Dive discovers missing aircraft hangar of sunken Japanese submarine

Link to download high-resolution video for broadcast: http://go.hawaii.edu/cM

The dramatic discovery of a lost World War II-era Imperial Japanese Navy mega-submarine by a University of Hawaiʻi and U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) team in December 2013 inspired a new search by NHK, the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation, to find key missing pieces of the battleship.

The recent survey, the first to return to I-400 submarine since its discovery, successfully located, mapped, and captured on video for the first time not only the submarine’s hangar and conning tower (navigation platform), but an unexpected and significant new discovery – the submarine’s bell. Torn from the submarine by the explosive forces that broke apart and sank I-400, the bell lies close to the conning tower on the seafloor.

The massive aircraft hangar, large enough to launch three float-plane bombers, was the defining feature of the I-400. After the end of the war, the I-400 was deliberately sunk at sea outside of Pearl Harbor to keep its technological innovations safe from the Soviet Union.

“We didn’t have detailed enough bottom mapping data to help locate the hangar, conning tower, and other signature features missing from the wreck of the I-400,” said Terry Kerby, operations director and chief submarine pilot of the Hawai‘i Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL). “With only one dive day to try to find anything, we knew there was a strong chance we might spend the dive looking at the barren sandy bottom.”

Kerby continued: “We made a lucky guess where to start when we approached the main hull of the I-400 from the northwest. Our guess started to pay off when the giant hangar door came into view, followed by the conning tower and hangar. Many items were amazingly intact for something that had ripped out of the hull of a sinking 400-foot-long submarine.”

The survey was conducted in cooperation with NOAA’s Maritime Heritage Program in the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, with NOAA’s Hans Van Tilburg joining the dives as project archaeologist.

“The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries has been a partner for over a decade with HURL on many of the amazing and significant historical and archaeological discoveries they have made off Oʻahu,” said James Delgado, director of the Maritime Heritage Program. “The waters off Hawaiʻi not only encompass an important part of Native Hawaiian culture, but are also a veritable museum of our maritime past. As America’s ocean science agency, we’re committed to working with partners like HURL and NHK to learn more, and to share more of what lies beneath the waves.”

The new I-400 footage will be shared in a 73-minute special television program to be broadcast nationwide in Japan on Wednesday, May 6, at 10:00 p.m. Japan time.

Video shot log:

:00 – :05   Pisces V submersible moves toward conning tower, periscopes on right
:05 – :09   Conning tower, periscopes
:09 – :14   Pisces V, front of aircraft hangar
:14 – :20   Aircraft hangar, Pisces IV hovering over
:20 – :25   Pisces V sitting front of I-400 bow
:25 – :31   Approach deck gun of I-400
:31 – :37   Hangar door
:37 – :41   Pisces IV submersible searching
:41 – :52   2 clips, Pisces IV lighting hangar door
:52 – 1:01   Debris field, passing over anti-aircraft guns
1:00 – 1:08   Pisces V landing on conning tower
1:08 – 1:17   Debris field, zoom-in to bell
1:17 – 1:30   2 clips, Pisces V over conning tower

For more information, visit: http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/HURL/

— UH News story

New study uses meteorites to date moon-forming impact

Not too long after the planets began forming, a Mars-sized object slammed into Earth, creating the debris that would later coalesce into the moon. Some of the debris from this giant impact escaped all the way out to the asteroid belt. Collisions there left shock-heating signatures – a permanent record of the impact event – that can still be detected billions of years later in meteorites that have fallen to Earth.

Planetary scientists, including Professor Ed Scott at UH Mānoa’s Hawai‘i Institute for Geophysics and Planetology, have found that a significant number of these altered meteorites have ages clustering at 100 million years after the solar system’s birth — the true age of the moon-forming impact, they say. The result is an independent check on other estimates for the moon’s age, and it suggests that the asteroid belt can provide important clues to the timing and nature of major events in the inner solar system when planets were forming. The team’s work appears in the current issue of the journal Science.

