Breathless in Bombay

Slum housing along the perimeter fence of Mumbai Airport

Most people would associate marine science with the bracing sea air and sound of the wind and sea. It is getting increasingly hard to find anywhere remote from the imprint of humanity and when an attractive place is ‘discovered’ and gets into a travel guide, the visitors soon begin to roll in. So much effort is placed on the ‘remote’ or ‘pristine’ that it is easy to ignore the other end of the spectrum; the coastal megacities where a quarter of a billion people live. Recently, I was sharply reminded of this when my plane landed in Mumbai on a hazy day and I felt my lungs filling with the acrid air of this city of over 18 million people. India’s increasing prosperity, like China’s, is putting a lot of pressure on the environment.

Last month, I was part of a group of 17 co-authors of a paper examining this issue and titled Megacities and Large Urban Agglomerations in the Coastal Zone: Interactions Between Atmosphere, Land, and Marine Ecosystems. My interest in mega-cities was a very practical one because I spent some years living in them. In 1987 I did a routine medical when I left Mexico City after living there for about three years. The doctor showed me the striations on my chest x-ray that were typical of a heavy smoker. “But I don’t smoke” I protested. “I know, but I do,” he said with a sheepish smile. “Imagine what mine look like!”  Six years later, I moved to Istanbul at a time when massive amounts of lignite were burned to keep the apartment blocks and houses warm in the winter. The air was full of yellow fumes made worse by the heavy traffic and there were few days when I didn’t wake up with a headache. But then the city switched to gas and things dramatically improved and serious efforts began to curb the millions of tons of raw sewage discharged to the Bosporus, the vital connection between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

But the issues of such dense human agglomerations go far beyond the problems that can be fixed by means of simple engineering. As we demonstrate in our paper, the cities act as heat islands and change the flow of air between land and sea, transporting pollution for tens to hundreds of kilometres over the ocean. They have strong influences over overfishing, harmful algal blooms, eutrophication (the over-fertilisation of the sea) and cause feedbacks to the atmosphere via marine emissions. So far, as scientists we have been unable to keep pace with the rapidly developing and complex array of problems. Our paper suggests a strategy for how some of the poorly researched issues can be tackled and hopefully serves as wake-up call. Already 16% of the world’s population lives in cities of more than 5 million people (the population of Norway or Scotland) and they place a huge resource demand on surrounding areas, also separating people from their natural environment and making it more difficult to instil a caring attitude towards it from an early age. Reconnecting people with their environment is a huge task that parallels the need to study and solve the problems technologically, for if there is no willingness to pay the costs, nothing will change.




Further information
Roland von Glasgow et al (2013) Megacities and Large Urban Agglomerations in Coastal Zones: Interactions Between Atmosphere, Land, and Marine Ecosystems. AMBIO 42: 13-28 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-012-0343-9

Sad time of reflection at SAMS

Two tragic deaths have stunned the staff and students at SAMS. Just a week after we were trying to come to terms with the loss of one of our bright PhD students, Christopher Bell, we received the news of another loss, the researcher in Physics, Sea Ice and Technology, Dr Tim Boyd. Chris and three other friends were killed by an avalanche in the Glencoe Mountains and Tim by a lightning strike while walking his dog on a coastal boardwalk.  These were freak events, both Chris and Tim were very competent and experienced outdoors people and the deaths were an awful coincidence.

Chris was a second year PhD student working on the physics of narrow tidal straits and how they contribute to larger scale ocean processes in western Scotland. In particular, he had been working on the infamous Corryvreckan and its extraordinary tidal race. He had already made major advances in his studies. Chris also made a big contribution to the social life of SAMS and the Oban region, particularly in his prowess as a mountain biker, climber and runner and for his practical encouragement of his peers in these activities.

Tim was a physical oceanographer who came to SAMS from Oregon State University with a long track record in Arctic science. He had been at SAMS for a year when I joined and was quick to catch up with me (almost literally, he was on his bike) to make sure that I knew about his endeavour to purchase an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) for SAMS. His friendly persistence worked! Tim used the same gentle persuasion to encourage the US and UK navies and others to continue to measure sea ice thickness from their submarines and to cooperate in Arctic oceanography. Tim was a popular lecturer and a great team worker and will be sorely missed.

This double tragedy was stunning for the SAMS community as students and staff struggled to comprehend the disappearance of two popular and respected colleagues from the same Physics, Sea Ice and Technology Department under such awful circumstances. There was particular compassion for Chris and Tim’s families whose lives have been instantly changed. As a caring and supportive community, my colleagues in SAMS neither hid their grief nor shied away from comforting those closest to them. Over fifty student and staff travelled to Blackburn to attend Chris’s funeral and there will be a memorial service for Tim in Oban on Thursday Feb 7th. A book of tributes was opened for Chris and website has been set up to gather tributes for Tim. To contribute, please go to http://tim-boyd.tumblr.com/.

Grief should not be confused with despair. As Chris and Tim are mourned, their close colleagues have appreciated how much their lives were enriched by them and feel the need to celebrate their work and friendship. The pain and solemnity of loss is accompanied by the feeling that their work and enthusiasm should continue and we will certainly do our utmost to make that possible.

Into the kingdom of the ice bear

It’s twenty below in wakening Churchill and the light from the low sun has replaced the snow-laden grey sky, adding sparkle to the taiga landscape. The flat white wilderness in the few miles between the airfield and the ice-covered shore of Hudson’s Bay is penetrated by knee-high patches of willow and dotted with ‘flag trees’, stunted conifers with branches that the icy gales only allow to grow towards the south-east except for their bushy undergrowth that is hidden beneath the snow. It’s too dangerous to go far on foot here so our little group is ushered onto a ‘tundra buggy’ with four big tractor wheels, a cabin and an observation deck. We are in the ‘kingdom of the ice bear’ where hungry polar bears have gathered near the shore, waiting for the ice to be thick enough for them to begin their seal hunt in a few days from now. We were almost too late, but a storm surge dumped a lot of water onto the ice a few days ago and the normally unsociable bears returned to their sparring matches in the willows.

