Part of a very large groups will work by very large groups, so there's a lot of people involved, and I named it only very few here, but there's many more involved.

I was very surprised that George asked me to give this talk for the centenary for the Department of Oceanography in Liverpool.

I was wondering whether he was confused whether I was there 100 years ago.

So this is me on my way to Liverpool. My friend Eric drove me there from the Netherlands and the only thing I had Daisy on the top is A is a bicycle and a couple of old clothes in the back of the car.

Is pretty much still the same at the moment. I have a couple of bikes and that's it.

And here you see me, we did a lot of walking in the in the Liverpool area, North Wales speak district, etc. In that time and it was fantastic. So you see me here, young and energetic.

Oil changed pretty much.

So I was also wondering, maybe one reason that George invited me is 'cause the British and Dutch have along maritime history.

And you see this on this beautiful painting, but from the filter. This is the rate of the Met Way in the second thing this day forward, where the Duxelles Optima Treyburn to English fleets.

And sell back again.

You probably haven't heard much about this in your history lessons because they never talk about the feats, obviously.

So that may have been the other reason so.

Let me talk a little bit about the work that we've been doing here.

In in my group over the last years and I'll first start with the approach we take to our research and it has focused more and more over the last couple of years.

So a scientific approach involves observations and experiments you, and also developing novel technology, and then we use ships, UV's etc.

And in the science in the chain of events B.

We do advance sample handling and sample analysis and data handling. Everything integrated modeling as part of our activities and more and more engaging stakeholders and have other forms of knowledge transfer.

And the stakeholder engagement can be ministry departments, but also a lot of industry and I'll talk about that at times as well.

So this is one of our approaches, so we do observations, ships or large sections with more and more, also time series, and then we use autonomous vehicles.

And we do experiments, and that data then feeds back into computer computational models of our body chemistry and ecological networks, and also our system models finally.

No, we use a lot of research chips, but are limited in terms of their spatial and temporal sampling and capability.

You that you can do a discrete sample collection, but you often have to go back to the lab for analysis is expensive. Using that ship that you see that this owner probably about 30 to 40,000 euros per day.

And now we have serious problems getting out to sea to do observations because of Corona.

So one alternative is of course satellites could spatial and temporal coverage, but it's only so many variables that you can measure.

So we need to move forward also to other ways of observing the argument. For that we required technology developments. We need more autonomous platforms and in situ observations. And here's a schematic of a future approach that I can visit with as many more autonomous vehicles that we're using in the ocean.

But what we're lacking at the moment still is senseful biology. In body chemistry there there for the physics you can measure become a ship, temperature, salinity.

And we can do this optical measurements, but it's the chemistry that is often lacking.

And this is what we want to do. Basically it is large units for nutrients for carbonate chemistry, for example, that we use in the lab, we need to take him into the ocean.

So we need to miniaturize things, and we're working with industry. For example, there's a couple of this German company and is also on there. Every work with and. We also develop sensor systems with Southampton over the last years, so these are the kind of miniaturized measurement technologies that we need to use on a very wide scale in the ocean to do proper observations of change everything.

So this has to be done with companies because they can bring him to the markets and then they become more widely available and we we do these projects, then often by you funded mechanisms like the sense ocean project we had in Southampton and we're running here now. And what your project on sensor development.

And then we can is the first example of extensive use of sensor systems for carbon capture and storage program. We developed environmental modeling monitoring approach to to look at Seutu leakage detection in the North Sea and last year. We conducted the real world demonstration of such an activity if new platforms and new senses observing carbonate chemistry and nutrients. So the very successful.

So what I just painted was a scientific approach. How are we doing things and how we should be doing things in the future? So what are the big questions, particularly once I'm dressing today?

So what we want to do, one big questions I'd be covering in the group is carbon uptake in the present and future ocean. We all know that the ocean take up about 30% of the anthropogenic carbon that we're meeting through fossil fuel burning.

And that is taken up by the ocean through two mechanisms. One is the physical pump, the physical carbon perm, which takes up all the intragenic. See you to let operates through. The CO2 is taken up by Castle ability and you could water mass transfer, then moving it through the ocean.

And the other mechanism which takes up atmospheric carbon is is the biological carbon pump here. This YouTube taken up by 5 plankton and that's transferred to the deep ocean through settling.

This is the process of focus on in next couple of slides slides.

See whether this works.

So we're really interested in how fried plantain grow, how nutrients are supplied to this fighter. Plankton had make them grow and then Bloom, and this was an annual simulation of phytoplankton blooms in growth in the ocean.

So we're interested in how nutrients are supplied through these areas where you get blooms, but we're also very much interested in the areas where there's very low productivity.

And why are we interested in these?

Because these regions are expanding, about 40% of the ocean has an extremely low productivity, and these regions are expanding because the oceans are warming and that results in lower supply of nutrients to the surface oceans.

