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Hello and welcome to Technically Speaking, where scientists and engineers come together to chat about a common interest, share knowledge, and satisfy some curiosity. I'm Antonia, and I'm joined by Laura and Ellie to talk about the world's oceans and both the good and bad things we as a society are doing to them, not just us three. Laura, what's your sort of interest into this topic?
Climate change, which is largely being driven by carbon dioxide emissions as well as certain other greenhouse gases, is affecting the world's oceans and it's causing them to acidify because of some fairly fundamental physics and chemistry, I guess. And I'm really passionate about environmental protection and I don't like the idea that our seas could be changed and it could drastically affect wildlife, which would also affect livelihoods of people that rely on the sea for fishing and
whatever else. I'm quite interested to learn more from you guys about your take on what we're doing to the oceans and could we find a solution. Good points. I also am interested from the climate change perspective. Yeah, I just knew in general that we have an effect on the ocean. So, this episode research gave me the chance to sort of look into it a bit more. And now we can ask Ellie about the effects on marine wildlife cuz you're a zoologologist, aren't you?
I am indeed. I write a lot about marine wildlife. Uh, it's been quite a whale heavy month for me. So, I've been writing about orcas quite a lot recently and other whale species. But yes, I think what people don't necessarily realize is that if you're not in that world, the effect that we're having on the ocean is massively detrimental. But it comes in many, many parts. There's problems with over fishing. There's problems with acidification. There's
problems with climate change. And because the ocean is so vast, remember there's more ocean on Earth than there is land. It affects different animals and different plants in different ways. And yeah, we hear a lot about maybe turtles and plastic, but we don't necessarily hear about all the other little things that can be happening underneath the waves that we're responsible for. The sparkles in the background as usual. Got an opinion on the ocean acidification and climate change.
Obviously, of course, she facts her tuna supply, so she's really invested in this. And we're all old enough that when we were in school, acid rain was a problem, but now the focus has shifted to climate change and ocean acidification. Do you remember that as well in school? Yeah, I mean, I think I'm probably the
oldest out of the three of us. I was born mid80s and I remember this being a huge thing about, you know, buildings were being dissolved because of the rain that was being acidified by human activities. And when I looked into it recently, um it's a problem that was known about as long ago as the 1970s, so
way before I was born. What seems to have um made a difference to it and sort of almost cured what we were doing to the environment in that respect was decades of research and then a lot of political action and led to legislation being put in place to tackle the sources of the chemicals that led to the acid rain, which was things like nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxides. Yeah. So often the impurities from burning fossil fuels.
Yeah. And some of the quite energy intensive processes like glass production because you create a lot of um gas when you're purifying your products to make your glass or chemical production as well cuz you want again fewer things to make your chemicals with. So you get a lot of stuff burnt off. It seems like this was a relatively easy I say easy inverse commerce solution tech from a technological point of view because from my knowledge of chemical engineering it's what you call
scrubbing. So you put some sort of treatment at the end of your flu gases, so all the fumes that come off burning stuff, and then you add something or use some catalyst to make it purer or get rid of the pollutants that you don't want. Honestly, from my perspective, sulfur and nitric acid, sorry, the precursors to them, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, quite easy to remove if you just chuck some lime in it, which is very basic. Nice easy solution. Yeah. And those acids can be used for other
chemical production systems, right? So there was also a use for that thing they were absorbing. Yeah. If you can retrieve it. So sometimes like if you just put lime and mix them with sulfur, I don't think you got back the components. But um using other types of scrubbing methods like with amine or ammonia, then you could recover it and make that an actual sellable product like sulfuric acid,
nitric acid. I think what's interesting about acid rain is that it was a huge issue and then everyone decided collectively as a country that it was a huge issue. The acid rain would not necessarily form or fall in the country that was really affected but would blow over to their neighbors and then it would cause problems for everyone. You know, you couldn't necessarily control where the winds were going to blow the rain. So, it was then a collective effort to clear it up globally and to
stop it happening across the world. And it's got me wondering if those emissions were so easy to suck out of whatever flu gases they were coming out of, why is CO2 so difficult? And I think the reason is because CO2 is a fairly inert gas. So it doesn't react as well with any of those scrubbing systems that Anton has mentioned. So it goes into the atmosphere and then once it's there, it's quite difficult to remove because
it doesn't react with anything. And then because of the ocean wanting to have roughly the same sort of concentration of CO2 in it as the atmosphere does because that's how physics works, the oceans then absorb the CO2 when that turns into an acid. So it's a slightly different way of causing acidification that acid rain does. Um apparently acid rain is more a problem for acidifying coastal areas if it's getting into the oceans. I remember being told about gravestones.