I didn’t come up here to see polar bears - this is a bonus – I have been in Winnipeg attending the annual rectors’ meeting of the University of the Arctic, a consortium of nearly 200 universities and colleges operating in the circumpolar region. The UoA has been operating for over a decade now and has coordinated distance learning modules in Circumpolar Studies which are attracting good numbers of students and it has established 25 thematic networks. It is beginning a new planning cycle and this provides a good opportunity to shape its future on the basis of improving experience and knowledge. The University of the Highlands and Islands is the only UK partner and its Principal and Vice Chancellor, James Fraser, has asked me to represent him. Over the past few days, I have had the opportunity to meet up with colleagues from Scandinavia, Canada, the USA, Greenland and Russia and to exchange ideas and learn more about Arctic issues from people who are key to shaping its future social reality. My visit to Churchill has helped to put this in perspective as I will explain later.

There is no doubt that Arctic social-ecological systems are undergoing unprecedented change. Speaker after speaker told of the threats and opportunities posed by rapid climate change, the surge in mining, the development of new shipping routes, fishing grounds and increased tourism.  The circumpolar Arctic region covers somewhere between 15 and 20% of the surface of the earth but has only 4 million inhabitants and this figure would be lower if it wasn’t for some Russian cities. Only 55,000 people live in the whole of Greenland. Furthermore, the more sparsely populated areas have a high proportion of aboriginal people, many of whom are socially disadvantaged from the perspective of our modern globalised society that has imposed its culture without sharing many of its economic opportunities. Modern generations of northerners are beginning to appreciate the rough deal that settlers often gave native peoples through crooked land deals, denial of rights and even forcible removal of their children for ‘re-education’ (the latter resulting in a recent apology from the Canadian premier for example).

Contextual recognition of these social realities is important but our meeting was not intended as a history lesson; there are pressing issues to be dealt with in the short and long term and education is at the heart of the problem … and the solution. Major interest in the region by mining companies is one of them. Mining interest isn’t new of course; remember the gold rush that swept over Alaska and the Yukon, or the mining city of Norilsk in Russia that is the biggest single source of nickel in the world. But recently there has been renewed fervour for mining and transnational companies (including major Chinese interests) are moving in fast. Providing that the scar on the environment can be limited, this could inject some funding into local communities and provide much-needed jobs in places where employment is low and there is a sense of hopelessness in younger people (64% of the population is under 19 in the Canadian north). It could also go very badly.

In some of the mining development areas, there is 60% unemployment but mining companies are bringing in their own workers because of lack of skills in the local population. As one young person explained “one day we were poor and unemployed and suddenly there were 5000 jobs on the horizon”. The same issue was voiced from Greenland with the Government poised to give the go-ahead to a mine that will be staffed by 5000 Chinese workers; a major social force in a national population of 55,000, desperately trying to assert its identity. The MP for Winnipeg South, Rod Bruinooge, who is from a First Nation family himself, described the low achievement that plagues indigenous communities and the difficulty of getting kids beyond primary education. In the vast territory of Nunavut in Canada’s far North and in the North-West Territories, there are genuine attempts to foster self determination.  Further South in Cree territories and the northern Manitoba township of Flin Flon, an innovative mining academy has been established to fast track students with the target of 30 ready for employment by next spring. There is no time for the slow and bureaucratic process of conventional FE college courses and a transformative ‘quadruple helix’ has been established between Government, educators, industry and communities and incorporating modern teaching technology.

Mining wasn’t the only force of change considered. There is excitement about the opportunities that climate change is providing. Listening to some of the presentations, a mental image was emerging of major shipping routes and offshore oil wells distributing prosperity to new northern ports that were also becoming the home to prosperous fishing fleets. But a sharp sense of realism soon took me out of this dangerous dream. There are sovereignty issues, ice will prevent ports from opening all year, insurance companies will be reluctant to insure vessels for the North-West Passage, and as ice increasingly breaks up, the risk of wind-driven ice jams suddenly occurring may go up and not down, at least for a few years. Sooner or later opening up will happen however and investors are already making medium term bets.

But there are ethical issues that are being ignored in the excitement. I asked the question: “In a world heading towards a cliff edge of dangerous climate change but with governments urging us to help develop safer technology to exploit new Arctic oil supplies ; what do we tell our students?” “A very good point,” the speaker responded; “it has been troubling me for some time now.” And as the northern climate warms up, there will be many unpleasant surprises such as trees and even villages sinking into the ground as the permafrost melts (already happening in Alaska and Russia), a northward movement of diseases like the West Nile Virus (already happening in Canada) and unpredicted switches in meteorological conditions (such as those seen in England this summer). As academics, it is up to us to take the longer view and try to become beacons of light to help our fellow humans avoid the headlong rush from one opportunistic mirage to another.

But back to the reason for me being here. The UHI was the first partner of the University of the Arctic from beyond the big eight circumpolar countries. It is true that Scotland has a little slice of the Arctic marine region defined by the EU but thanks to the Gulf Stream we don’t have the same climate as Churchill or even the plus and minus forty five extremes of hot and cold in Winnipeg at a latitude far south of Scotland.  We do have Arctic interests however, particularly in SAMS and the Mountain Studies Centre in Perth and a lot more to offer in areas of health, language and cultural studies. Beyond these specific interests, it is the model of distributed learning centres in a sparsely populated region that is particularly relevant because UHI has been a pioneer and this is recognised by the entire pan-Arctic consortium.  UHI’s digital learning provides particularly valuable lessons. We too are pursuing the quadruple helix and learning, sometimes painfully, as we do. And we need to learn more from others as they learn from us. So on my return from Canada, I will be discussing ways to increase cooperation and get more from our membership of this extraordinary club. This time around, I was particularly pleased to see Tara Morrison, one of UHI’s mature postgrad students, actively involved in the group of students engaged in their own meeting. Hopefully, she’ll write her own blog (hint).