And that may well result in less. You do have take by the ocean and also changing ecosystems and lower fishery supplies, and that we do not know one of the challenges with these oleka trophic local activity areas that they're remote. So it's not so easy to study them. You need to sell for at least a week, often to get there.

So what we have just got funded got a large project, 6 million project with the University of Haifa to use the eastern Mediterranean Sea as a as a model system for under control pick ocean. There have been a few hours teaming there's extensive morning setups operational there easy. Wanna use to study in much more detail how these systems are functioning.

And why is this East Mediterranean system so so ideal for our purpose?

Or one reason is the increase in temperature of the surface waters in the eastern Mediterranean is 0.12 degrees per year over the last 40 years.

And that's five times larger than the annual surface ocean temperature increase over the last 50 years for this system is very rapidly warming, and any biological and biochemical changes will be very obvious there.

Not a very interesting reason we choose to use the Mediterranean is its course. It has a range of historical changes over the last 8000 years and clear impacts and we can use that to them. Validate our system modeling approaches. For example, the Sahara was created 8000 years ago.

Before 8000 years ago, in two and yellow. So things are very dry and we could find that effort and in the in the settlements there.

And also the engine tips and the.

And increase their farming activities about 4000 years ago and that has effect on the settlement loads into the coastal waters of offshore of the Nile.

And we we build the Suez Canal and that's now has resulted in the inflow of Indian Ocean species into the eastern Mediterranean. So.

On the.

So ensure of the Israeli waters about 90% of the species is invasive.

There's also the building of us fandom, and that has resulted in much lower sediment transport into the eastern Mediterranean, and we got coastal erosion as a result, and our global warming has resulted the inflow of warm, deep waters into the eastern Mediterranean and with everything as destabilizing, we find hydrates.

Deposits them.

So the big question for this project, then, is how we will climate change in entropy turning crashes impact the subtropical oceans. So will critical ecosystem services decrease and that includes the profession of food and Sue to uptake, and we also want to have a look at how sensitive ecosystems are.

And to get this project funded, we developed a video and I'll try to show that. I hope it works and there's also some sound to it. I hope that functions as well.

Now I start that now.

OK, so that was a picture of the future and will be advertising for a range of positions to work on that project in the coming months. We probably start next summer of code which has calmed down a bit, we hope.

So what I'll do next is I'll show you a couple of case studies so ocean observations over the last decades undertaken and I'll show you how we can use the the ocean as well. I've got the board tree we can actually do sort of experiments. River observations.

And the case studies I've chosen were all the ones that University of Liverpool was involved in.

Hope it be clear. So one big program that we worked on over the last 10 years is the Geo traces program and our summer is also very strongly involved in others in Liverpool as well.

So we do large ocean sections in this to understand how the ocean functions in terms of trace elements and their isotopes, and in my team we've done quite a number of these sections now and we still have three planned over the coming years to have just been rescheduled. So we have to wait a bit longer.

So in the G Trace program, we want to look at the.

The fluxes, the sources and also the sinks and the processing of trace elements in the isotopes and how this is affected by.

By environmental change and what we do in our group. Often we link this supply and the distributions to ocean productivity and things like nitrogen fixation.

So we use for this purpose. We use ships to do these sections, and this is the meteor for example, which we use for Cruzan, one to one in the Southeast Atlantic. We also have to use very specialized sampling systems, or these are for example titanium frames.

So we do not contaminate our samples and we also using specialized wind systems and this one is a careful of conducting cable.

And all because we want to sample in a clean manner.

And also in the lab we have to be extremely careful with contamination and we need to use extremely sensitive equipment, so we use high resolution ipms with Isotope dilution to measure simultaneously a range of elements that were interested in.

And what do we get if we do these things? So this is a. This is the Atlantic Ocean arranged you traces cruise section, cruises in the Atlantic Ocean and we look here from as it were, the certain ocean into the Atlantic. So if you look.

On the top of the picture is the North Atlantic and the bottom is the South Atlantic, and these these are sections of the soft cap knee AM, which is a nutrient type element wake. You also then see is that its concentration increases with depth like you also find 4 elements like nitrate for nutrients like nitrogen phosphate.

But for for cadmium. The beautiful thing is you see these streaks in at certain depths in the ocean and going from South to North. So this is an antibiotic in the intermediate water that flows at depth North with in the Atlantic Ocean and supplies nutrients to the surface ocean ultimately.

And at the bottom here we see Antarctic bottom water at depth Ian.

So these things, these pictures will be could not have without this to trace program. So we understand a lot more and people like Alessandra using this for modeling the ocean and see how it functions.

So it's key elements for us always is iron, and here's the same sections for dissolved iron. Iron is critical phytoplankton growth. I'll come back to that in a number of times, and one of the things you already see here that I looks very different to get me an iron as a very short dress and this time in the ocean in the service ocean. It's only a couple of weeks so it's removed as particles very quickly.