That's my overriding memory of being taught at school about acid rain is that the rain was like eroding the limestone in gravestones and it was obviously upsetting a lot of people. It was also like runoff as well, wasn't it, into lakes and rivers. So, it wasn't just like affecting buildings, it was affecting lots of ecosystem. I saw images of like trees being sight sort of like almost dissolved or or damaged because of the rain.
Yeah. Yeah. And this is why places like the United States had their um legislation put in like the 1990s and I think the EU updated theirs in like 2010. So, it's still an ongoing thing to manage. It's not necessarily gone away. It's just we know how to deal with it. And I think there are more strict requirements for people to remove those components before they release like gases or emissions into atmosphere and
water or land. But if we could make it so easy for acid rain, could we just take that same approach and apply it to PAS or climate change? Oh, PAS. These are the forever chemicals that we talked about in a previous episode, didn't we? Yeah. They're a problem because they don't break down in the environment and some of them are quite toxic in kind of concentrations can cause all sorts of um horrible diseases and things like cancer
and they're just forever. So like will eventually accumulate it and they accumulate in little animals that then as you go up through the food chain they bioaccumulate into the larger animal. So it's eventually going to become a huge problem. Yeah. I think there's research now that pases in your brain. I mean not necessarily in high concentrations that would cause an issue at this at this moment but there are you know they persist. That's the entire issue is that
they don't break down at all. So what can we do about them? Yeah. So again, similar to CO2 there, we've we've made this thing and it's quite difficult to get rid of it using just the science that we currently have available. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when we look at the oceans and we've got this idea that CO2 is having this big effect and it's absorbing into the ocean and creating an acid. I think I'd read that although the oceans are becoming less alkali. They're currently
alkali. They're not actually going to tip over on that pH scale to become acidic, they'd still say somewhere around neutralish, which you would think, well, is that really a problem? But Ellie, am I right in thinking that that can still have a lot of effects on wildlife? Oh, yeah, absolutely. The ocean itself is a very delicate balance. Obviously, it's vast, but certain areas are more affected than others. And even just a tiny change can have a super detrimental
effect on what's going on. There's a study in clown fish, which is super interesting. It turns out they can hear less well when there's ocean acidification. I'm not entirely sure how that works. But they become more vulnerable to predators when the ocean is more acidic or we should say less alkali. That's the end of clown fish if that carries on. Ocean acidification also means that some algae can then grow. So like I said, clown fish are negatively affected, but other species
like it to be way more acidic. So then they're thriving and that's out competing all the species that were there in the first place. So, it's a real problem because you're affecting the balance of these very sensitive ecosystems. Yeah, I was going to say I've never heard of more algae being a particularly good thing. It's generally something you want to avoid having a lot of.
I mean, you go, you often if you go for a walk along the coast sometimes, you can see signs that say do not let your dog swim, do not swim in this area, this stream, because we've had an abundance of algae. And often that is caused by more acidic conditions. Yeah. And some of the algae is toxic, isn't it? There's a lot of blue green algae in some of the lakes near me. The algae also could be growing more because of utrification which is the run off of
fertilizers as well. So we've kind of almost got two potential causes for more algae and that's going to you know cover up more light. So anything that's not growing directly on the surface is going to be a bit more in shade. So kind of terrible for biodiversity. What you don't want the runoff affects more sort of um areas near farms. So in the lakes rather than the sea cuz I guess it would dilute down quite a lot in the sea. So it wouldn't necessarily have much of an effect.