“Meteorites provide an extraordinary record of major events in the formation of the planets and the solar system,” said Scott. “We study meteorites and asteroids as they provide the key to understanding how and when planets formed.”

The team of NASA-funded researchers modeled the evolution of giant impact debris and analyzed ancient impact heating signatures in stony meteorites to conclude that pieces from the giant impact did indeed strike the asteroid belt.

Subsequent, less violent collisions between asteroids have since ejected some shocked remnants back to Earth in the form of fist-sized meteorites. By determining the age of the shock signatures in those meteorites, scientists were able to infer that their origin likely corresponds to the time of the giant impact, and therefore to the age of the Moon.

Noted Director of NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) Yvonne Pendleton, “This is an excellent example of the power of multidisciplinary science. By linking studies of the Moon, of main belt asteroids, and of meteorites that fall to Earth, we gain a better understanding of the earliest history of our Solar System.”

“It is even possible that tiny remnants of the Moon-forming impactor or proto-Earth might still be found within meteorites that show signs of shock heating by giant impact debris. This would allow scientists to explore for the first time the unknown primordial nature of our home world,” said lead author of the paper and Principal Investigator Bill Bottke of the Institute for the Science of Exploring Targets team at the Southwest Research Institute, a U.S. team member of SSERVI.

SSERVI is funded by the Science Mission Directorate and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters to enable cross-team and interdisciplinary research that pushes forward the boundaries of science and exploration.

* * *

The abstract of the paper may be found here.

Additional media resources to accompany this release are available from the Southwest Research Institute at: http://www.swri.org/press/2015/moon-forming-impact.htm.

For more information on how the moon may have formed in the giant impact, visit http://www.psrd.hawaii.edu/Feb08/EarthMoonFormation.html.

— UH News story

David Karl elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Some of the world’s most accomplished leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities and the arts have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among those elected this year is David Karl, the Victor and Peggy Brandstrom Pavel Chair in Oceanography and Director of the Daniel K. Inouye Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (UHM).

Members of the 2015 class include winners of the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize; MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships; and Grammy, Emmy, Oscar and Tony Awards.

“I am humbled and honored by this announcement from the Academy,” said Karl. “I have been very fortunate to be able to work with such great students, postdocs and staff here at UH, and with colleagues from around the world. I am also grateful for the outstanding support from the University leadership, and generous funding from the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Agouron Institute and the Simons Foundation.”

One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the American Academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to Academy publications and studies of science and technology policy, global security and international affairs, social policy and American institutions, and the humanities, arts and education.

“David is a hugely productive longtime member of the UH Mānoa faculty. He has made exceptional contributions to our understanding of the role of microorganisms in the structure and function of the ocean ecosystems in the Pacific and around the world,” said UHM Chancellor Robert Bley-Vroman.

For decades, Karl had been a leader in the field of microbial oceanography – even having a hand in creating the discipline. Karl, who joined the UH faculty in 1978, has spent much of his career building teams of scientists to tackle large, complex scientific questions.

Although the organisms he studies are the smallest inhabitants of our planet, the implications of Karl’s research are huge. The Hawaiʻi Ocean Time-series (HOT) program, co-founded by Karl, provides a cornerstone in our understanding of the ocean’s role in regulating climate and global nutrient cycles, for example. And C-MORE, the NSF-supported Science and Technology Center Karl and colleagues established in 2006 at UHM, assesses marine microorganisms from genomes to biomes. Last year he and UHM colleague and Academy member Ed DeLong established the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE) to enhance understanding of how microbes control the flow of energy and material in the open sea.

“We are honored to elect a new class of extraordinary women and men to join our distinguished membership,” said Don Randel, Chair of the Academy’s Board of Directors. “Each new member is a leader in his or her field and has made a distinct contribution to the nation and the world. We look forward to engaging them in the intellectual life of this vibrant institution.”