So the imprints you see on the on the on the along this section are from very strong sources. Either sediments, rivers, siren, dust or I'll kill more friends.

We also work closer to the shore, so this is in the Celtic see alot program with it. Part of the Nook.

Chelsea body chemistry program and will look here at the.

We look at some sections on on the slope here.

And I'll show you a picture here of this is dissolved. Let let us one of the elements of the few elements through which we can clearly see antigenic imprints in the ocean. Mercury is the other one.

So what we found in this study is that actually in the service ocean that has decreased four faults compared to 20 to 30 years ago, but it's still want to orders. How high are we think as natural levels? So the let's comes from the pollution comes from in the past from their petrol which was faced out in about 20 years ago in countries like Italy and Spain and earlier in the UK in the US.

But we can still see the signature of this lead, but we also very clearly see is the imprint of the Mediterranean overflow waters washing up on the on the.

On the shelf system on the European shelf system here, 'cause there was a lot of lead pollution in the Mediterranean over the last decades.

And the interesting issue is that the atmospheric inputs of let have been reduced because we have unleaded petrol these days and now the sediments starting to become the most important source. So we see settlements here. So this is a section of leads resolved Latin become over kilogram. You see this item is now becoming an important source of lead to a coastal systems. So this pollution source hasn't gone yet. We still have.

Yes.

So I mentioned saharon input, so I'll have a short case study now of dust supply to the tropical Atlantic and biological and body comma consequences.

And the first thing I mentioned is. This is about what limits for plant growth in the ocean, and we know that.

At a global scale in nitrogen availability's primary control on phytoplankton biomass, you see on the left hand side surface water nitrate concentration and it's extremely low in most parts of our ocean and where the weather is nitrogen. So where nitrogen is replayed, then another nutrient is limiting.

And in this case this is ion.

You could probably work this out. Phytoplankton use iron for many fundamental metabolic process is it's used in protein as a cofactor, so it's it's a key method below metabolic and by the chemical process is for phytoplankton. So we talking nitrogen fixation, so this nitrogen gas which is fixed by certain types of Phytoplankton recording, dies. Droves and also it's important for nitrate uptake, photosynthesis and respiration.

So it's a very key trace element for our functioning of our ocean.

And one supply mechanism is dust. So here we see a dust flows over a worlds ocean and the North Atlantic actually receives nearly half of a global dusty inputs.

We did some solace work about 15 years ago and this is an example of a dust storm coming from the Sahara over the North Atlantic and in the center agency, the Grapefruit Islands. And I'll show you so. These are satellite pictures of dust flowing over that region and this is a regular occurrence in winter there.

Here is another different satellites also showing these dust inputs.

So what is what is this dust go? So you see, here we could use atmospheric aerosol back to directories, so these lines show where the air masses have come from. So these air masses have moved dust from the Sahara to our cruise area. This is a cruise be conducted in 2011.

So the air masses are moving it. Dustin is deposited on its way.

You also see her line which is the ITC set, which is the Intertropical convergence zone. Which is it's better. It's a, It's a X like a shower curtain in the ocean, so it doesn't allow.

Air masses in the northern hemisphere to move South and sudden intend for them. Hemisphere and my sister moved North, so these are the sudden hemisphere masses and they cannot move through the IT set.

The sudden hemisphere air masses had very low dust levels.

So we conducted this crew. So this is North South. You traces cruise.

And this then, is the dissolved ion concentration along their transects while going from North to South is dissolved iron. In animals political and you see just North of the equator, Pekin dissolved ion of nearly one animals bulletin.

Envy associated with test inputs.

It's the same for aluminium resolved aluminium which is shown here in red's, which is an element which we use as a tracer for Dustin puts because there's a lot of 8% of the menu on dust particles and some will come off if it enters the ocean.

The other key element here is of Newton. Here is for Spade, So what he clearly see under that?

Peak in element iron and aluminium that there's a there's a depletion in Phosphate concentration, so there seems to be a mechanism, but it does add iron and aluminium and as removal of phosphate going on.

So how is that working?

So let's first think about the addition process.

So at the at the peak of iron and aluminium also see a dip in salinity, which means as a freshwater input into the system.

It rains a lot there in a region. You get about 7 1/2 meters of precipitation at the year, which is the.

Seven times more you get in Liverpool.

And if you plot iron versus salinity here you can see that it correlates pretty well and the rain in that region has iron concentrations of 100 to $300.

So how does actually functions, then? Is that the iron and aluminium is added not through the dust with actually through rain to precipitation. So this is a modis errors satellite precipitation picture.

And this shows how the dust is supplied to the ocean. It's not through the dust to the driver position, so this is a modest.

Optical thickness depends optical thickness picture which shows it dry dust in the atmosphere. So that's not the main delivery mode for our causing our maximum in iron and aluminium.

And we linking this now also to a biological process is so in that region where we get very high iron concentrations. We also get enhanced knowledge fixation. So just the type of fighter plankton dies it throws which take up atmospheric nitrogen gas.