That's true. It's more CO2 that seems to be the governing factor making the acidification. Yeah, we should say that the oceans are a massive carbon sink. Like they help control carbon dioxide levels enormously in general. The oceans just absorb CO2. But it's the amount that is happening now compared to sort of historic levels is the problem. I can see a market for algae farming. Didn't we talk about this in the episode
about making cows less gassy? Because cows produce methane that contributes to climate change and algae could be a feed stock that makes them less gassy. I think it was a feed stock additive that somehow now I can't remember how it worked. I'll have to relisten to my own episode. Too many things have happened since then. It was a little while ago.
Yeah, exactly. But something that surprised me as well was it's so hard for researchers to actually understand how exactly ocean acidification will affect the oceans because there's so much going on. So they usually do like a particular study on one species and then try and extrapolate what other species might be affected similarly. So, like the clown fish studies, for whatever reason, two separate research groups decided to use clown fish and see what
the effect was. Like one group did it on sound, they played the sound of their predators in different concentrations of CO2 in the ocean and then they found the higher the concentration and they just like didn't respond or run away from them. Did they have any idea what that biological mechanism might be? cuz I can't understand why. This is probably because I'm a human and I don't have to think about acid affecting my hearing. Why would acid affect what a fish hears?
Okay, here's my speculation, Ellie. You can correct me after I've said it. Okay, go on then. Something about they hide in coral or they hide in something and I guess is it the sound waves and how they move less or move differently? So, they hide in an enemies. That's the classic symbiotic relationship is plantfish and an enemies. So potentially it's affecting the sound waves through
the aneommy. I don't know. This is really intriguing to me as to how they found this out because I yeah read the study like you did that was like the concentrations and they just stopped hiding. Very strange. But I can see if it affects a physical structure that would influence physics of things. I'll stop talking. I'm just going to say the word physics many many times. Well, you know about physics I suppose. So maybe that's your way into understanding the world. That's it. I go for sort of the
fundamental science. So what's the chemistry happening here? What's the material science? But a lot of science is just we've seen an effect and this is the cause because we controlled all of the variables. Yeah, they cuz they tried it on smell as well. They put like a scent of I think it was like rock cod or something one of their other predators. And again, when it was higher concentrations, they didn't run away. But how does how does
it affect smell? Maybe it's affecting something more like maybe it's some biological process within a clown fish that's then compromised. like they just clown fish less effectively. They're just less of a clown fish. I can see how acidification could affect smell though cuz you've got molecules in the water. They might react with the acid in a different way and uh make them not the same smell molecule that they should be that the final fish can sense.
That one seems really obvious to me from the chemistry side. Oh, fair enough. But again, speculation. It was surprising though cuz I thought with higher acidification that there was be more dissolving of things like carbonates which lock in like calcium and any form like bones and and shells. But then some shellfish actually were better off in acidic oceans. Oh, in that they had thicker shells.
Yeah. Okay. So there must be different biological mechanisms at play to create their shells in that case. Yes. This goes back to your point about the sea is really complex and really vast. It's this really rich life that we don't necessarily know a lot about cuz we pick one species and infer things. Yeah, absolutely. There's little tiny organisms called forina and they're like super small and really
common. Basically, marine biologists thought that with their calcium carbonite shells that they would really suffer as the ocean gets more acidic. But basically, the opposite seemed to happen and they're like thriving, which sounds good, but probably is a bad thing because anything out of balance is always a bit dodgy when it comes to an ecosystem like that. And in chemical engineering as well, you'd say, Antonia, with your background.
I would. Yep. Yep, that's true. because then you don't have a steady state and you like a steady state cuz then you know what's going to happen when everything's in flux. You don't know what's going to happen and that is uh terrible for control purposes. Also other control purposes that might be a struggle. Apparently jellyfish are better in more acidic oceans. Jellyfish are just weird. I can't with jellyfish when you don't have a brain is very hard to be like oh they're doing
well. I guess more jellyfish potentially they're just breeding more. Yeah. So, don't you quite like the idea of being a jellyfish though, while Ellie kind of float around going wherever the flow takes you. Yeah, but you're not aware of it. You're like barely sentient. Yeah. So, so we can't anthropomorphize jellyfish. Is that is that a limit? I mean, you could try, but realistically there's there's not a whole lot to anthropomorphize, but how how are they
doing better? Cuz they're just what are they made of? All I know is when they wash upon the beach, they're surprisingly meaty. They're basically water. That is no surprise. Yeah, there must be something holding them together, though. Anyway, um I think we should probably move on. Yeah, I was just imagining if we just put aside all the like, you know, detrimental climate change, biodiversity, just how annoying it would be if all the beaches were just algae and jellyfish.
