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EmailBy Karen K. Marvin
The Center for Ocean Solutions (COS) was the focus of the “Ocean Salon” sponsored by the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. The event, held on November 30, 2010, at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, was an opportunity for COS to present its latest work on key initiatives in marine policy and research. Barton H. “Buzz” Thompson, director and senior fellow at Woods, welcomed the attendees, including many important supporters of Woods and COS.
COS executive director Meg Caldwell and COS acting science director Larry Crowder discussed marine spatial planning in a talk entitled “To Plan or Not to Plan? A New Era for Ocean Space.” Some of the most pressing challenges facing the world’s oceans are caused by a lack of comprehensive planning and by a fragmented regulatory structure, among other issues. “Marine spatial planning,” Crowder pointed out, “is a compelling way to approach environmental restoration and protection.” An example was the scientific research on Right whales in the Stellwagon Bank National Marine Sanctuary that revealed that the shipping channel traversing the sanctuary could be easily relocated away from areas where whales congregated while still allowing for new energy facilities planned in the region.
“Marine spatial planning provides a framework for existing and emerging uses of our oceans,” Caldwell commented. Marine spatial planning is proposed as a practical approach for holistically managing the ocean and is an important part of the July 2010 report released by the U.S. Ocean Policy Task Force, established by a 2009 executive order of President Obama. COS early career fellows, Caldwell and Crowder collectively provided legal, scientific, and policy analysis and recommendations to the Task Force through oral testimony before the Task Force and its marine spatial planning working group as well as formal written comments, including a special report on legal considerations for coastal and marine spatial planning COS co-authored with the Environmental Law Institute.
Barbara Block, professor of marine science at Stanford, presented her research findings on tracking giant bluefin tuna and other large predators and marine species that routinely traverse ocean basins. Block used sophisticated electronic tags that her lab helped develop to study the movements of giant bluefin, large sharks and other open sea predators. Block explains, “By tracking where they go and examining distribution and abundance, we can inform management.” Her research team has shown that while populations of bluefin tuna are in steep decline in the Atlantic, the Pacific Ocean tracking reveals a “Serengeti” off the Pacific coast. Here, large animals congregate seasonally to forage in the rich California Current. The Pacific Ocean is still a frontier compared to the Atlantic and as such, there is time for this generation of environmental leaders and policy makers to make significant progress in science-based ocean management.
“Hot and Sour Soup: The Ocean of the Future?” was the subject addressed by Stephen Palumbi, director of Hopkins Marine Station and Robert Dunbar, professor of environmental earth system science at Stanford. Dunbar discussed his work on deep borehole drilling in the Antarctic where he and his team extracted sediment samples beneath the world’s largest ice shelf, penetrating 1300 meters below the deep ocean floor. These samples revealed a history of repetitive rise and fall in global sea level associated with changing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. His research points to the need for policy makers to plan for a significant rise in sea levels. “In the next 90 years, we should be planning for sea levels to rise as much as two meters,” Dunbar commented. “But worldwide, there are not uniform adaptation strategies in place. Some countries are preparing for rising sea levels, while others have not taken even the initial step.”
Palumbi presented the surprising results of his research on tropical coral reefs. The bleaching of large areas of coral reefs worldwide due to the rise in ocean temperatures has been widely covered in the media. However, his research with corals and symbionts shows that in some cases corals can survive fluctuations in sea temperatures thanks to the offsetting affects of the symbionts, such as photosynthesis by algae. “ ‘Can biological alkalization counter ocean acidification?’ is a compelling question for marine science,” he noted.
The Ocean Salon concluded with Woods director and senior fellow Jeff Koseff discussing the nearshore observation system proposed for the kelp forest off the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Hopkins Marine Station. The mooring would provide important scientific information for research on climate change by allowing the capture of data about biogeochemical and ecological processes. Developed by Stephen Monismith, director of Stanford’s Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, and his team, the device will be comprised of an armored electrical/fiber-optic cable connected to a main node and many individual sub-nodes. Scientists will be able to plug into the mooring a variety of equipment that will feed back a stream of real-time data on chemical, physical and biological measurements as well as streaming video. Testing of the proposed site began in November 2010.