And I use that as their main, not is supply, and they need a lot of iron bees is noted to fix it everyday. I demand because they need that for their enzyme systems.

But they also have very high food system. One and photosystem two photosystem two ratio which also requires them high iron concentrations.

So again, we then hypothesize that this does not weaken fixes that can take up and from the from the atmosphere they can take up iron from the water, and then they also strip out all the first fade. So this is the reason why there's such low phosphate concentrations in these systems.

And in terms of experiments, what we see is that.

The Intertropical Convergence. Oh moves a little bit so in winter it's hitting further South.

In winter, it's sitting further sales and in spring, so you see latitude and or movement of the rainfall in their system and at the same time we then see a latitude and or movement of the dissolved ion concentration and also of phosphate depletion. In the negative fixation. So we're dealing with a natural iron fertilization experiment where where the system moves.

The but the iron addition ultimately moves the phosphate depletion and the notification in that system.

Another natural experiment we encountered was difficult to cash supply to the subpolar North Atlantic. This region, like ice and basin, just South of Iceland, is.

Is iron limited in in in summer following the spring blooms?

And we shown this. So this is the chlorophyll picture you see. This deep blue colors indicating as low chlorophyll in that region.

And we we did experiments to show this by taking voters in very clean manner, sticking them in ultra clean bottles, and doing these experiments over a period of two to six days. Looking at the growth of phytoplankton with edit ion revolts at a time. So the controls and that clearly shows that in dead region in summer. Typically, if you add on you get more chlorophyll and you get strong removed.

Nitrate so you see six the experiment and enhance growth. Or if it's I'm so very clear, experiment how you can show that the system is is limited in certain nutrients, images.

So with also with Rick Williams had a project funded to study that region and look at the iron limitation, but during the first cruise we had an enormous for kind of eruption of an Icelandic volcano.

And here you see how that region James tuned organic eruption.

Completely covered in Deborah.

So June, these cruises we were able to sample right under the plume.

And so this was the first one of the first cruises done globally where people actually looked at the budget chemical consequences of mechanic irruption basia some photos of this eruption whilst people were on the ship. So this guy got dark.

And there were enormous inputs of this volcanic ash into the ocean.

And the consequence of that was for dissolved iron, for example, this is on. In the surface voters concentrations increased 10 times. Relatively normal conditions for ion after 10 nanomolar, right close to the mechanic irruption and also for aluminium is again this is a tracer of inputs and was the same case a very strong increase.

And we collected some of that for Kinect ash and we did experiment with it a couple of months later when everything had died done.

And indeed, if you added this ash too.

2 waters which were limited by their growth.

It shows there was an increase in global growth. If you add these, if you add at least as particles to it.

And that was clearly related to a lack of iron in our system, so these for cash portal particles adds a little bit of iron, which simulated five point increase in the system.

How does the ash looks like? So this is a microscope picture of the ash, so you see here.

Ten 1520 micro in size and on the outside of the Ashley. Together you get assault layer about 3 to 1990 nanometers thickness, and that layer dissolves rapidly. When these ash particles fall in the ocean. So that's the supply of material. Then to the option.

So we modeled this both using atmospheric and also some ocean modeling. Very simple and we calculated that depending on the solubility of the ash, which is very difficult to establish for ion between 26,000 and 600,000 square kilometers of the North Atlantic received more than a .2 normally to iron, and we assume that would be the amount which would actually stimulate some fiber.

And you see most of the ash fell actually in the island basin. Yet to the southeast of Iceland. 'cause that was the dominant wind direction.

So what were there?

A lot of consequences.

So this region is known for very strong spring blooms, which means that in a typical year. So the grey here is the 2000 three 2009 data. In typical years spring bloom starts like April peaks in June and then dies down a little bit.

But when we had the ash inputs into the into the system, we got a very early.

Boom, boom, establishing itself and then much lower.

Concentration of chlorophyll for the rest of the year, so it was a boom bust situation that year.

And why was that so? We looked at the surface nitrate concentration in the island basin for the region affected by the dust inputs versus Julian days for the sort of days of the year in 2010. So in typical years, the service nitrate concentration in that system in spring start off with about 1415 Micro Mobility nitrate and I dropped about four micro mode.

The nitrate, but in this year we had these very high inputs of organic cash or the nitrator strip codes and the system became United Limited.

So they unusual situation for that system.

So this scenario would, which we anticipate for the system is that it shifted from an iron depleted scenario in the summer to micronutrient scenario.

Very interesting was that this offering concentration in the during the observed during the cruise a couple months later had returned to background levels. So ion is very insoluble and after a couple of weeks your surface concentrations after perturbation are back to the way normal levels.

The the.

The full canik eruption was reasonably small.

