How important is it to our oceans to limit single-use plastics?
I think it is pretty important. Single-use plastics are too much of a convenience and people don’t self regulate well enough so that it is too easy to use and have big negative impacts. One thing we can do to make a big difference quickly is to minimize our use of single-use plastics.
What advice do you have for young people interested in oceanography?
Just get involved. It doesn’t have to be oceanography. It can be marine science or biology or environmental science. I think the more your read and learn about it the more you become active in guarding your decisions and making your decision be impactful, the better. My daughter really brought the attention of single-use plastics to our house. Because we were kind of sloppy about it, she got the aluminum straws, the recyclable water bottles, and that really cuts down the amount of plastic use by changing those little things. It is not too hard to make a difference quickly. If you start a process or a program and gets some enthusiasm behind you, then it becomes something that everyone does. You build a culture around being environmentally conscious, and it becomes contagious.
What are the impacts of global warming on marine microbial communities.
The ocean is pretty complicated regarding how heat structures the water column and then that prevents or delivers nutrients to the surface. If you increase the amount of heat that is coming into the ocean, it changes the way that the ocean mixes. When you reduce the amount of mixing and you reduce the amount of nutrients that come to the surface then that changes the ability of organisms to grow. So plankton they’re the primary synthesizers of photosynthesis in the ocean, and their the ones on the base of the food web. So if warming prevents the mixing of nutrients from deep portions of the water to the surface, then you are going to change the food web structure, and you are going to change the types of organisms that come to the surface systems. Global warming has big implications with regard to biology and climate. The oceans are one of the biggest reservoirs of heat on the planet, and it can only take so much before it really becomes problematic. The biggest instabilities are in the polar systems because they may see only seemingly small changes to us, but a 1-2 degree Celcius change has big, big implications with regard to how much ice can stay as ice or how much of it melts and becomes destabilized and breaks off and becomes giant icebergs that are floating around Antarctica right now.