Academy President Jonathan Fanton added, “The honor of election is also a call to service. Through its projects, publications and events, the Academy provides its members with opportunities to discover common interests and find common ground. We invite every new member to participate in our important and rewarding work.”

Karl is ready for duty. “I look forward to continuing the important challenge of enhancing the public understanding of science, and to helping inspire and recruit the next generation of scientists,” he said. “There is plenty of hard work ahead. It should be an exciting next decade.”

Since its founding in 1780, the Academy has elected leading “thinkers and doers” from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Margaret Mead and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the twentieth. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Karl will join an august and diverse group of Academy members – including two who inspired him in his early life: Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney – at a ceremony on October 10, 2015, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For more information, visit: http://cmore.soest.hawaii.edu/

— UH News story

Extending climate predictability beyond El Niño

Tropical Pacific climate variations and their global weather impacts may be predicted much further in advance than previously thought, according to research by an international team of climate scientists from the USA, Australia and Japan. The source of this predictability lies in the tight interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere and among the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Such long-term tropical climate forecasts are useful to public and policy makers.

At present, computer simulations can predict the occurrence of an El Niño event at best three seasons in advance. Climate modeling centers worldwide generate and disseminate these forecasts on an operational basis. Scientists have assumed that the skill and reliability of such tropical climate forecasts drop rapidly for lead times longer than one year.

The new findings of predictable climate variations up to 3 years in advance are based on a series of hindcast computer modeling experiments, which included observed ocean temperature and salinity data. The results are presented in the April 21, 2015, online issue of Nature Communications.

“We found that, even three to four years after starting the prediction, the model was still tracking the observations well,” says lead author Yoshimitsu Chikamoto at the UH Mānoa International Pacific Research Center. “This implies that central Pacific climate conditions can be predicted over several years ahead.”

“The mechanism is simple,” states co-author Shang-Ping Xie from the University of California San Diego. “Warmer water in the Atlantic heats up the atmosphere. Rising air and increased precipitation drive a large atmospheric circulation cell, which then sinks over the Central Pacific. The relatively dry air feeds surface winds back into the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. These winds cool the Central Pacific leading to conditions, which are similar to a La Niña Modoki event. The central Pacific cooling then strengthens the global atmospheric circulation anomalies.”

“Our results present a paradigm shift,” explains co-author Axel Timmermann, climate scientist and a professor at UH Mānoa. “Whereas the Pacific was previously considered the main driver of tropical climate variability, and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean its slaves, our results document a much more active role for the Atlantic Ocean in determining conditions in the other two ocean basins. The coupling between the oceans is established by a massive reorganization of the atmospheric circulation.”

The impacts of the findings are wide-ranging. “Central Pacific temperature changes have a remote effect on rainfall in California and Australia. Seeing the Atlantic as an important contributor to these rainfall shifts, which happen as far away as Australia, came to us as a great surprise. It highlights the fact that on multi-year timescales we have to view climate variability in a global perspective, rather than through a basin-wide lens,” says Jing-Jia Luo, co-author of the study and climate scientist at the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia.

”Our study fills the gap between the well-established seasonal predictions and internationally ongoing decadal forecasting efforts. We anticipate that the main results will soon be corroborated by other climate computer models,” concludes co-author Masahide Kimoto from the University of Tokyo, Japan.

Citation: Chikamoto, Y., A. Timmermann, J.-J. Luo, T. Mochizuki, M. Kimoto, M. Watanabe, M. Ishii, S.-P. Xie, and F.-F. Jin: Skilful multi-year predictions of tropical trans-basin climate variability. Nature Communications, 6:6869, doi: 10.1038/ncomms7869 (2015).

Author contacts:

Yoshimitsu Chikamoto, International Pacific Research Center, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, UH Mānoa, Honolulu, HI 96822; email: chika44@hawaii.edu; phone: (808) 956-9054.

Axel Timmermann, Professor of Oceanography, International Pacific Research Center, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, UH Mānoa, Honolulu, HI 96822; email: axel@hawaii.edu; phone: (808) 956-2720.