And therefore the effect on the on the carbon uptake by the ocean was relatively limited, and it was partly due to the factory. The system running out of nitrates, so further additions of iron could not stimulate any update of common valuation.

So if you really want to have an effective big effect of achanak eruptions on.

On the Comp Anchor Song Ocean carbon uptake he need to do this experiment in the sudden ocean, so you need to kind of corruptions in the Southern Ocean where there is much more nitrate and is a bigger potential of carbon export following iron Inputs.

OK, the last ocean carbon example ocean nutrient example our show is that for southeast Atlantic, so this is 4 from our most.

From a recent due traces cruise which we conducted in the region.

And I'll show you the example of the Congo River, so I'll show you example how to Congo discharges in the Southeast Atlantic. So this is a satellite picture of the salinity.

And distribution of Congress or Congress is on the right hand side. You see the.

So that the distribution so the Congo is sitting here and the flow is in a northwesterly direction.

OK.

So why we're interested in the Congo, so it's the second largest River after the Amazon.

And for the Atlantic, it's comprises about 6% of all the freshwater inputs, and the interesting part. It's it's a large River which discharged discharges in the eastern boundary region. It's pretty unusual. It has a narrow shelf and a complex circulation pattern.

And typically the the discharges by rivers they remain in after in coastal regions and I do not reach the ocean. That's a very typical situation for I and most of the ion always gets removed in Ocean Systems. So we were wondering how this at work with the with the Congo.

We can see from the from the celente observations that the plume reaches 800 kilometres offshore during Austral summer.

And to study this we we used radium isotopes.

To determine the I and other elements of fluxes from the control plane, I won't go into much detail, but it's it's a beautiful way of quantifying the rates of exchange between coastal systems and the open ocean by using radioisotopes.

They are a lot of work.

So here you see the iron distribution in the system, so this is the Congo again and very high iron concentrations right outside the Congo an we don't follow the flow to the northwesterly in a northwesterly direction.

On the right hand side, here you see there high iron levels in the bloom of of the Congo. This is a South to North transect and you also see this freshwater plume sitting there.

We also sampled the Congo over a seasonal.

Overseas all time periods are at four to five sampling exercises in the Congo River itself, so we could determine all the elemental concentrations and there was a lot of iron in the system.

And typically most of that is removed in the look salinity region.

So how did it work for the Congo? So with the use of radium, we could we could calculate the fluxes of iron and also manganese and cobalt.

So we could calculate the ion flux in the River and we can also then look at the Congo shelf transfer, which was much higher than we expected, so normally we expect 90 to 99% of the iron being removed in this Michelle region, but not for the Congress system.

And also the off shelf transect still had large amounts of iron, but none constraints is behind. The fluxes were high as well and the very interesting part is if you then look for fluxes for magnesium and cobalt. The fluxes from the River was smaller than the flux is on the shelf.

And that is just cause the sediments of the Congo River. So outside the Congo River deliver a large amounts of these redox sensitive elements, cobalt and manganese, and then also large amounts of iron.

So the total ion flux from the Congo into the into the into the ocean system towards the gyre of the South Atlantic was .6 billion miles per year, and that's 2% of the overall resolve influx into the global ocean. So it's an enormous flux of iron into that system. And if you compare that to the atmospheric input is about 40% of the atmospheric inputs to the total of the South at length, so significant input.

Combat system.

So.

And compare this to the Amazon. So this is the distance from the River mass, so we got the Amazon here. Very low iron concentrations at 500 kilometres and you see the the Congo has still 29 amounts of iron flowing at 500 kilometers.

And even at 800 kilometres we still get 2 three animals of iron, which is Compara Bulto the transpolar drift. So the the flow out of the optic.

So the question now is, why is the Congo able to distribute to provide so much iron to the Atlantic? So the key reason is.

For the party by stabilization work by organic ligands to the Congo River got very high DOC levels.

But so does the Amazon.

And added a main difference between the Amazon system and the Congress. Did very fast flow, so from the outflow from the Congo River itself to the to the ocean system is 7 to 10 days, so it's probably the speed of transfer which is very important here.

So what are the biological consequences of this large inflow? So we're dealing with an eastern boundary system, which means that upwelling of voters to the surface you can very high productivity in these systems. And then these voters flow into the open ocean and the constraints of nutrients decrease.

So what does the Congo? What effect is the Congo having this in this system?

So this is work from from Tom Browning. So you see here on the left hand side, the.

The green here. This is the December service nitrates contour in the system here. So enhanced concentrations of nitrate because of the upwelling in this angular region, sorry.

And and Tom did these experiments is factorial design experiments again by adding nitrogen, phosphorus and code, nitrogen, iron and cobalt to his bottles in different combinations and look at which is the limiting routing system.

And this showed that.

In this appalling region, then iron was obviously the limiting nutrients or warady.

So to speak, in which nitrate levels reached the surface waters in was the the most was the Newton, which was most limiting depleted appan in surface waters and then the outflow of the Congo. We actually notice that no team was there was the limiting region, so the Congo supplies so much. I am that enlighten. Complimenting in this system.

