MICHELLE MCCLURE: Here we are. AUDIENCE: All rise. MICHELLE MCCLURE: Looks like you're going to have to step out for a minute. We're going to start with our Oceans and Coastal Processes Overview. Dr. Dave Butterfield is going to give the overview for this one. And here we go. DAVE BUTTERFIELD: OK, thanks. Dave Butterfield, with Earth-Ocean Interactions Group here to tell you about the oceans and coastal processes. So why do we have this theme? Because important things happen at the boundaries between the solid earth and the ocean, and the atmosphere and the ocean, that impacts all kinds of processes. So I will give you a few examples of that on this complicated graphic from the [INAUDIBLE] folks. Tectonics makes our planet collide, creates vulcanism and earthquakes. On the seafloor, we've got the mid-ocean ridge and volcanic arc system that puts a lot of heat and chemical mass into the oceans. In the EOI group, we discover those sites. We go down to them with submarines and document what's there in terms of mineral and biological resources, study the chemosynthetic ecosystem that surrounds the mid-ocean ridge system around the planet, and discover, conceptually model, and try to sustain existence. The earthquakes that result from plate tectonics, especially in subduction zones, create tsunamis. Obviously, this is a critical thing to understand and to be able to forecast and model. And the Tsunami Group does that extremely well, developed the real-time detection of tsunamis in order to forecast, model, and save lives. At the air-sea interface, gases are exchanging between the atmosphere and the ocean. The Ocean Tracers Group studies trace gases, uses those to measure ocean circulation, the movement of water, and formation of deep water masses. That data gets fed into climate models, and it's important to validate those models. And just one more example-- along continental margins, there are thousands of methane seeps coming out of the thick sediments there on the margin. And those have implications for climate if that methane gets up in the atmosphere. They also create habitat for fish. So these are the variety of things that we study in this theme, which has three groups-- the Tsunami Research Group, the Ocean Tracers Group, and the Earth-Ocean Interactions Group. And our common goal is to understand the influence of chemical interactions on the solid earth with the atmosphere, and determine implications for climate and ecology [INAUDIBLE]. So starting off with the Ocean Tracers Group, which consists now of two people, Rolf Sonnerup and Bonnie Chang. They have developed the state-of-the-art methods for measuring chlorofluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride as inert tracers. And they are using those to study the formation of deep water masses. And Rolf is going to tell you all about this, much better than I could. You can essentially use this as a plot to look at the formation of deep water masses [INAUDIBLE] water. The Ocean Tracers Group primarily gets their samples and data from the GO-SHIP cruises and they go on approximately one per year. And they are the lead tracer group for about one-third of the GO-SHIP cruises that take place. They make that data available very quickly, and it gets out into the modeling community. The Tracers Group has developed another trace gas study on nitrous oxide. This is adding a bioreactive dimension to their work. This is not an inert gas, responds to changes in redox conditions in the ocean. It seems to be increasing now in the atmosphere. And it's an important greenhouse and ozone-depleting gas. So it's important to study this. And they have developed a method that's very sensitive. And they can measure it on the same samples that they are measuring the CFCs and SF6 during those GO-SHIP cruises. Moving to this Tsunami Research Group, this is primarily a modeling group as opposed to a sample-collecting group like the other two. There are 10 members in the Tsunami Group right now. And their primary task is to develop tsunami forecast models, and turn those over to the National Weather Service Tsunami Warning Centers so they become operational and can quickly forecast tsunamis. And Diego will give a talk about the current tsunami research that's going on. And I'll show you just a couple of things from their group. You can divide their research into two big categories. One is the short-term prediction of tsunamis. So once a tsunami-triggering event has taken place, they have sensors in place that detect those events, and automatically generate a tsunami forecast that predicts when and where a tsunami wave will strike. And this graphic is an example of one of those predictions based on the 2015 earthquake off the coast of Chile. The other type of modeling you can call "tsunami preparedness." It's sort of a long-term forecast of potential tsunamis from a given tsunami-triggering event. In this case, this model that's running right now shows the tsunami wave expected from a magnitude 9 earthquake along the Cascadia subduction zone off the coast of Oregon and Washington. And you can see there are some very significant inundations along the coast of Oregon and Washington from this kind of event. So this type of modeling gives advance warning to emergency management organizations. So they use that to make emergency response plans for future tsunamis. Just one example of some other research being done in the Tsunami Group, teaming up with investigators from Scripps and from Stanford, looking at the effect of tsunami waves traveling underneath Antarctic ice sheets, and looking at how the tsunami contributes to breaking off large sections of ice. The PMEL groups provide the information about the tsunami wave. The other groups are looking at the physics of the ice sheet bending and cracking, and predicting when it will break off, and assess potential effects on sea-level rise. Moving to the Earth-Ocean Interactions Group, our group studies hydrothermal systems and methane seeps