Fei-Fei Jin, Professor Department of Meteorology, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, UH Mānoa, Honolulu, HI 96822; email: jff@hawaii.edu; phone: (808) 956-4645.

International Pacific Research Center Media Contact:

Gisela E. Speidel, International Pacific Research Center, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, UH Mānoa, Honolulu, HI 96822; email: gspeidel@hawaii.edu; phone (808) 956-9252.

Funding:

This study was supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, through the Program for Risk Information on Climate Change. The simulations were performed with the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and the NEC SX-8R at the National Institute for Environmental Studies. A. T. and Y. C. were supported by NSF (1049219); S.P. Xie by NSF and NOAA.

For more information, visit: http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/

— UH News story

David Karl honored for outstanding accomplishment in microbiology

David Karl, the Victor and Peggy Brandstrom Pavel professor of oceanography and director of the Daniel K. Inouye Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) at the University of Hawai‘i (UH), has been honored with the 2015 DuPont Award in Applied and Environmental Microbiology from the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), the largest professional life sciences society in the world. With this award, ASM recognizes “outstanding accomplishment” in research and development in environmental microbiology.

“Science is a team sport,” said Karl, humbly. “The recognition of this award is shared with my many students, post-docs and staff – who carry out much of the work – and through enduring collaborations with colleagues from around the world.”

However, for decades, Karl had been a leader in the field of microbial oceanography – even having a hand in creating the discipline. Investigating the smallest inhabitants of our planet, Karl has logged more than 1,000 days conducting research at sea including 23 expeditions to Antarctica. In 1979 Karl participated in the first biology expedition to the Galapagos hydrothermal vents, where microorganisms abound in the absence of sunlight.

Although the organisms he studies are small, the implications of Karl’s findings are huge. He co-founded the Hawaii Ocean Time-series (HOT) program that has measured physical, biogeochemical and microbial characteristics at Station ALOHA every month for the past 26 years – providing a cornerstone in our understanding of the ocean’s role in regulating climate and global nutrient cycles, for example. In 2006, he led a team of scientists in the establishment of a new NSF-supported Science and Technology Center at UH. The center, C-MORE, conducts collaborative research on marine microorganisms from genomes to biomes, and has a vital training mission to help prepare the next generation of microbial oceanographers. Last year he and UH colleague Ed DeLong established the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE) to enhance understanding of how microbes control the flow of energy and material in the open sea.

Karl has written or co-authored more than 370 research papers and reviews, and has received numerous awards and honors, including the Alexander Agassiz Medal from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Karl is also an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

“My contributions to the field of microbial oceanography would not have been possible without funding from the National Science Foundation – who have supported my research continuously since 1978 – and the generous support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Agouron Institute, Simons Foundation and UH,” said Karl.

The DuPont Award has been given annually since 1977 to some of the leading microbial ecologists, including two of Karl’s mentors, Ken Nealson and Holger Jannasch; former Director of the National Science Foundation Rita Colwell; and UH Oceanography Professor Ed DeLong.

“I am both honored and humbled to receive the DuPont Award in environmental microbiology and to join the impressive list of previous award recipients,” said Karl.

The 2015 award will be presented to Karl on May 31 at a banquet at the ASM annual meeting in New Orleans. The award consists of a $2,500 cash prize, a commemorative piece, and $2,000 to defray travel expenses to the annual meeting made possible through the generosity of the DuPont Industrial Biosciences Company, the corporate sponsor of this award. The following day, he will deliver the annual DuPont Lecture “Microbial Oceanography; Challenges and Opportunities in a Sea of Change.”

For more information, visit: http://cmore.soest.hawaii.edu/

— UH News story

New data allows broad view of human influence on Pacific ecosystems

As man-made threats to coral reefs mount, and interest in conserving reef ecosystems grows, scientists have turned to studying extremely remote and uninhabited reefs in an effort to understand what coral reefs would be like in the absence of humans. A number of islands and atolls in the Pacific Ocean remain virtually untouched by human influence, situated hundreds of kilometers from the nearest human populations.