The key finding front from Tom was was was much more focused on and the change from this iron and nitrogen limitation to Co limitation between iron and I've seen when you move into the into the gyre, and particularly also observed Co limitation and.

I won't go into detail this, but Alexander was also part of this location, ultimately.

OK, I'll move to the last parts. I hope I'm not running out of time again. I'll show a video. I hope this will work. It may be a bit loud's account control the sound.

One of the aftermath of war when Britain was a veritable Arsenal Ball. The Allies is the disposal of a vast quantity of unused and dangerous ammunition.

Lookout when you see one of these signs, much of the ammunition is taken to see for disposal and once again, the faithful LST is on the job.

Already 300,000 tonnes have hit the briny oil have been blown up, but there still remains a gigantic stockpile of 800,000 tons to be liquidated.

In the wake of war, Britain has one of the world's biggest house cleaning jobs.

OK, so this is a completely different topic, but I've finished.

On in the in my presentation.

So we're dealing here with large scale pollution issues into our coastal waters with relic missions. And it's a global problem stems from World War One and World War Two. This ocean dumping stopped in 1972, but you see, it's it's a global phenomenon everywhere in coastal waters. We find this. This munition has been dumped, but there's also other sources of it.

And in German waters alone, there's 1.6 million tons of the material lying on the sea floor.

So where did it come from? So it could be transport loss, but also shipwrecks. So of the in the Met Way of the Kent Coast as a US ship line there, which sunk in 1944 completely full of Monition. And we're working with the MoD on that on to check how much.

T&T is coming out of that vessel.

So also we have large issues with unexploded ordnance. We call it new Excel Minds and that's emergency disposal from aircrafts which are flying back British across for example trying to bomb Germany and they didn't do that. Then they had to had to dump the munitions in the North Sea on return and there's been enormous amounts of disposal after the war and you see the video of that and this happened in many areas.

Europe.

And particularly where we are in Q as a massive dump between 2 and 80,000 tons of Monition, aligning the two kilometres of the shore. So it's a few kilometres from where I live.

And you see here some some optical pictures of that.

And this is causing an enormous problem is getting worse and worse for for two reasons. So we are more and more using our coastal waters for various activity. Reconstructing windfarms, we putting infrastructure in agriculture, relying pipes. And these people are encountering the dissemination more and more. And it's a massive industry. This blue industry, more than 9 billion euro in 2018 U and the delays caused.

By underwater munitions are very, very significant.

Another issue is the shelves are Corro Ding.

Then in the coming more dangers, and they're also releasing a lot of these toxic compounds like TNT, REX&Y, MB.

So here's specifically for George here. Some of these chemical compounds that we're dealing with.

As they denied your Benson Rd defense explosive misses TNT, which also breaks down to compounds which are equally toxic and dangerous.

So we have been studying this over the last few years, funded by the.

The Science Ministry, so we're looking at this, this solution of these management compounds and how they move into deserved praise and particularly phase end up in the settlements in organisms and they can ultimately then be.

End up in seafood as well.

So we set up a very sensitive methods. Martha Kato published this last year. So now we finally. This is the first method where we can very, very low concentration. These compounds in in the ocean. But we've also done is experiments looking at the dissolution rate of these compounds. So putting Bentick Chambers on the sea floor.

We developed methods to very easily sample or pre concentrate these.

Compounds from seawater just using blood bags, which we distributed. Also too many other people going to see.

And this is, for example, a results of one of our studies two years ago. One of the cruises in the Baltic seed and we find TNT at enhanced levels everywhere. This is from the sea floor TT constructions in the sea floor and Pickles later, so we can find these compounds everywhere in the in the North Sea Baltic. And they are also present in the North Sea. And our approach also allows us to look for the different compounds. So this is.

T&T this is DMP DMP in the Baltic Sea and we see different regions have different signatures for these compounds.

Because we did the experiments, the solution we know the sources in order dissolution rates we have been able to model this. This is done by Sister Institutes environment. So they've been modeling the distribution of this of these compounds in the Baltic Sea and you can see the sources and you can see that distribution as well. So it they can be found everywhere in the Baltic Sea and they can also be found in all conditions.

So what are we doing at the moment? So working with industry up? Yes, it's a UK company dealing with removal of Monition from coastal seas. Cremated German technology company. So we've been developing sensor systems to be put on ships so more specs to be put on ships for these companies is explosive removal. Companies can near real time, determine ignition compounds and then.

Check weather is medicine there and whether it's dangerous and needs to be removed.

So future scenarios. This is my last slide is for in terms of this mission. We need improved knowledge about your current with fates in coastal waters and economic government collaboration for that.

We need we want to combine chemical and you physical methods you physical methods is the typical way to look at Mission Component Mission in the ocean. When it's not enough.