One of the most important ways to maintain identity and culture is by conserving living languages and the narratives and artistic expression that they hold. There is a great diversity of languages in the Arctic, most under pressure or in decline. It isn’t easy to maintain linguistic diversity; there are around seven variants of the Sami language for example, covering about 70,000 people in Norway, Russia, Sweden and Finland. Intervention to help only one variant could speed the decline of the others so the work of the academic carries huge ethical responsibility. UHI has great linguistic expertise through Sabhal Mòr Ostaig its Gaelic college and it was good to hear from Jelena Porsanger, Director  of the Sami University College, that strong cooperation already exists between the two colleges and that SMO and BBC Alba are highly regarded throughout the circumpolar world.

I haven’t said much about scientific research so far. There is a great sense of urgency in the need to study the rapidly changing Arctic system and to bolster this work by training new scientists. Canada is building a state of the art high Arctic research station in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, scheduled to open in 2017 and a new icebreaker will be ready at the same time. Denmark will build a station in northern Greenland at 81°36'N 16°40'W, about 574 miles from the geographic North Pole and a major research partnership has been established between Canada, Greenland and Denmark and this will lead to a series of joint expeditions. Russia is also accelerating its own research and encouraging cooperation with the West. UHI, through SAMS, offers the only UK degree in Marine Science with Arctic Studies, thanks to our partnership with UNIS, the Norwegian University Centre in Svalbard. SAMS’ is also a partner in the Kings Bay Marine Station in Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard. Our expertise ininstrumentation and autonomous vehicles is internationally recognised and we have led many of the major UK expeditions to the Arctic on the research vessel James Clarke Ross in recent years. It is clear however that UK Arctic science is seen as a poor cousin to its neighbours and unless there are game changing investments, we will really be missing the boat and the potential to reap the rewards of being in the leadership of a knowledge-based economy.

As our ‘tundra buggy’ lurches slowly towards the coast, I have the opportunity to gather more viewpoints on the realities of the Canadian north. The first cargo ship to dock in Churchill arrived in 1929 and the port is open for a short 4-5 month season every year, handling about half a million tons of grain exports and fertiliser imports. It has grown very little despite being Canada’s main northern port and is in a rather shabby state. The township of Churchill has less than nine hundred inhabitants and the two hour flight to Winnipeg is extremely expensive (C$1,300 return; more than a transatlantic flight) and this makes the place very isolated. During the seven week ‘polar bear season’ there is an increasing traffic of specialist tourists, so much so that the Government has had to introduce a strict code of practice and limit the ‘tundra buggy’ fleet to 18. I couldn’t help feeling that these large vehicles must have some implications for behaviour of the bears but this is gut feeling without any basis of evidence.  Some bears get overly accustomed to human settlements and are found wandering through Churchill where they are ‘jailed’ and returned to more remote places!

Our buggy comes to a halt near the shore and we step outside into the cold air on its platform to look for bears. It is exciting to spot the first ones sparring in a distant patch of willows and I begin to regret not having one of the big telephoto lens cameras that are appearing around me. The Hudson’s Bay population, one of 19 around the Arctic, numbers around 900 and are thought to have declined by about 20% in the past decade, probably due to poor ice conditions. It is rare to see more than a half dozen in a single day.  From time to time, our guide moves the buggy to new sites and we are lucky to see a total of eight bears. Most of them appear to ignore us as they pad around at a distance or rest in the snow. Finally though, we are approached by a large curious male, scarred from a fight over a female and with blood dripping from its muzzle and claws after a recent kill, maybe a muskrat snack, and perhaps seeing us as potential tinned food. So here is a chance encounter, up front and personal, very close and just above the range of claws and teeth; I didn’t use a zoom for the photo posted at the top...

On turbulent times

Turbulence appears rather often in the press these days. Most people would associate it with stock markets or the BBC but right now I’m sitting in an Air Canada flight heading over the Atlantic towards Ottawa. The crew have just scuttled their trollies away and strapped themselves in as we bounce up and down crossing the Atlantic shelf near the Porcupine Bank and buffeted by the famed Jet Stream. I’m waiting for a lull and the “ping” that releases the air crew and stops my empty food tray from bouts of levitation but it’s quite a rough ride.

Unlike the food (“Would you like chicken sir?” – “Oh, is there a choice?” – “No, it's chicken or nuffen”), I like the maps that appear on the little screen before my eyes because they include oceanographic features as well as the usual coastlines and random settlements. That’s why I know I’m over the Porcupine Bank and I can spot the neatly labelled Wyville Thomson Ridge and the Faroes-Iceland Ridge, the Maury Sea Channel, the Biscay Plain and the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone. Down below, 150 years ago, the ‘highly strung’ Edinburgh professor, Charles Wyville Thomson had taken the first abyssal samples of marine life from the HMS Porcupine. That’s why the Bank got such a strange name (but doesn’t explain the prickly name for the ship!). He later went on to persuade the Government to fund the follow-up Challenger Expedition, the biggest milestone in 19th century marine science, but following its huge success, suffered total mental exhaustion and died a broken man.

Wyville Thomson knew a lot about ‘turbulence’, though the word hadn’t been coined in the way it is used today. Apart from the physicality of a heaving deck, he knew about the difficulty of getting projects funded in times of great financial change. The apocryphal image of studious high-collared and bearded academics in teak paneled laboratories betrays the realities of the cut and thrust struggle for funding that they were facing and the backstabbing rivalry conveyed in neatly penned but occasionally venomous letters.

Have things changed much? Perhaps it is far easier now to dash off a nasty (and often regretted) email rather than brooding over pen and ink… But scientists continue to face a struggle to gain funding. Have you ever seen the track taken by the Challenger? It would be easy to imagine the crisscrossings of the oceans as a product of sails in trade winds but that was not the case. There were two other factors at stake: commercial interests and geopolitics. The expedition was at the beginning of the 19th century communication revolution where cables were being laid to connect outposts of the empire and major business partners … and this needed information about the sea floor in key places. And there were other political interests to pursue in the Southern Ocean. It seems ironic that today’s marine scientists are asked to prove the economic impact of their research if their funding is to continue; the same thing happened to Wyville Thomson. Today’s research leader has to be every bit as canny as his or her counterpart of 150 years ago.