Yeah. You're not going on holiday to Greece or Italy, are you? Your beaches are covered in jellyfish. It's just so slimy. An unexpected consequence of ocean acidification is slime. If that doesn't put you off, um, please. So, yeah, apart from all these things we do know, there's actually a lot we don't know about the oceans because they're so big and deep. Well, this is what the um, oh, what's it called? The Chinese Academy of South China Sea Institute of Oceanology,
which is a mouthful on a good day. Um, they've got this idea that they're going to make a cold seek ecosystem research facility, which is basically I kind of liken it to a bit like the ISS but underwater, the International Space Station. Yeah, I guess so. But see, I always think they're complete opposites cuz the ISS is pretty much in a vacuum, right? Yes. Whereas the deep sea, this is 2 km down, so it's 200 atmospheres of pressure. So to me, that is completely different kind of engineering.
Oh, absolutely. It's an in an extreme environment and it's sealed. So in space obviously you don't want to be sucked out into the ether, but in the deep ocean you want to keep the water out as much as you can. Yeah. You don't want to be crushed. No. Horrible. I wonder from an engineering point of view, doesn't that just mean your joints have to be pressurized to the other way around, I guess. So make sure you maintain enough pressure to overcome the outside pressure.
Ellie, you mentioned cold seats.
Yes. are these they're not hydrothermal vents which are where you get like sort of sudden volcanic activity in a rush of heat coming out and whatever else various chemicals these are just a gradually releasing flow of what are probably gases hydrocarbons aren't they yeah it's like uh hydrogen sulfide methane yeah hydrocarbon rich fluids that basically escape from cracks and fishes in the ocean floor unlike the like very hot volcanic ones that you just talked about these are very cold.
They're referred to as cold seeps because they are like separated from the hydrothermal vents even though it's like a very similar sort of process. See, that makes me wonder if they're doing it to find a source of fuel if there are hydrocarbons down there. Oh, you cynic Laura. I'm like, oh no, they're doing it to study the environment and the wildlife. And you're like, they're going to exploit natural resources from the ocean like we always do.
Well, probably both, right? if um if it's government funded and to to us government labs are about, you know, finding all this research that's there to help society. But when I started looking into this, I found that um we've actually gotten quite a lot of useful stuff from organisms living in these sorts of extreme environments or in the deep sea cuz their biochemistry is just weird.
Oh yeah, I would say that the deep ocean is home to a whole host of deep sea weirdos and they look like nothing else you've ever seen in your life. What's your favorite deep sea weirdo? Oh, I love a handfish, which I would say does look not too dissimilar to whatever you think a handfish would look like, but they just look grumpy. Like it's still fish shaped, like a human hand. Yeah, it's like a very grumpy looking upturned mouth with then like little fins and it like walks along the bottom
of the shore. There's also Oh, a discoorm. It's probably got some proper scientific title that I can't remember, but I did write an article about the disco. Why is it called the discoorm? Oh, because it's uh it's got either bofllororescents or normal fluorescents and it like sparkles as it crawls along the floor. It looks like a slug or a caterpillar, but way cooler and way sparklier. Um, it's actually a poly chilate deep sea worm, but I prefer to call it the disco worm because it's so
sparkly. Google it everyone so you can see what I'm talking about. Disco is definitely a better name there. 100%. Maybe they can find some sort of use for their biochemistry. Like some of the weird ones I found was um making ice cream. Wow. Which seems like an odd one and probably not that useful in the long run, but I guess it would make better ice cream than a traditional method where you just have to keep kind of stirring it so it doesn't just turn into
ice crystals. Um, but apparently there's some deep sea creature that has proteins that can nucleate ice crystals in a certain way. I mean, I'm all for better ice cream. Ice cream is really difficult to make cuz you want to make an emulsion with basically ice crystals and cream and
fat. interesting if you can make them actually form crystals in a particular way because otherwise the idea is just spin it so fast that big crystals can't form and that's why you're constantly stirring it but then you're adding energy into it so in like a big chemical process I guess that's not a chemical process the way they do it in industry industrial process it's probably not the most energyefficient method so if you can add in this ice crystal nucleating protein