along coastal margins. The video you're looking at here is from the Mariana Back-Arc from a cruise that we conducted in 2016. This is the side of a large, black, smoker chimney with what we now know is a typical Back-Arc fauna, since we've looked at a number of sites on the Back-Arc. We asked these general questions of how does the output of these thermal vents and cold seeps affect ocean chemistry and marine ecosystems? How are the hydrothermal mineral deposits linked to the global deep-sea ecosystem? And what are the implications for deep-sea mining? That's the end of this shot right here-- at the base of that large structure were large boulders of sulfide. Minerals have fallen down. The core capabilities in the EOI group include seafloor mapping, case of the Mariana Arc here. We have a helium isotope lab in Newport. It's one of the few across the country that can measure helium isotopes, uses a tracer of [INAUDIBLE] input. We have specialized equipment for hydrothermal chemistry and microbiology. We have a world-class trace metal lab to measure low-level oceanographic concentrations of iron, manganese, aluminum, and other metals, and we have a group of plume sensors and some hydrographic expertise to go and find hydrothermal systems by looking at the plumes. We currently have nine members, and four who have recently retired. This is a map of where we've worked in the last few years. These highlighted boxes. And the map of the Pacific here showing all of the known hydrothermal vent sites in blue is from the [INAUDIBLE] database. And the superimposed red dots are the sites that PMEL has either directly discovered or contributed to discovering through collaboration. And that, if you add it up, it's about 50% of the known hydrothermal sites around the world. So we've had a major impact in this area. When we go to these sites, we put out cruise reports very quickly that are used by other groups. We have geochemical data, map data. It gets out quickly, and we've had 94 peer-reviewed articles in the last five years. And you could say that we are defining the input function for hydrothermal heat and chemical maps of these systems around the world. Just [INAUDIBLE] one important result-- this is from a paper published in 2015 by Joe Resing and others about hydrothermal iron, which is an important trace nutrient in the ocean. If you look at the top figure here, this is showing a large iron plume [INAUDIBLE] 4,300 kilometers across the Pacific. And we know that it's hydrothermal because there's a helium-3 plume that we also tracked. And that is only sourced from the mantle, I mean, hydrothermal vents. So it was unexpected to see this level of iron because it's so insoluble. So there's something keeping that iron in solution. And there's a new research area now looking at how organic compounds, [INAUDIBLE] iron dissolve and letting it be transported such long distances. If you look at a biogeochemical ocean circulation model, it suggests that 10% to 30% of the exported primary production from the Southern Ocean is using hydrothermal iron as a critical nutrient. So this aspect in terms of overall primary productivity in the ocean. EOI have been very active in the last five years, in spite of the difficulty of getting GO-SHIP time. We have managed to come up with 13 global expeditions. And 10 of those have used remotely operated vehicles to study hydrothermal systems and methane seeps, totaling 270 days at sea. And the funding for that ship time has largely come from NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, also significantly from the Schmidt Ocean Institute, and some from NSF. So we work with different funding sources to make this work happen. During this time, we've discovered five submarine volcanic eruptions in different places. And there are certainly many more that are happening that we're not seeing. And finally, the work we do has implications for deep sea mining. And we have a role both in resource discovery and characterization, and in ocean stewardship. So the work we do in EOI-- we're finding mineral deposits, and taking samples of those, and evaluating what's in them in terms of copper, zinc, lead, et cetera. But those are also the home for all of these chemosynthetic animals that are living there. So you can't separate the mineral resource from the habitat. This is a deep sea mining machine built by Nautilus Minerals. Hasn't been used yet, but the general idea is you chew up one of these things, transport the material to a surface ship, extract the metals that you want, and then put the waste material back down in deep ocean. So the work we do is relevant to the habitat damage that could be done, looking at biological connectivity between the different sites, and understanding how those sites could possibly be recolonized. And also, we look at hydrothermal plumes that tell you something about what happens to these minerals if they're put back into the ocean, in the deep ocean. And I'll stop there. [APPLAUSE] I have time for a question. [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: Yeah. I don't know if it would be better to save it till after the lightning talks or not, but I'll start it out. So the ocean tracers-- it just seems-- to me, I guess-- why it has its own part of this group, this theme, versus part of the first two. DAVE BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, well-- AUDIENCE: I mean, does it matter? DAVE BUTTERFIELD: Yeah, it probably doesn't. AUDIENCE: It probably doesn't. DAVE BUTTERFIELD: But we had to fit all these three groups in somewhere. And this is what we came up with. MICHELLE MCCLURE: This is how the groups were categorized in the 2013 research plan. So we just went with that. I'll confess I was surprised, also. But this is where it was put. And I honestly think it's the interface issue. You're looking at the patterns and the processes involved in ocean circulation. It's an interface between the ocean and the air. I think that that was the original motivation.