And so I have to turn to the events of the past few weeks. Rarely has the politics of oceanography and polar science found so much space in the press and parliament as the debate over the proposed merger of BAS and NOC was tossed to and fro. Science, good management and economics became intermingled with nostalgic patriotism of the kind normally reserved for the last night of the proms (which I still enjoy watching by the way). The big difference of course is that this debate was not just about fanfares and pith helmets but touched on people’s careers, long-term aspirations and loyalties. It is easy to miss the big picture though; the British economy is in dire straits, fuel prices are skyrocketing and the UK science budget is declining at the current rate of inflation (which thankfully is still relatively low but gradually bleeds away the real budget of publicly funded institutes). With the political prerogative of maintaining UK Antarctic bases and the obligation to demonstrate short term economic impact, long term observations are under close scrutiny, there is little spare change for blue skies research and even less headroom space required for the innovation needed to keep our science on the cutting edge. Something had to be done but there was no simple and obvious solution. On the one hand, there was economic logic in streamlining fleets and services and breaking down sclerotic silos but on the other there was huge value in maintaining prestigious brands (particularly BAS), team spirit and keeping management structures close to the coalface. This was never going to be an easy debate and not everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the plan for merger was shelved.

The big question remains though; how will the underlying problem be tackled? Without a profound and long term solution, this story will simply rumble on and the ‘can’ will be kicked down the political street, or worse, into the long grass. For the naïve triumphalist, this could be a pyrrhic victory. Part of the answer has to be in the way we value our science and join up the dots between discovery and societal benefit. We haven’t been very good at doing that or even framing the questions that will allow us to make meaningful valuations. Take the much talked about BAS discovery of the ozone hole nearly three decades ago. There is little doubt that this, followed by the Montreal Protocol, saved human lives. For Britain, this could be conceived as a remarkable piece of altruism of immense value … but not for the treasury of course. On the other hand, it triggered the rapid development of non-ozone depleting CFC substitutes by the British chemical industry, so there was a major financial reward as well. And nobody was expecting an ozone hole. 

It would be interesting to do an economic assessment of the Challenger Expedition; perhaps we owe one to Wyville Thomson. His successor and SAMS’ founder John Murray was much more entrepreneurial; ‘assertive’ would be an understatement. When the Government refused his request for funding for the Challenger reports, he browbeat them into submission by threatening to fund publication himself … and keep the profit. I don’t think we would get away with that today!

Meantime, this side of the Atlantic the turbulence has subsided. Just before the Grand Banks, we flew over the Gloria Ridge. Therein rests another tale. Gloria was the pioneer long range sonar device developed by the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, the predecessor of NOC. It was a pig to deploy but made a huge contribution to mapping the seafloor. I wonder what unforeseen economic benefits that investment has triggered...

Sloshed in Bangkok: No way to save the planet

I’m in Bangkok and, outside the concrete wall of the UN conference centre, the monsoon is in full fury with bolts of lightening and water sloshing down. I arrived on Sunday and joined rarely seen colleagues from my former UN life in a café by the Chao Phraya River, returning to our hotel by tuk-tuk through the bustling streets, just before the deluge began again. But the monsoon is a regular event, essential for the food production and hydrology of south-east Asia, so I shouldn’t be complaining … or should I?

The Thai Minister of Science Dr. Prodprasob Surasawadi had a very clear message about the nature of recent monsoons. Thailand has changed from a country where the main concern was water supply to one where flooding dominates the agenda. “I told everyone, we need a paradigm shift” he said “from how to store water to how to drain water”. Last year’s monsoon was deemed a 1 in a 100 year event and flooded 63,000 km2 of land, leaving 600 people dead, the majority from short-circuiting as they struggled with inadequate pumps. The economic damage was vast and estimated by the World Bank as US$ 45.7 Bn. The minister doesn’t see this as a one off event however. He reminded us that eight thousand years ago, Bangkok was 6.4 metre below sea level: “It will come back for sure”. It isn’t just an issue of increased rainfall though; sea levels are rising at least as fast as they did during the Holocene and sea water is beginning to intrude into rivers and aquifers.

But what to do? The Thai government is facing hard choices. Bangkok is the beating heart of the Thai economy, an Asian tiger that has been unleashed in a globalised world. That new world that we all inhabit has extraordinary economic interconnections due to globalisation and supply chains that work on very short timescales. Some 25% of the world’s hard disks are made in Bangkok as are key automobile components and a sudden flood can shut down production of computers or cars in remote parts of the planet. According to Minister Surasawadi, the choice is to construct massive flood defences or to move the 9 million inhabitants somewhere else; but where? “I don’t know how to do it”. He estimated that it will cost at least US$10Bn to change water management in Thailand and US$20Bn to construct levees, dams and sea walls. “I don’t believe we have much time” he says. “This will happen not only in Thailand but in other parts of the world”. And he threw scientists and engineers a challenge: “We need an answer from you: more practical, more focussed”.

All of this brings me to the reason why I am here in Bangkok, adding 3.18 tons of CO₂ to the planetary burden despite my economy class flight. I’m at a meeting of the Global Environment Facility, created in 1992 and the biggest funding mechanism in human history for dealing with shared environmental problems. The GEF has three main areas of interest: climate change, biodiversity and international waters. The international waters focal area covers all waters that cross national boundaries: aquifers, rivers, lakes and the oceans and, since 1992, US$ 2 Bn it has spent in this area that has ‘leveraged’ (World Bank speak for persuaded people to cost share) a total of around US$ 7 Bn. That sounds like a huge amount of money but bear in mind the US$ 30 Bn bill for a temporary fix to Bangkok’s problems alone. Need I say much more?  The GEF can help trigger action, but it won’t ‘save the planet’. And the planet doesn’t need saving anyway; it is human society that’s high up on the risk register but we’re far too twee to talk about it in those terms.

