 |
Exploring the Cold Oceans of the NorthPeter RhinesUniversity of Washington In this talk we approach global climate change by looking at the oceans of the far North, where global warming is more extreme than anywhere else on Earth. The research involves a deep historical record (3000m and 120,000 years deep, in the layered icecap of Greenland), extensive connections with polar explorations and the history of indigenous natives of the Arctic, whose lives are inexorably related to climate. The work involves new robotic instruments that probe the deep sea and ‘phone home 3 times daily, and instrumented narwhal, who dive a mile deep, many times a day, in search of food. Working near the Arctic also has given us some new ways to teach our students back at home and in the laboratory about the global environment, and to help them to fathom their own place in it. Peter Rhines is a Professor of Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences at University of Washington. His research involves ‘ocean climate’, that is, the workings of the ocean in the global climate system. By a quirk of good luck he started visiting the Labrador Sea between Greenland and Canada in 1992, just as the North Atlantic region was experiencing some of the most extreme winter weather of that century. With colleagues at Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Canada he worked to observe the Labrador Sea through the 1990s and begin to understand the physics of deep convection, subpolar circulation, and their interaction with the atmospheric storm track overhead. He works both with NASA satellites that can map the ocean’s surface currents and with a new technology developed at UW, a robotic deep-sea probe called the Seaglider. He has launched Seagliders from west Greenland, and with them surveyed the climate state of the entire Labrador Sea through the winter. The role of the high latitudes and Arctic Ocean in climate is important, and yet has not always been recognized. If climate is an argument between the atmosphere and ocean, this is a good place to listen in. Peter Rhines teaches the dynamical basis for ocean/atmosphere circulation and climate to graduate students at University of Washington, and teaches science of the global environment to undergraduates, many of whom manifestly hate science: in this he uses intensive time with laboratory experiments to break through the barrier. Rhines is a graduate of MIT, Cambridge University, a former Guggenheim Fellow and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He participates in climate activities like the book ‘Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises” (National Academy Press 2002),
|
|
