Aussie scientists uncover secrets of Indian Ocean

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The Indian Ocean is strategically important for both Australia and India. With an abundance of fish and mineral resources, it feeds and provides livelihoods for millions of people.

But while humans have long appreciated the ocean as a source of food, we’re only beginning to understand how muchit influences our lives on land – and how our lives are impacting it.

This is now a critical question for scientists worldwide. And anew India-Australia research partnership aims to get to the bottom of it – literally.

Scientists have been launching bio robots equipped with cutting edge sensors into the Indian Ocean, as part of a collaboration led by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO, with the Indian National Institute of Oceanography (CSIR-NIO) and the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services.

They already know the Indian Ocean plays a direct role in driving the climates and weather of its surrounding regions, where 16 per cent of the world’s people live. It helps bring us everything, from thundering monsoon rains to the gentlest sea breezes.

What researchers are now trying to find out is how human activity is impacting the Indian Ocean, which in turn is affecting the kind of weather it gives us.

The idea is their findings will help us to predict and prepare for global climate and change, and conserve the marine life and diversity of the ocean.

CSIRO principal scientist Nick Hardman-Mountford told the Indian Sun the robots, called Robotic Argo floats, had been used to measure ocean currents, heat content, and mixing for over a decade.

“They are used routinely in weather forecasting and have shown how the heat content of the ocean has been building up with climate change,” said Hardman-Mountford.

Hardman-Mountford explained that the warming ocean was affecting, “the intensity and timing” of weather events like India’s monsoon.

“Climatic cycles, such as El Nino/La Nina and the Indian Ocean Dipole arise from a tight coupling between ocean and atmospheric processes,” Hardman-Mountford said.

These cycles can change the amount of cool deep-ocean water reaching the ocean surface, the amount of surface warming being stored in the deep ocean, or the strength of ocean currents in different regions, he said. This in turn influences atmospheric weather patterns, as well as nutrients in the ocean that normally get carried up by deep ocean water flowing to sunlit upper regions.

The new Bio-Argo robotic floats have been designed to dive deep into the ocean to take measurements that will provide information about these processes.

“They carry novel sensors that can tell us about microscopic algae (phytoplankton), nutrients, carbon and oxygen levels in the ocean – these are all indicators of the health of the ocean’s ecosystems,” he said.

“In the central Indian Ocean, it is thought that the amount of nutrients reaching the upper ocean will decrease with climate change leading to a reduced growth of phytoplankton,” he said. Phytoplankton fuel the ocean’s food webs (like oceanic meadows for grazers) so a reduction in their growth will likely decrease the food available to the rest of the ecosystem, including fish.

“Phytoplankton also take up carbon dioxide and turn it into biological material, some of which will sink deep in the ocean effectively burying the carbon. So reducing the growth of phytoplankton would diminish uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the ocean and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means more warming,” he said.

Hardman-Mountford said it would take several years to log enough measurements to show how the health of the entire Indian Ocean is changing – getting to the point where we can track how climate change effects ocean ecosystems is decades away.

“We have a long way to go,” Hardman-Mountford said. “However, we hope to learn lots more along the way about how these ecosystems work and how efficiently phytoplankton bury carbon and this understanding will help us improve predictions of how ecosystems will adapt to future global and regional changes,” he added.

“We’re working hard on processing up the data and hope to have the first results within the next few months,” said Hardman-Mountford.

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