I have a bit of a history with the GEF as I convinced them to hand over US$ 11.7 m to fund the first marine international waters project – on the Black Sea – in 1992. Yesterday, a former colleague reminded me how I had presented my case to a ‘brown bag lunch’ of senior World Bank officials in Washington. The Black Sea is now in a much better state than it was then but, to be fair, this is much more to do with the reduction of polluting activities due to economic decline than my five years of efforts. Only time will tell if we left a legacy. We did, however, learn a lot through our failures as well as our successes and we helped develop an ‘adaptive management’ approach that is being applied worldwide. So almost 20 years later, I was invited to chair an international panel of practitioners with the remit of looking how we can improve the science behind international waters projects of every kind. Sheila Heymans from SAMS also worked alongside the group to help bring together the information from projects all over the world through a GEF project financed through the UN University (who coordinated the overall study). The report Science-Policy Bridges Over Troubled Waters that I co-authored with Adeel Zafar, Head of the UNU Institute for Water, Environment and Health, was published last week and shows how systems thinking can be used to make the best use of science in future GEF International Waters interventions. My attendance at the conference was to explain the findings and join in with the discussions on future application of science in the GEF strategy. The GEF is operating in almost every developing-country shared waterbody on the planet and it has the potential to exert enormous influence on the way these systems are managed.

One source of personal amusement was the press conference following the launch of our report. Earlier press releases had been picked up by a few agencies including Reuters and I had done a Skype interview with the Financial Times. We had foregone our coffee break and were set up for a Q & A session with local correspondents. In the event, nobody showed up. The entire press pack had gone off in pursuit of the Science Minister. What do you expect when you have talked about uprooting 9 million people? At least it was an environmental news story. I remember doing a long piece on fishing for the BBC a few years ago. They dispatched a crew to do a seven minute news slot from a fish market. Just as it was about to be aired, Paul McCartney announced his engagement to Heather Mills and the editor cut seven minutes to one so I had a 15 second sound byte. “Overfishing is a serious problem that damages our economy” CUT!

On songs, subversion and singladuras

I don't want these blogs to dwell on the past but sometimes things happen to uncover memories long incorporated in the medley of experiences that make us who we are. A smell, a sound or an object removes the mantle of time.  In the midst of last Saturday's Guardian, I noticed the Obituary of the Costa Rican born Mexican singer Chavela Vargas and suddenly it was 1979 again and I was in the mid Pacific on the rolling deck of a World War II minesweeper. 



Chavela Vargas was 93 and this by itself was surprising given her tequila soaked, gun touting, cigar-smoking persona on and off the stage. A lesbian in a homophobic world, hugely admired for her rasping and gut-wrenchingly dark renditions of 'rancheras'; songs where there are no heroes, only frustrated love and unrequited death. Unpalatable stuff for those brought up on the Momas and Papas or Elton John.



Chavela Vargas was always present in the nicotine-impregnated wardroom of the Mariano Matamoros, vessel H01 of the Mexican navy. Every day for two long months, the same increasingly scratched record; a seedy soundtrack to a man's world.



The slender cigar-shaped Matamoros began her life as the USS Herald in 1942 and swept mines in places as distant as Pearl Harbour and the Mediterranean, often in great danger. She was 67m long and less than ten wide, could reach 18 knots thanks to her two independent engine rooms and had a huge complement of 100 sailors: a very crowded 900 ton ship. She was given to Mexico in 1972, renamed Mariano Matamoros and plans were made to convert her into a survey and research vessel. But how to do it? After much debate and advice from the redoubtable Ingvar Emilsson - a Mexico-based Icelandic physical oceanographer - a box-like structure was added above the aft deckhouse to accommodate 18 scientists and labs were fitted out in the bowls of the ship below the foredeck. Midships, a hydrographic platform was rigged with a winch on the deckhouse and a small wet lab nearby. But all of this extra weight made her roll like a metronome. So, after much discussion (and the relief of scientists), the guns had to be removed and she was painted white, just like hydrographic ships in other countries.

Of course, the time came when, in the middle of a naval review, an admiral asked “Why is that ship painted white? Paint her grey like the rest..” and so it was. And being captain of a gunless warship, regarded as a stallion with no … well, you get the point, was considered a duff posting, and - for each captain - hopefully a short-lived one!

I boarded the plane in Mexico City with some trepidation; the first of two month-long cruises in February and June in the Pacific on an old naval warship – and the only chemical oceanographer. Our kit had gone ahead of us in a truck and our group decided to fly to Oaxaca and consider taking a local plane to Salina Cruz from there; the sweaty bus option of eight hours down precipitous winding roads was unattractive. In the event, the Aerolineas Oxaqueňas plane – a hand painted decrepit Dakota from an unregistered company – looked sufficiently scary to send us scurrying for the bus.

Salina Cruz is a sultry place, ignored by tourists and mistreated by time. The church bells tolled as we left port; we were told later that this was the furthest the ship had ventured for years and some people feared the loss of loved ones. I was too busy to notice, stowing boxes of pre-weighed chemicals and tanks of distilled water in the cramped space and reassembling the six channel autoanalyzer that I had built from a machine destined for the scrapyard. We were heading for the Costa Rica Dome, an area of oceanic upwelling off the coast of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. This was Mexico’s contribution to the Global Atmospheric Research Project and we were to release weather balloons and make well over a hundred oceanographic stations. Our equipment was rudimentary by today’s standards: traditional casts of ‘Niskin bottles’ – a series of sampling bottles with thermometers that could be set to fixed depths to over a kilometre and closed by dropping a ‘messenger’ weight down the supporting cable – and a self registering instrument for measuring temperature, salinity and depth. I also used a fluorometer to measure surface chlorophyll (an indicator of phytoplankton) and nets for zooplankton.