less energy less CO2 produced if you're relying on fossil fuels and maybe it's a useful protein and a taste protein in ice cream maybe. Yeah. They also found an enzyme that helps to make, you know, the PCR tests that were a big thing during the pandemic. Polymerase chain reactions, so you could uh figure out how much of a particular type of gene you had in somewhere, so you could tell if you had a particular virus or not. Apparently, deep sea creatures helped create those
tests. Wow. Couldn't find out any more information, but I am intrigued. That is really cool. They weren't physically making a test, but we understood something from them. Yes. So they found an enzyme or a catalyst or some sort of biomolelecule that could help facilitate grabbing a DNA fragment and making more DNA fragments. You can get a viable reading from it, I guess. Wow, that's really interesting. So all this deep sea exploration in the South China Sea, it could have some real
benefits here on the surface. It's not just about exploiting the Earth's resources. You never know. Well, you never know what they're going to find as well. They're planning to send people to live down there for periods of time. So yeah, a long-term study like that always yields some surprising results. So we'll have to wait and see what happens. So that's the deep sea. We obviously live closer to the surface and yeah, some of the effect that we have on it is good and some of it less good.
Well, the deep sea is easy because that's the point where light starts to fade, but you have a lot shallower sort of seabed areas. The effects that we're doing there is just is mind-blowing when you see the videos of people trolling. This is fishing using enormous nets that are dragged along the seabed. It is so so damaging to those environments because it's ripping up the seabed as it goes and scooping up a whole host of marine life in the process.
I can't really see how anyone thought this was a good idea as a sustainable business solution cuz unless you've already got a perfectly scraped sea floor, inherently you are going to do damage. So your business is never going to continue. If you destroy the environment that you're actively relying on for food and money. I think the point is that they are not
trying to make it sustainable. They are trying to make a lot of money very quickly and then if it doesn't sustain them doesn't really matter because they've made their fortune in the previous years. Oh, that seems really shortsighted to me though. I mean it's like it's almost like they're shooting themselves in the foot. Yeah, we got a lot of money now but then we don't have a business. I guess they just don't care. Yeah, we don't have the ocean which is
the fundamental thing. If we keep doing this, we're going to completely destroy a lot of areas. And the point of them doing this is to catch fish, right? So, they're trying to feed into this global demand, which is only increasing for fish and for sea products. But yes, like you said, it's incredibly unsustainable, incredibly damaging and heartbreaking to watch when you see some of these animals caught in the nets that these are the animals they're not even trying to
catch. This is the thing. It's a very unargeted process. is just scoop as much stuff as we can out of the water and uh we'll sell what we can and we'll discard what we can't even if it's not alive anymore. I can't work out if this is better or worse than ocean acidification because we're not just polluting the oceans. We're using it to find food, but doing it in a really indiscriminate way. I think ocean acidification is a product
of thousands of things. you know, all of these processes that we do throughout the day that create carbon dioxide, whether trolling is a deliberate sort of act of damaging and trying to make money and trying to get fish, which could be done in more sustainable ways. So, I think ocean acidification is kind of a global problem caused by lots of
different things. trolling is its own problem in its own right which with a bit of a crackdown maybe could be changed if we can't get people who who run these companies to stop you know I suppose what's the legal framework maybe that's where it needs to be is just like stop allowing trolling but is that actually policable if the ocean is so vast that people just can't stop them this sort of goes back to the acid rain thing right like we stopped acid rain because it was
a global collaboration between lots of different nations to make a legal framework where you had to have the scrubbers and the catalysts to change it and it was underpinned by scientific research. I think that's the key thing. It seems to take quite a lot of time for that body of research to gather and then for scientists and engineers or politicians to pose solutions. Yeah, it's not popular either, right?
Because uh nothing about conservation is ever popular because it it eats into cost and profit which is uh very motivating to a lot of companies. See, I still think that you want to conserve that environment because you want your business to continue for years and it should be seen as an inherent part of doing business. I feel like we've gotten off the whole science and engineering thing and just gone on a business rant now. Business and politics. Yeah, this always happens.