And we are starting to think about removing this munition dumps and it has to be done by robots, but this will be a task. This will take decades.

And I think that's it.

Thank you very much for listening.

Thank you very much, Eric. That was it. That was a really fascinating talk.

So.

I'm going to open up. Can you stop showing your screen now? Yeah, I'm trying to do that.

So just now.

Has anybody got any questions?

Well, I've got one really interested to see the Sahara Desert.

Dust deposition.

Be mainly dominated by wet deep position.

I mean, presumably that's not to say that dry deposition doesn't occur as well, but do you think that the.

The transport within the rain actually mobilizes the iron at all because of the pH.

Yes, it will do so. Yet dry deposition is important and we see in-house concentrations of ion throughout the North Atlantic. Well sort of 50 NI would say so it is an important process.

But the wet deposition released rips the atmosphere of atmospheric particles and the and the rain has a lower pH often. So that's mobilizes ion and facilitate and transfer to the dissolved facing the oceans.

So it's an important process and people have been looking into this, but it's not easy to study this.

No, I mean I guess.

My chest was looking at this problem years and years ago, was knee and never really.

Well, it was a very difficult issue.

Yeah, particularly getting samples for rain in the ocean is very difficult because it's never there where you are with your ship. It's always raining somewhere else, so collection of rain samples is very difficult. But if you talk to people like Tim Jiggles and Alex Baker, rain is a key mechanism of transferring.

Dying and also nitrogen into the oceans.

So I'm not seeing Jonathan. You've raised your hands, could you?

As she question. Yep, hi Rick, I am. Yeah there was a question about the you showed the sections of the iron off the Celtic sea shelf edge.

So the iron that's coming off the shelf edge air. Do you have any idea on whether that iron is relatively recent but it's coming out of the rivers and working its way across the shelf? Or is it iron that's been sort of buried in the sediment since?

I don't know the last glacial perhaps, and is gradually being resuspended out of those segments.

If what I am becomes more unavailable overtime if it's in in in settlements typically so it it crystallizes.

And to become available again, he said image, it has to be reduced to iron two and only then can transfer, moving into into the water column. So how old the ion is which enters the water column is very difficult to assess. It could well. It often is more fresh material which is delivered by rivers or any other mechanism from the water column, and it's typically not I am which is very deep in the settlements.

That's all I can say because deeper into settlements is locked up by sulfide components.

So you get Einstein suicide in Pyrite Formation and that will stop at the Lokai in up until it's re oxygenated.

Eric, there's a question coming here.

From tenders one I'm not sure who that is, but the question is what will be the effect of the wildfire Ashes from the US West Coast fires transported to the ocean, yeah?

We just had a cruise cancelled.

Pacific and this is one of the issues that we want to look at.

So.

But that material obviously supplies potassium, nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon to the ocean ultimately, but I may also be some metal inputs through that ash. So yes, it will fertilize the ocean to some extent, that's correct.

Sorry, that question was from Tanya in California. OK, so I would see keen interest. Yeah it will have a stimulating effect on productivity in the ocean. I would I would think yes.

So that's a.

It may result in some carbon storage, again in deeper ocean.

OK.

OK, getting some nice comments here. Eric Excellent Summary.

Or the vast amount of important research, so I'm not seeing any more questions. Eric, so I think if that's OK with you.

Goodnight, sorry George.

It should.

And also I think our has.

I'm not saying that I'm sorry, OK, carry on.

OK, thanks very much for that all Eric. Great coverage you started off with the kind of premise with the eastern Mediterranean experiment about looking at the imprint of kind of stratification on the biological drawdown. But what I found interesting was your three case studies looking at the Itsy said bingo are upwelling in the Congo River, actually the.

I would have thought that the controls of ready from the atmosphere in terms of the winds or the precipitation would always be much more important, at least in it, on an interannual sense than any background trends. So was really.

A comment for you to head to, but do you think for the eastern Mediterranean, you will be able to extract those kind of longer term responses? Or will it again be driven by events?

Looking at extreme events is 1 aspect that we want to do like there's just Inputs. There is also strong flooding at times, so that is part of the study.

Some of the controls unproductively we will also have to get from settlement records so over longer page of time when gradual more natural changes have taken place. Some of these are recorded in the settlements and that's what we can do. We can look at in the Mediterranean as well, so that's one of our teams as well.

In terms of stratification.

It's very in terms of certification and nutrient supply and decreasing productivity in the surface ocean.

That will reduce the effectiveness of the of the company, but the other effect of increased certification is reduced upwelling of Sio 2 so that maybe there is going to be more carbon stored in deep ocean as a result of social stratification.

And is that balance between these two process is that we want to look at in some of the studies that we're doing in coming years and that requires modeling. Of course 'cause you cannot just do that with a little ship or a little glider.

So there's a couple of very difficult process is that we try to disentangle and you need a range of different observations to do that and modeling approaches.