Nothing about this was particularly unusual. It was the circumstances and people that left a deep impression engraved in my mind. For a start, this was a military ship with a scientific crew from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, not so long after the 1968 massacre in Tlateloco Square in Mexico City, where hundreds of students were killed and persecuted. Our Chief Scientist, my friend José Barberán, had been deafened in one ear by machine gun fire and then detained in a secret jail, and he was not the only detainee from our team of scientists. Trained in Scripps, ‘Pépe’ (as everyone called him) was a brilliant physical oceanographer. The stern-faced Captain Poveda (not his real name) was deeply uncomfortable with his mission and hardly ever engaged in conversation with scientists and there was thus an almost electric tension on board as he regularly arrested members of the crew for relatively trivial misdemeanours. Luckily flogging was a thing of the past!

A key victim of Poveda’s wrath was the cook. Poor guy hadn’t joined the navy to be a cook, he was assigned the duty and told to get on with it. With a crew of 80 (I never worked out how they fitted them in and ‘new’ people seemed to emerge like pale-faced moles from the engine room even after a month at sea) and dreadful supplies, he had a daunting job. Weevils in the flour and pork chops with a greenish hue. Too much chilli “ARREST THE COOK”. It was when food supplies started to run out that he became innovative. While we were doing ‘hydrocasts’ on the port deck, officers and crew were shark fishing on the starboard deck and shark fishing was a particular pleasure of the captain. Oceanic sharks have a high urea content and here the cook had his day, cooking the meat for hours to get the urea out and produce his “chan chan de Tiburon” which was a life saver (except for a blue shark that made everyone ill). Despite all of this, we were a pretty emaciated bunch after a month and one colleague ended up in hospital. We were determined to do something about it for the second trip.

And that was only the beginning of the problems. Getting enough water for nearly 100 people is a real challenge when the ‘evaporator’ (the device that distils seawater for drinking) is nearly forty years old. Our ‘box’ had a toilet and shower room accessible from deck but water had to be rationed, sometimes ten minutes a day for the entire scientific team. And we were the lucky ones; you can imagine the unsanitary conditions for ratings in the engine room in the tropical heat. We had our own routine. The first scientist would put a bucket half under the shower because the last one would always end up covered in soap. I will never forget the tannoy announcement: “OFFICERS, PETTY OFFICERS, SCIENTISTS AND RATINGS! SAINT JOSEPH IS GIVING YOU A FREE SHOWER. FORM ON DECK IN AN ORDERLY MANNER!” The watch officer took the helm and steered the ship for a particularly angry looking black line squall. By the time it had arrived there were eighty naked men on deck with their soap ready for action, some with small piles of clothes and soap powder. Five minutes of phrenetic activity and back into the tropical sunshine again. 


Traditional oceanography was often rather monotonous and demanding. We joked that an oceanographer’s hell would be a ghost ship doing bottle casts for ever and being woken up at odd hours of the night by “STATION!” It took a long time to get my autoanalyzer cranked up and all channels working (I could never get the ammonia channel to work; too much sweat and cigarette smoke). Once it got going, I would try to measure everything I had collected, even if it involved a 24 hour shift. We analysed the data as much as possible on the table in our ‘box’ and discussed sampling tactics for Pépe to negotiate with the captain. The table also became the centrepiece for little parties designed to let off steam and keep up the morale. While we were off the coast of Nicaragua, a revolution – the Sandanist revolution – was going on and we listened intently at the clandestine “radio Sandino; victory or death” on our short wave radio, cheering the victories and happy in the knowledge that we were one step ahead of the world’s press. The fall of the oppressive dictator Anastasio Somoza, was happening just a few miles away. "STATION!"

I'm measuring the wire angle. With no thrusters we had to stop engines and drift on each station.

 

 

Every ship has unsung heroes. Chief Petty Officer Corros, the boatswain, was ours. Corros was a lanky man from the port of Veracruz. You can’t mistake a typical “Veracruzano” with their love of laughter, flamboyant storytelling, music and a fast talking almost Cuban accent. On an earlier training cruise, I saw Corros holding forth in an animated monologue with a group of students. “The problem with you students is too much “mota” (marijuana). Not like in my day. Disgusting. And you can’t even grow your own. Nobody today bothers to learn how to plant the seeds, water them and keep them carefully on the windowsill. Such laziness…”. Corros was a genuinely skilled boatswain and always helpful. But for our second cruise, the navy promoted him to lieutenant and sent him to the bridge without much training. You could always tell when he was on duty from the way the ship stopped at random angles to the swell. One day he came down to see Pépe with a piece of paper and a quizzical look. “Err, Barberán, I’ve calculated our latitude and its three degrees. Err, can you tell me if its three degrees South or North?”

By day 20, the pressure had begun. Poveda told Pépe that he was worried about the supplies and had put his men on shortened shifts because of hunger. “We have a mission to accomplish” he was told “and it is an international commitment”. We were also on one engine but that was normal, they never seemed to get them both working and when they did, sparks and soot would come out of one chimney and the offending engine would have to be shut down again. Then we were told that the fuel was running low and the men would have to pump it up with stirrup pumps. “We will finish our job” came the reply. Then eventually the day did come when the last station was over with a cheer and we steered for port. Of course, both engines suddenly sprang to life. They call it the “homeward breeze”; everyone knows that.

But this story is far from over so go and make a cup of tea… for the best and the worst are still to come…

By the second cruise, in June 1979, there had been a lot of lobbying to ensure improved conditions on the ship. A strong case had been made to ConNaCyT, the Mexican research council, for extra funds for food and this was meant to be inclusive of the entire crew, not just the scientists. To our surprise, they raised the navy food budget almost fourfold, arranging a payment directly to the captain to buy fresh provisions. We were approaching hurricane season and conditions could be tough.