I think cuz ultimately like science and engineering do kind of live within the framework of how society uses the tools that we give them. It's also, like we say, we rely on the oceans. Like the poor person driving the troller isn't perhaps necessarily aware of the environmental impact that they're having because they're just one troller in an ocean of many trollers. It's not on them to stop trolling if that's their
livelihood. It's on governments and groups to introduce sustainable ways where they can still have a job and feed their family, but not at the expense of what's happening to the ocean. Ellie, didn't you come across some news recently in your job as a science communicator that um marine conservation leads to recovery and increases populations of fish that we would probably want to eat? So, it actually be in my mind a good thing for people that work in the fishing industry.
Yes. So, this is all about papa now. Nearly nearly made it through that. Um which is an incredible sort of poster child for marine conservation. It's the world's largest marine conservation area. It's basically incredible what's happened. It's a good argument that large marine scale protected areas are a good idea basically and that there's an
enormous amount of spillover. So they created this protected area and as such yellow fin tuna which are very popular across the world as an eatable species tasty boosted the population by 54% in the surrounding areas. are not even just in the protected area because you can't, you know, there's no fence. The fish don't know when they swim left, they're in the protected area and when they swim right, they're not. So, you boost the population, there's more fish, it spills
over. It's very, very simple. They dispel the myth that we can't protect the ocean and have a fishing industry basically because the enemy is over fishing and it's not protected areas. People think protected areas mean that you can't fish, but it doesn't mean that you can't have fish that you can then catch. It's sort of the balance of having protected areas to allow the fish populations to recover so that we can then keep eating the fish if that's what we want to do.
So Antonio's point about being steady state, you want to take just enough to not affect that steady state too much. You want to be part of that ecosystem essentially. Absolutely. And also there's knock-on effects then for land species, seabirds, algae, all the tiny things, whales that I write about, killer whales, all sorts. So yeah, the more areas that you protect, the more knock-on effect that you have to many other species.
I guess part of the reason that these things are a bit of a struggle to get right is because we don't necessarily know a lot about the oceans and especially that interplay with the deep sea where the light doesn't penetrate. I think that means there has to be more research. Have you guys heard I don't know how true this is that we know more about space than we do about the deep
sea. Yeah, I think we've put a lot of research into understanding space and getting into space and maintaining a population on the ISS and all of that sort of thing, but there's so much area of ocean that's undiscovered. A because it's really hard to get to, but B because necessarily the will isn't there to go down in these subs and send in ROVs and find out what's lurking beneath our feet. No. See, in some respects, I think space is easy because it's essentially a
vacuum, right? So um energy packets of energy photons can travel quite freely through it and go a long way. Yeah. You know I say we can look back in time at stars that have died millions of years ago but their light is still traveling to us. All these photons mean that physicists can detect them and do interesting things and find out stuff about the universe. You can't do the same in the deep sea if the photons don't penetrate it. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty scary because
it's so deep down. You could be crushed horribly and it's dark and cold. Who knows what's going on down there? I mean, we definitely don't. Kind of. You've just planted an idea in my mind of some sort of evil sea creature that would do terrible things if we disturb it. I mean, it could be down there. There's so much undisplored. We find new species all the time. Every year they find new species uh in new areas. So, yeah. Terrible sea creature is waiting to be
discovered. I I hope not. I think that's probably more influenced by so many films that like the drama of a terrible sea creature. There'd be less drama if it was just this really benevolent giant squid that was somehow, I don't know, psychic and wanted to brainwash us all into not acidifying the oceans. That would be nice. I'd be all for that. Okay, I think this feels like a good
place to leave it there. We've deviated quite far off topic, but just to sort of recap what we've discovered or learned about, we were talking about the approach the whole world took to addressing global issues like acid rain and whether we could do the same for other polluting issues such as ocean acidification, which isn't really acidification. It's like a 0.3 pH change, but it is enough. It's enough to to have a huge effect on biodiversity, but also we actually don't know that
much about oceans. We are trying to explore more about the deep sea. I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode and we will see you next time. The views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them. They do not represent any industry or organization. If you enjoyed listening to these views, it would really help us out if you could rate us, leave a
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