Bio 322 Honors Contract Karla and Rhys Ep 1

The podcast discusses the impact of climate change on the oceans. It highlights that climate change affects the temperature, acidity, and organisms in the oceans, and that the effects on the oceans are equally as serious as those on land. Rising ocean temperatures and increased acidity can lead to the death of organisms and disruption of food chain systems. Seaweed forests play a role in isolating carbon and can have a positive effect on carbon levels in the oceans. However, they are declining, and alternative solutions should be explored. The concept of "blue carbon" is introduced, which refers to carbon stored in the ocean and coastal ecosystems. The hosts suggest investing in seaweed forests and also focusing on other alternatives, such as blue whales. The episode concludes with the hope that more action will be taken to address climate change rather than just discussing it. Hello, welcome to our podcast, this is Karla and Reece. About 70% of the Earth's surface is covered in water and in this percentage, 96% of Earth's water is mainly from our oceans. In recent decades, there has been a transformation in our oceans. In today's podcast, we will talk through our climate change and how it has been a critical issue to the biotic and abiotic factors. Join us while we discuss how climate change has been affecting the oceans' temperature, acidity, and organisms. Yes, so climate change has always had a really big deal in our conservation efforts. It currently stands as one of the major crises that future generations may be battling in the upcoming decades. This accelerated heating of the planet will cause huge glaciers to melt and increase sea levels to the point of permanently flooding major coastal cities, increasing the severity and frequency of natural disasters, and causing famine in multiple parts of the world. While many are familiar with these repercussions on climate change, they tend to be focused on the effects that would mostly affect organisms on land. The effects of climate change has been on our oceans is less known, but still detrimental to the planet's health. So Carla, do you think the effects of climate change has in our oceans will be more or less detrimental than it has on land? Well, I think that this is something that's not really talked about enough, but I think there's probably more effects on climate change in our oceans than our land. In my opinion, terrestrial ecosystems have way more plants, so in my head, that's saying that there's more photosynthesis, so more carbon is being produced in the... not produced. It's being changed in our plants, so yeah, that's what I think about that. What are your thoughts, Reed? Yeah, you know, I definitely think it's something, like you said, it's definitely an issue that's not talked about enough. I feel like sometimes we as humans, we tend to focus on stuff that is more pertaining to us, such as terrestrial changes with climate change, and I think sometimes we get a little self-centered, a little too focused, and we don't concentrate on what's beneath our oceans. Because a lot of the effects that climate change has on our oceans can inevitably lead up to detrimental effects on terrestrial land. So in my opinion, I think it's just as serious as the terrestrial effects on climate change, if not even more serious. Climate change can negatively alter the ecosystems found in the Earth's oceans just as much as the ecosystems found on land. Just like the atmospheres, the temperature of the oceans have been, and will continue to, exponentially increase. This will cause organisms who are very temperature-dependent to migrate in order to survive. While an organism having to migrate may not seem like a large issue, it can cause species from different ecosystems to overlap and interact when they may not have interacted before. This can throw off the delicate balance of an ecosystem, and may cause those serious effects on the species who originally occupied the area. Alright, Reece. How do you think climate change can impact how oceans live? Well, I think there's multiple ways. And I think, unfortunately, we've already started seeing small changes. Very commonly, we tend to see more droughts, more severe weather changes, melting of glaciers, rising of sea levels. I know these can all relate to the climate change that's going on in our oceans currently. There's a lot of similarities between them, and I really think that it's an issue that we're going to need to address soon, or else we may have severe consequences in the future. So, as many of you know, rising ocean temperatures may seem like an obvious effect of climate change. But what isn't as obvious to some people is the acidity of the water. When carbon dioxide levels increase all around the globe, it causes the oceans to absorb more carbon dioxide than they normally do, and this leads to an increase or a decrease of pH levels in the water. Acidic water can have many negative effects on organisms that live there. Some organisms flat out cannot survive in more acidic environments, and will die as an effect. Acidic waters can also alter many marine food chain systems. A disruption on the food chain system can lead to the death of many species who feed on specific organisms. This domino effect can even lead up to humans. Acidic oceans could drastically reduce the amount of seafood that we can take without taking too much of a species population, further adding to the very likely famine events that climate change can cause. Now, we just talked about the pH levels of our oceans dropping and causing acidic waters. This is something that we've already seen on a Southeast smaller scale with acidic rain. When more carbon dioxide is in our atmosphere, it gets collected in our clouds with the condensation, and then it continues to rain, causing crops to die out, small organisms to be severely harmed as well as crops. And that's already seen a small but still noticeable toll on our crop output in some regions of the Earth. So I definitely think this is a relatable issue that more people should be aware of. Okay. A species that has been able to battle this situation are seaweed. Seaweed forests play a big part in isolating carbon. Seaweed forests usually grow and thrive in temperature and polar regions. So the location of these species really matters because in warmer temperatures, there seems to be more carbon in the tropical waters. It is really cool to find out that these types of plants can influence an area. Seaweed, like many plants, absorb a large amount of carbon dioxide, and then massive seaweed forests can have a large positive effect on the carbon levels in the surrounding oceans. In an article written by Mary Kate McCoy, she states that when the seaweed has reached the end of its life, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean and remains there. This type of situation reminds me of earthworms. Yes, earthworms are not native to our area and invasive, but they allow carbon to remain in the soil for longer periods of time, still releasing carbon, but very slowly. Which, in my opinion, I think is pretty cool because it allows organisms like plants to process carbon dioxide at their pace, rather than lots of carbon being in the area when plants can only do so much. Unfortunately, seaweed forests are declining. We hope this podcast will inform many others about this situation and hopefully find a solution fast. Alright, so as we're coming to the end here, we thought we'd include a word of the day. My word of the day is blue carbon. Now, what blue carbon essentially means, it's basically the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that is stored in the ocean and coastal ecosystems. Blue water, some blue carbon, makes sense, pretty easy to follow. It's an important thing to know because it's a word that's not generally brought up a lot, but may be brought up more in the future when people start to recognize how the carbon levels in our oceans around the world are just as impactful as the carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere. Alrighty, so Carla, do you think that investing in growing seaweed forests and maintaining the numbers, do you think that would have an overall positive effect on the carbon dioxide levels within our oceans and our atmosphere? I mean, in my opinion, yes, but there's only a certain amount that seaweed forests can do because they don't grow everywhere. Like we said, they grow in tropical warmer climates, so I think it would be good to invest in them, but we should look at other alternatives. I don't know, we should try to focus on also blue whales because they seem to have a big impact bringing plankton up to the surface with their tails. So I think that's something we could focus on. Yeah, I agree. You know, I think seaweed provides us another useful tool in order to combat climate change and can definitely help in the fight of reducing carbon dioxide levels throughout our globe, but I think that there are multiple areas that we should be confronting climate change from, seaweed forests only being one of them. So Carla, any final thoughts about this episode? Well, I thought while we were doing this episode, I think it's a nice, interesting topic that we need to discuss about, but hopefully in the future I see us more doing stuff rather than discussing about it. You know, I agree. Doing research for this podcast, it was really interesting and educational, but it was also pretty eye-opening as to the changes and the detrimental effects that we aren't always told about, but we probably should be. So yeah, that wraps it up for today. Stay tuned for our next podcast, which will be dropping November 3rd. Thank you. Stay tuned!