Back on board in Salina Cruz we were soon reinstalling our equipment. We were almost incredulous to discover menu cards in the officers’ mess with imaginative names for the dishes. Soon at sea, we began a 400 mile transect southwards, almost to the equator. There is a strange allure to the central Pacific; a long swell that is comforting in its steady regularity on a vast and seemingly empty blue sea. But the Costa Rica Dome is far from empty. It all starts with a combination of trade winds funnelled through gaps in the Central American part of the Rockies-Andes Ridge and the sharp northwards turn of an extension of the eastward flowing Equatorial Counter Current when it approaches the coast. The result of this is to spin off giant eddies as much as 200 miles wide, and to bring nutrient-rich deeper water towards the surface. These fertile eddy oases surrounded by a blue marine desert gradually drift offshore and eventually decay. The final ingredient to the mobile melting pot is dust brought by the wind that adds enough iron to trigger blooms of phytoplankton – tiny photosynthetic organisms that form the base of the food chain.

And few mariners crossing the Costa Rica Dome would notice the very slight greening of the sea. But they might begin to spot whales and sleek tuna boats. Our vertically hauled zooplankton nets revealed the missing link as we tipped increasing amounts of tiny creatures into glass jars and pickled them with formalin. On one occasion the whole net was bulging brim full of gelatinous salps (tunicates), organisms that are often barrel-shaped and consume phytoplankton. We thought that such a big haul was a complete fluke so we kept a small sample and tipped the rest back into the sea. But the same thing happened in the next three hauls; we were virtually sliding on a mass of jelly! This doesn’t explain the whales; you can’t survive on jellybeans and neither can whales. But the same patchiness that leads to aggregations of salps also happens with the zooplankton species that baleen whales depend upon and the Costa Rica Dome is a whale oasis for this reason.

My data helped to show the position and intensity of upwelling. On this plot, I am showing the surface chlorophyll data to indicate phytoplankton. The nitrate measurements show the area where there are high levels of nutrients sufficiently close to  the surface to trigger a phytoplankton bloom. The ‘historical position’ is based on the Levitus dataset as analysed by Kessler (2006)

Matamoros was now off the area of Nicaragua and Honduras where the Dome is spawned. We were working deep into the night and although we had permission, this part of Central America was in turmoil. Suddenly there was a little flurry of activity from the bridge and the captain was summoned from his bed. “Seems to be a gunboat approaching from starboard” we were told “we can see it on the radar and it’s closing fast”. Military logic took over. Silent ship. Lights out. Drifting. But still the gunboat was approaching. When it was close enough, all lights – decklights, searchlights, floodlights, everything – was turned on and then off again. I can only imagine the reaction on the gunboat: “Holy s***, a battleship…”, or something like that. No time to see our gunless reality. Anyway, they did a tight 180 degree turn and left at full speed. The only time we cheered the captain!

And that was an understatement. The big problem began one lunchtime a couple of weeks into the cruise. We were served a thin translucent liquid with a hint of grease floating on top. “What’s this soup?” barked the captain. “I have nothing to put in the soup” said the cook. “You’re arrested!” But so it was, yet another time, supplies were running out and the little menu cards became increasingly aspirational. Of course, we wanted to know why. How come the funds Pépe had negotiated for food had run out? “It’s that cook” we were told. “Money waster. He’s under arrest.” The cook, weary-faced and distraught, called Pépe late at night to show him all his carefully stored receipts and papers. This was a big risk for him and he had already forfeited the chance to return to his family when we returned to port (this was the reality of an arrest). He had spent much less than the money provided to supplement the provisions but that, he asserted, was all he was given.

That night, our usual light-hearted meeting became an intense debate. “What can we do? How can we tolerate such behaviour and apparent corruption?” Finally, we decided on the best course of action; we would no longer eat in the officers’ mess. Effectively we were on hunger strike. But we had to survive another ten days at sea and complete our mission. Pépe informed the captain that we were relinquishing our rations so that they could be redistributed and that later we would demand an inquiry. Poveda was furious and over the next few days began to vent his spleen by accusing us of subversive behaviour, even warning of a court marshal. Fearful of a mutiny, he even made the officers take out their firearms and clean them on deck. The atmosphere was electric. Our protest was passive though and we continued to work as normal. The ship steamed on. Again we resisted stories of low fuel and insisted that a job had to be done.

Night stations were the highpoint. While a small group of colleagues did bottle casts on the port deck, a larger group would be aft, fishing for squid and we became increasingly expert at making lures and catching them. Squid are aggressive creatures and will go for a ring pull from a beer can if it has a hook on it. A couple of our number had brought large bags of limes on board (fearing scurvy no doubt!) and we marinated the squid and pretended they were a delicacy. Sometimes we simply had to eat them raw. Sometimes late at night we were visited by some of the crew from the engine room who had a supply of maize flour and would bring presents of hot tortillas. We were shown immense kindness by these tough but caring souls.

On the Matamoros, I learned more than tropical oceanography. It was a lesson in resilience, companionship and human dignity. I have no doubt that we did the right thing. As a foreigner I was particularly vulnerable. Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution states that “foreigners cannot in any way meddle with political matters in the country” and any violation of this can result in immediate expulsion. My friends carefully shielded me from any political undertones and our actions were about dignity and not politics. I decided not to tell this story until everyone had retired. We finished the cruise but it was not our last trip to the Costa Rica Dome.

We eventually docked in Salina Cruz again and unloaded our equipment to the warm smiles of the crew and frosty stare of the captain. My memories of the last few days at sea have become hazy; we were not in a very good state. Ironically, I was given a letter to inform me that I had completed some 28 “singladuras” – days at sea that I could count as military service. I keep the letter somewhere, just in case!