A study published today by scientists at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the University of Victoria in the journal PLOS ONE draws on data from nearly 40 islands and atolls across the central and western Pacific, including 25 unpopulated islands, to investigate the relative influence of environmental variation and human presence on reef fish assemblages. The resulting message is sobering.

After accounting for environmental variation among the reefs, the team of scientists estimates that human presence is associated with large reductions in reef fish biomass compared to projections for an uninhabited state – 20% to 78% depletion at reefs in the Main Hawaiian islands, up to 69% depletion in the Mariana Archipelago and up to 56% depletion in American Samoa.

At the core of the study is an extensive dataset of fish abundance across the Pacific, gathered by divers conducting visual surveys of reefs during more than 2,000 hours of underwater observation at reef sites spanning 39 U.S. Pacific islands and atolls. The surveys were performed as part of NOAA’s Pacific Reef Assessment and Monitoring Program, one of the world’s largest coral reef monitoring efforts. The full dataset includes surveys of reef fish, coral habitat and satellite-derived measurements of oceanographic conditions at each reef location including sea surface temperature, wave energy and oceanic productivity.

“The great strength of the Pacific Reef Assessment and Monitoring Program is that the data are extremely comparable because it is gathered at all locations using the exact same methods, survey design and by a core survey team. This continuity in a dataset across such a large scale is unparalleled and allows us to really focus on the causes of differences among those locations,” notes lead author Ivor Williams of NOAA’s Coral Reef Ecosystem Division.

The data on oceanographic conditions and human population at each reef location were combined in models to investigate the influence of both environmental and human variables on reef fish abundance.

Fish higher up in the food web, like grouper, appear most susceptible to the influence of human presence. The sharpest declines in fish abundance were associated with relatively low human population densities, with continuing but more gradual fish declines seen on highly populous islands such as Oʻahu and Guam.

The absence of humans from remote, uninhabited reef areas in the Pacific was not always associated with spectacular fish abundance. Reefs in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, though extremely remote, had many fewer fish than uninhabited U.S. Line Islands situated close to the equator where regional and local upwelling bring nutrient-rich waters to the surface, enhancing phytoplankton production.

“The association between oceanic productivity and fish biomass that we document for Pacific reefs is an important reminder that not all coral reefs have the same capacity to sustain high fish biomass. There is natural variability among reefs that is unrelated to their history of human influence,” said Kate Hanson, a UH Mānoa postdoctoral fellow and a co-author on the study.

“Natural variability in fish communities amongst reefs implies that there is no single target for what a healthy reef should look like,” notes Julia Baum, an assistant professor at the University of Victoria, Canada, and a study co-author. “However, the consistent declines in fish abundance with even low levels of human presence suggest that fully protected no-take zones will be necessary to maintain coral reef fish communities in their natural state.”

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Ivor D. Williams, Julia K. Baum, Adel Heenan, Katharine M. Hanson, Marc O. Nadon, Russell E. Brainard (2015) Human, Oceanographic and Habitat Drivers of Central and Western Pacific Coral Reef Fish Assemblages. PLOS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120516.

— UH News story

New research predicts a doubling of coastal erosion by mid-century

Chronic erosion dominates the sandy beaches of Hawai‘i, causing beach loss as it damages homes, infrastructure and critical habitat. Researchers have long understood that global sea level rise will affect the rate of coastal erosion. However, new research from scientists at UH Mānoa and the state Department of Land and Natural Resources brings into clearer focus just how dramatically Hawai‘i’s beaches might change.

For the study, published this week in Natural Hazards, the research team developed a simple model to assess future erosion hazards under higher sea levels – taking into account historical changes of Hawai‘i shorelines and the projected acceleration of sea level rise reported from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The results indicate that coastal erosion of Hawai‘i’s beaches may double by mid-century.

