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Online registration for the 2020 NOAA Science Camp is now open! NOAA Science Camp is held at the NOAA Western Regional Center in Seattle, WA and exposes middle school and high school students to the various research conducted at NOAA through hands-on science activities and emphasizing solutions to real-world scenarios. The Middle School Science Camp offers two, one-week sessions from July 6-10 and July 13-17, 2020. The Junior Leadership Program is a two-week program (July 6-17) for high school students entering grades 9-12 in the fall of 2020. Applications for the Junior Leadership Program are due on April 10th. Camp runs from 9 am to 4 pm each weekday. Scholarships are available for both programs. 

PMEL scientists (NOAA and JISAO) lead activities relating to oceanography including what scientists do when they go to sea, various tools and techniques scientists use to study the ocean, and how currents and trace chemicals move throughout the ocean.

Learn more on the Washington Sea Grant site and register for NOAA Science Camp here.

The northern Bering and Chukchi Seas are among the world’s most productive ocean areas. They are home to millions of seabirds and marine mammals and vibrant Indigenous cultures. The region has also long been one of the fastest warming places on the planet. In a recnetly published paper in Nature Climate Change, a multi-disciplinary team of academic, government, and private sector scientists reports that dramatic changes in these Arctic ecosystems due to warmer ocean conditions. The scientific team, participating in a four-year Arctic Integrated Ecosystem Research Program, observed conditions more typical of subarctic ecosystems.

"The rate of change over the study timeframe came as a shock. Having a team with the expertise to put together the pieces across the whole ecosystem simply drives home how far-reaching the changes are and how much they matter," said Henry Huntington, lead author of the study.

Some key observations over the past several years of the study include:

• Near-bottom waters that typically remained close to freezing year-round have in the past four years warmed for several months in the summer and fall.
• Sea ice that used to start forming each fall has been absent or sparse into January and February and the spring ice retreat was earlier than normal in recent years.
• Juvenile Arctic Cod, which dominate pelagic fish communities in the northern Chukchi Sea, were substantially more abundant in 2017 than in 2012 and 2013.
• In 2017 pink salmon were observed to have increased dramatically in abundance in the northern Bering Sea
• Bowhead whales that typically migrate south of St. Lawrence Island were observed year-round north of the Bering Strait.
• Ice seals were absent from vast portions of some of their main breeding areas, and dead seals were reported in unusually high numbers on the Bering and Chukchi coasts.

The North Pacific Research Board, in cooperation with other organizations funded the Arctic Integrated Ecosystem Research Program. The goal of the program was to better understand the mechanisms and processes that structure the ecosystem and influence the distribution, life history, and interactions of biological communities in the Chukchi Sea.  Previous integrated ecosystem programs were undertaken in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska.

The big question for scientists remains whether these changes reflect a new norm. Collaborative research efforts like this are important because they allow scientists to monitor changes as they are happening and provide meaningful information to local communities and resource managers so they are better able to respond and adapt.

The team of authors includes physical and biological oceanographers, ichthyologists, ornithologists, marine mammalogists, marine ecologists, and social scientists, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the University of Washington, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, the North Pacific Research Board, Stantec, and Huntington Consulting.

PMEL's EcoFOCI program was involved with the study. EcoFOCI is a joint research program between NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Lab and NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center. EcoFOCI scientists integrate field, laboratory and modeling studies to determine how varying biological and physical factors influence large marine ecosystems within Alaskan waters.

Read the full press release here. 

On November 20, 2019, a team of PMEL scientists, engineers, and technicians successfully deployed two deep water oceanographic moorings off the coast of Hawaii to test PMEL’s newest data acquisition system, known as TELOS (Telemetry, Electronics & Logging of Oceanographic Sensors).  The “brain” behind oceanographic data collection, TELOS interfaces with the atmospheric and oceanic sensors aboard the moorings -- collecting, storing, and transmitting measured data in real-time via satellite telemetry.

Station ALOHA, located 90 miles north of Oahu, is a well-established hub of ocean research.  The site contains a cabled array seafloor observatory, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution surface mooring (WHOTS), long-range profilers, autonomous gliders, and other equipment.  With the abundance of ocean observations on site, frequent ship visits, and ease of access from a US port to ocean depths greater than 4,500 meters (nearly 3 miles), the site offers an ideal testbed to evaluate the new TELOS technology.