Pépe Barberan died of cancer in 2002 in the middle of a rising political career and his ashes were scattered at sea. We bade our farewells a month earlier. A few years ago when I was working in Plymouth, I attended a talk given by Daniel Ballestero, a visiting scientist from Costa Rica. He mentioned how the best series of observations in the region had been four Mexican cruises in the early 80s but nobody knew where the data was. I took him to my office and pointed to the yellowing boxes packed with data logs and rolls of paper from chart recorders. We managed to get some funding from the EU and he came to work on the records for three months. Later, colleagues from Mexico pooled the physical oceanography data and Dima Aleynik (now also at SAMS) travelled out for several weeks to recalibrate and quality checked the data and model it. He produced a modern data archive and we still have every intention to publish an atlas of the region. So if you see some cardboard boxes in my office, you know what’s in them (and there are other cruises too!).

As for the allegations, no charges were ever made either way. To my knowledge, Poveda was never promoted. The rector of the university took a personal interest in our story and decided to invest in the first purpose built oceanographic research vessel in Mexico. Two years later, we were back in the Dome with our sophisticated equipment and superb accommodation. Our fantastic cook never repeated a menu in 30 days at sea…

"Hay que saber sentir, que hay que saber luchar para ganarse el respeto de otros y respetar a esos otros".
You have to know how to feel, you have to know how to fight to gain the respect of others and to respect others.
Chavela Vargas

Basking in summer

Some things don’t seem to change with time. Years of technological advance, escalating ticket prices and customer-focused-integrated-deregulated family-friendly summer rail travel still ends up with cluttered corridors full of sweaty travellers sitting on groaning backpacks. My journey down to Plymouth took 13 hours, mostly in one of those trains that has increasing undertones of a mobile portaloo as it progresses through the day. But I’m not really complaining, I got the seat next to a power socket and managed to do a day’s work; so many people around … but no one to distract me.

Back south, I was struck by a big photograph of a basking shark on the front cover of the Western Morning News. This is a regular feature in the summer in a newspaper that often features fishermen complaining about the unfairness of current regulations and the attempts by conservationists to steal their livelihoods with conservation zones for valueless sea grasses and the like. But basking sharks are different, they eat plankton and don’t compete with fishermen and, like the first cuckoo in spring, give reassurance that all is somehow well and the summer has arrived.

I remember when I saw my first basking sharks in Plymouth Sound, steering the University of Plymouth Marine Institute’s yacht Fairtide at a safe distance so as not to disturb these extraordinary 30 foot animals. Awesome. Some years later, under sail in my own boat Ettrick, I came across a shoal of thirty or more basking sharks between Mull and the Treshnish Islands on a stormy day. My seasick daughter who was huddled in a corner of the wheelhouse was instantly revived by the sight of these animals (and later by a killer whale) seemingly milling around us randomly as they fed in waters peppered with puffins and guillemots. This year, colleagues spotted them near the island of Kerrera, just across the bay from Oban. No matter how many times you see them, there is always a sense of excitement (at least that’s what I feel). One of our colleagues, hiking on Skye, was so excited to see them that he jumped into the water to swim alongside!

But it wasn’t always that way. Just after the Second World War, the 31 year old Scottish author and naturalist Gavin Maxwell purchased the island of Soay near Skye and established his ill-fated shark fishery and factory. The whole enterprise was a disaster, misguided and poorly planned. It seems extraordinary to us today that a celebrated naturalist should be harpooning basking sharks and that most of them ended up rotting on a tiny Hebridean island. He made more money from his book ‘Harpooning at a venture’ than from the fishery. We took Ettrick across the sand bar into the little natural harbour in the now deserted Soay. The stone house and quay built by Maxwell are still there, together with the macabre rusting boiler where oil was supposed to be extracted from the carcasses. Everything, apart from the dense and savage clouds of midges, was eerily still and silent.

Historical capture of basking shark in Scottish and neighbouring waters

Basking sharks, only exceeded in size by whale sharks, have huge livers that form around 25% of their body weight. The shark liver oil was unmarketable in the UK due to a high concentration of squalene (ironically now highly valued) but other shark products were sold, particularly shark fins for the oriental market. Maxwell’s disastrous exploit was small in comparison to Irish and Norwegian fisheries though. I have plotted the data (from Kunzlik, 1988) from the three fisheries on the graph and you can see how the Irish and Norwegian fisheries went through boom and bust. Whatever you think about fishing these animals, the fact remains that they have quite low birth rates, distribution and migratory behaviours that are still not entirely clear, and became severely depleted by the 1990s.

At this point I have to mention a political irony. Before Elliot Morley wrecked his political career in the House of Commons expenses scandal, he had been the Environment Minister who personally championed the cause of protecting basking sharks. Almost ten years ago on 15 November 2002 he was in Chile attending the conference of parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to lead a UK sponsored motion to protect basking sharks. This was by listing them under CITES Appendix II - the category for species not immediately threatened with extinction but which may face it if trade is not carefully regulated through a system of CITES export permits. At that time, basking shark fins could be sold for up to $15,000. After much debate the UK motion fell short of the necessary two-thirds majority by two votes. Intense late night lobbying followed and a new vote at the end of the meeting secured the motion and there was an additional successful vote to protect whale sharks.

But have this and the other local measures worked? Arrivals of shoals of basking sharks are so irregular that it is difficult to determine trends. Matthew Witt and colleagues from the University of Exeter’s Falmouth campus have recently published a review of all data from shark sightings in the UK, some 11,781 records plus their own tagging experiments in Scotland. They conclude that the species is indeed recovering from over exploitation and that there is a “significant correlation between the duration of the sightings season in each year and the North Atlantic Oscillation”. And the West coast of Scotland is indeed the hot spot for the species in UK water so we can probably look forward to more sightings in the future.

In the year that Elliot Morley and colleagues were lobbying for the basking sharks, delegates in Johannesburg were busy with the Rio+10 conference, not deemed very successful except for its strong declaration on the oceans. They agreed to establish a globally coherent network of marine protected areas by 2012. This year the deadline has been ‘kicked down the road’ by another decade. The lesson from the basking shark is that we need champions in high places if effective measures are to be taken to protect and sustainably use our seas. But who will step forward in a world preoccupied by our own economic boom and bust?