Yes, just account. You know, one interesting thing is sometimes what happens with the mode waters and how they leave the region. That's I would say as a central control elsewhere, at least in terms of the physical transfer. And so it might be interesting looking at 11 tine intermediate water there. Thanks for the road child, 'cause they will. Yeah, it's a key part. Yeah, we very carefully look at it and something I never mentioned that these waters the deeper waters. There are 14 degrees Celsius.

So that 10 degrees warmer than indiatlantic, so there's very strong differences in in process is in the rate of process is that take place there, which also will teaches couple of things about decomposition of organic matter. Boss is sinking in the ocean.

So it's it's a very fascinating model system to work.

Thanks.

Ann, thanks Rick. I'll did you have a question?

Yeah, I can ask a question. It says if this time Hi. Hi Eric, I everybody a nice international audience so take the opportunity to say hi to some friends and colleagues on the line as well. Eric, I wanted to ask.

For your thoughts about how we how we do our science, you know you started off with this. Your talk actually quite nicely with them. Sort of few slides about how your group goes about doing it. Science and there's been a lot of push in recent years as you know towards more and more autonomy. You know, robots going and doing the work of ships, but now through the coronavirus we're actually seeing the facility, the science you and I am mostly interested in. We rely on ships going to see.

And I wanted to wonder if we could hear your thoughts on the prospects for new sensors. You know the idea of trace metal sensors has been around for many years, as as far as I know, hasn't ever really come online. Are we still relying on ships to go out there and collect this work? And if so, you know you know better than most how much this this current crisis has put back science and a lot of people's careers, especially the junior postdocs relying on.

Access to ships etc etc.

Yeah, this is difficult. So yeah, we had two large to trace cruises cancelled so I should have been in the Indian Ocean two months ago and next year we should have been under Pacific and that then evolves to obscure range of junior postdocs. Which kind of be undertaken and they cannot.

But then data and things like that, so it's very difficult period that we have to get through, which hopefully doesn't take too long.

We need to get more autonomy in observations.

'cause we've had the ships and actually without the airplanes, there's less data being gathered, so weather.

Predictions at the moment are much less reliable than they were when we have all these planes in the air, so our global observation network is well, cannot cope with losing all that ship time.

So we need to find more autonomy and last week we submitted the proposal to the government to indeed have more autonomy and enhance our observation capabilities using autonomous vehicles. We need better battery systems on these units and we need more sensors, better sensors. We're getting there slowly, but it takes extreme amount of time getting an ion sensor that will last for six months.

It will take another 10 years probably.

So the trace elements is difficult. These things work in F series. Now we can make them work for half the year in S3, but not any open ocean. So that will take a long time and it's the same for all the other elements trace elements.

And for nutrients, the picture is looking much better, but still to get to metrology, right? The quality of machines is gonna take take great effort, but it's possible. We can message salinity very reliable now, but it has taken decades.

So we need similar efforts for a number of these chemical and biological parameters.

And as you mentioned, because it is sort of the short residence, time is some of the bio active elements. You know the ships are providing a very synoptic scale observation of the system. Even in the ocean interior, which we hope is integrating process is for longer, but for the elements like iron, it probably isn't and that lays down big challenges for those of us who want to use those sections to constrain global models and things like that. So yeah, I agree with you, thanks.

Yeah, and then what they're trying to do in the eastern Mediterranean is having regular ship access to a side, so yeah, and that should that is possible even in Corona times.

Still difficult, Eric.

I'm going to wrap things up in a moment, but there was one final question that somebody put in the chat and that's about the munitions, and the question is, what's the time scale for the possibility of robots removing the munitions, and how is the risk of further break up and release of chemicals mitigators, so that's from stellar shackle.

Well, the we had a project from that that has been impossible project funded on robotic removal of munitions and then.

They made a couple of great steps forward, but I also realize that this stuff is much more dangerous than than they expected.

So losing your robots.

Likelihoods, but it is going to be the way to do that do it. But what we see? Yeah, it is the only Safeway to do it at the moment. 'cause there's so much of that material lying everywhere in our coastal zones and it's affecting our mariculture if we buy muscles on the market here, we can measure TNT in it so.

And it's affecting fish.

And it's affecting the the workers on the laying the pipes and building the wind farms. So we need to do something about it. And robotic approach is that the only way.

But removing everything that we have been throwing into the ocean, that's gonna take decades.

But we probably have to make a start, and in the meantime we're throwing a lot of other stuff in as well.

So yes, we are. We don't learn. Do we know?

Plastic.

Eric, thank you very much for a great talk. OK, or will clap your hands and it's been fascinating and I wonder if it's OK with you if we can just meet privately for five or 10 minutes after this. Yeah, so I think Rick is going to call you.

OK great thanks everyone else for.

In

it's an excellent talk, thank you.

What do I do now if I stay in all end the meeting now? Yeah, Rick's gonna call you via zoom.