The two deployments near Station ALOHA represent the first-ever open-ocean moorings with TELOS.  One mooring contains a standard set of 13 line-mounted temperature/salinity instruments at depths ranging from 1 meter to 500 meters, two current meters, and a full suite of six meteorological instruments similar to the instrumentation on well-established Global Tropical Moored Buoy Array and Ocean Climate Stations moorings.  A backup data acquisition system with a duplicate suite of six meteorological instruments is deployed on this mooring for comparison to an established control system.  The second mooring also includes the standard set of 6 meteorological instruments and features a PMEL subsurface Prawler device that crawls up and down the mooring line, transmitting upper-ocean temperature/salinity profile data and potentially replacing the need for multiple in-line instruments.  Both moorings will be evaluated over the 1-year deployment period to compare the data acquisition systems, using measurements from both moorings as well as the WHOTS mooring for additional comparison. TELOS has already demonstrated the capability to collect, process, and return higher volumes of real-time data than previous data acquisition systems, with the additional capacity for integrating new instrumentation.

So far, the mission has been a success.  High-resolution real-time data are transmitted to PMEL via satellite, and scientists are developing visualization tools and analyzing data quality.  The full data payload will be downloaded from the moorings in late 2020, testing the ability to survive a yearlong deployment at sea. If successful, TELOS will be scaled up for implementation across the PMEL mooring networks, transforming the future of oceanographic data collection.

A new NOAA-funded study has documented for the first time that ocean acidification along the US Pacific Northwest coast is impacting the shells and sensory organs of some young Dungeness crab, a prized crustacean that supports the most valuable fishery on the West Coast.

Analysis of samples collected during a 2016 NOAA research cruise identified examples of damage to the carapace, or upper shell, of numerous larval Dungeness crabs, as well as the loss of hair-like sensory structures crabs use to orient themselves to their surroundings. 

Prior to this study, scientists thought that Dungeness crab were not vulnerable to current levels of ocean acidification, although a laboratory study conducted on Dungeness crab larvae by NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in 2016 found that their development and survival suffered under pH levels expected in the future.

“This is the first study that demonstrates that larval crabs are already affected by ocean acidification in the natural environment, and builds on previous understanding of ocean acidification impacts on pteropods,” said lead author Nina Bednarsek, senior scientist with the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project. “If the crabs are affected already, we really need to make sure we start to pay much more attention to various components of the food chain before it is too late.”  

In this study, examination under a high-magnification, scanning electron microscope revealed that the corrosive conditions of coastal waters had affected portions of the fragile, still-developing external shell and legs of the tiny, almost translucent post-larval Dungeness crabs, leaving tell-tale features, such as abnormal ridging structures and scarred surfaces. This could, in turn, impair larval survival by altering swimming behaviors and competence, including the ability to regulate buoyancy, maintain vertical position, and avoid predators. 

One of the more important findings of this study was that crabs showing signs of carapace dissolution were smaller than other larvae. This was disconcerting, scientists said, because the damage during the crab’s larval stages could cause potential developmental delays that could increase energy demands and interfere with maturation.

In a surprising discovery, the team found that the low pH water in some coastal areas damaged the canals where hair-like bristles called mechanoreceptors stick out from the shell. These receptors transmit important chemical and mechanical sensations to the crab, and may help crabs navigate their environment. Examination showed that carapace dissolution destabilizes the attachment of the mechanoreceptor anchor, resulting in them falling out in some individuals. 

This is a new aspect of crustacean sensitivity to ocean acidification that has not been previously reported. The team hypothesize that the absence or damage of mechanoreceptors within their neuritic canals may in part explain potential aberrant behavioral patterns, such as slower movement, less tactile recognition, and prolonged searching time, as well as impaired swimming, that have been observed in various crustacean species exposed to low pH conditions in laboratory settings. 

“We found dissolution impacts to the crab larvae that were not expected to occur until much later in this century,” said Richard Feely, Senior Scientist with NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and one of the co-authors of the study.

Combining observations and modelling work, the research team, which included scientists from JISAO, NOAA’s cooperative institute at the University of Washington, from the University of Connecticut, and from Quebec, Britain and Slovenia, demonstrated that the impacts of dissolution were the most severe in the coastal habitats, where crabs grow and mature.

Read the full story on NOAA Research: https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2581/Dungeness-crab-showing-impact-of-coastal-acidification