure pursuits. For the uninitiated, Extreme Ironing involves taking an ironing board and an iron to a remote or in some way difficult location, setting it up and then doing so ironing. If you don’t believe me, you can check this out for yourself with this BBC News report from 2002. Being a diver, his particular brand of the sport involved ironing underwater…
Recently, news of a different sort of marine ironing has come to the fore, namely the idea of adding iron (the chemical element) to ocean waters in order to promote growth of phytoplankton (microscopic plant life). Iron is a nutrient that is required for phytoplankton growth but it is lacking in many parts of the oceans. It is argued that the enhanced phytoplankton growth caused by the addition of iron leads to increased absorption of carbon dioxide from the ocean waters which then absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When the plankton subsequently die the solid parts sink to the seafloor taking the absorbed carbon with them and forming sediments in which the carbon remains locked for thousands of years. Thus the plankton bloom caused by the increased iron level serves to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and so reduces its impact there as a Greenhouse Gas and its contribution to global warming. That’s the theory anyway and there have a been a couple of small scale experiments to try to see this process in action and establish its potential for a means of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Not surprisingly, this is a controversial topic as it is not clear how efficiently it would work and what other impacts adding iron might have to marine ecosystems. Now there are plans for a new (larger) experiment on iron fertilisation in the Southern Ocean and there was a nice piece about this, and about measurements of the effects of naturally occuring iron fertilisation caused by volcanic islands, on the BBC Radio 4 programme “The Material World” last week. Further details and more relevant web-links can also be found at this related BBC News report.
BBC Radio 4 – The Material World
As a child I grew up in a BBC Radio 4 household. People who know me well might say that this explains a lot, certainly it is probably responsible for the way I talk… Nowadays, with a busy life and a home life that seems to generally involve people rushing about here and there, I never seem to find the time to listen to Radio 4 and this is something that I often wish was not the case because Radio 4 is the home of a huge amount of interesting, funny and informative material. One particularly good programme is “The Material World”, a weekly half-hour offering on science. The format is generally the same – there are two items each getting roughly half of the air-time during which the presenter, usually Quentin Cooper, talks to one or more scientists, engineers or similar beings about a topical issue or piece of work.
Fortunately for people like me who never manage to listen to the radio at home, “The Material World” has its own web-page from which it is possible to listen online to past episodes. It is also possible to download episodes as podcasts (e.g. via iTunes). This is great because not only can you listen to past episodes that look interesting, but you can do so whenever you want! Now that I have set this web-site up I will write about episodes that I think are of particular relevance to oceanography and meteorology as and when they occur, but to start things off I thought I would provide a list of some of the past episodes that I might have included in this way if this site was already up and running. I don’ty pretend to have listened to all of these but they are all episodes that judging by the blurb should be of interest to anyone interested in marine and atmsopheric science. Please be aware that each time you click on one of the links the page for that episode will open in a new window. You can then listen to the episode by clicking on the Listen Again link provided. If any of the links are incorrect or broken please let me know so that I can correct or remove them.
From 2005: air pollution – trees and climate change - coastal wind jets
From 2006: ghost ship – Thames barrier – artifical gills – deep sea fish – gas hydrates – mega plumes – forecasting evolving coastlines(1) – Antarctic Science – solar energy – stratospheric broadband – a new look at the sun – sediment analysis and charting the ocean’s organisms - data logging animals
From 2007: the Thames whale – Scapa Flow – international polar year – El Nino – managing uncertainty in complex models – flood warning – seaside bouquet – Sumatran earthquakes – Arctic sea ice – fish stock extinction – algae(2)
From 2008: deep tropical ocean kelvin waves(3) – plate tectonics – Severn barrage – predicting natural disasters – seaweed and iodine - ocean acidification(4) - the secret seeds of clouds – subglacial lakes – seawater greenhouses – lobster hotels - the deep carbon cycle
(1) featuring my PhD supervisor Professor Alan Davies from Bangor University
(2) featuring Professor Peter Liss from the University of East Anglia, former President and current fellow-Council member of the Challenger Society for Marine Science
(3) featuring Professor Karen Heywood from the University of East Anglia, a postdoctoral researcher at Bangor University when I was taking my MSc and PhD there
(4) featuring Dr Jason Hall-Spencer from the University of Plymouth