Like the majority of Hawaiʻi’s sandy beaches, most shorelines at the 10 study sites on Kauaʻi, Oʻahu and Maui are currently retreating. If these beaches were to follow current trends, an average 20 to 40 feet of shoreline recession would be expected by 2050 and 2100, respectively.

“When we modeled future shoreline change with the increased rates of sea level rise (SLR) projected under the IPCC’s ‘business as usual’ scenario, we found that increased SLR causes an average 16 to 20 feet of additional shoreline retreat by 2050, and an average of nearly 60 feet of additional retreat by 2100,” said Tiffany Anderson, lead author and post-doctoral researcher at the UHM School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.

“This means that the average amount of shoreline recession roughly doubles by 2050 with increased SLR, compared to historical extrapolation alone. By 2100, it is nearly 2.5 times the historical extrapolation. Further, our results indicate that approximately 92% and 96% of the shorelines will be retreating by 2050 and 2100, respectively, except at Kailua, Oʻahu, which is projected to begin retreating by mid-century.”

The model accounts for accretion of sand onto beaches and long-term sediment processes in making projections of future shoreline position. As part of ongoing research, the resulting erosion hazard zones are overlain on aerial photos and other geographic layers in a geographic information system to provide a tool for identifying resources, infrastructure and property exposed to future coastal erosion.

“This study demonstrates a methodology that can be used by many shoreline communities to assess their exposure to coastal erosion resulting from the climate crisis,” said Chip Fletcher, Associate Dean at the UHM School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology and co-author of the paper.

Mapping historical shoreline change provides useful data for assessing exposure to future erosion hazards, even if the rate of sea level rise changes in the future. The predicted increase in erosion will threaten thousands of homes, many miles of roadway and other assets in Hawai‘i. Globally the asset exposure to erosion is enormous.

“With these new results, government agencies can begin to develop adaptation strategies, including new policies, for safely developing the shoreline,” said Anderson.

To further improve the estimates of climate impacts, the next step for the team of researchers will be to combine the new model with assessments of increased flooding by waves.

The research was sponsored by the Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources, and the U.S. Geological Survey Pacific Islands Climate Science Center.

* * *

Tiffany R. Anderson, Charles H. Fletcher, Matthew M. Barbee, L. Neil Frazer & Bradley M. Romine (2015). Doubling of coastal erosion under rising sea level by mid-century in Hawai‘i. Natural Hazards doi:10.1007/s11069-015-1698-6

— UH News story

New research finds oceanic microbes behave in synchrony across ocean basins

Researchers from UH Mānoa and colleagues found that microbial communities in different regions of the Pacific Ocean displayed strikingly similar daily rhythms in their metabolism despite inhabiting extremely different habitats – the nutrient-rich waters off California and the nutrient-poor waters north of Hawai‘i. Furthermore, in each location, the dominant photoautotrophs – light-loving bacteria that need solar energy to help them photosynthesize food from inorganic substances – appear to initiate a cascade effect wherein the other major groups of microbes perform their metabolic activities in a coordinated and predictable way.

As expected, different photoautotrophs dominated the coastal versus open ocean. In contrast, many other heterotrophic bacterial groups were common to both habitats. For the study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers monitored when, throughout the day, these microbes turn on and turn off genes that regulate key metabolic processes (referred to as “transcriptional patterns”). The bacterial groups common to both ecosystems displayed the same transcriptional patterns and daily rhythms – as if each group is performing its prescribed role at a precise time each and every day, even though these communities are separated by thousands of miles.

“Our work suggests that these microbial communities broadly behave in a similar manner across entire ocean basins and that specific biological interactions between these groups are widespread in nature,” said Frank Aylward, post-doctoral scholar at the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) at UHM and lead author of the study.

The investigation used a robotic sampler, the Environmental Sample Processor (ESP), recently developed by co-author Chris Scholin and his colleagues at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Riding the same ocean currents as the microbes it follows, the ESP is uniquely equipped to harvest those microbes every few hours, so that researchers can measure exactly when different genes are turned on or off for many different species simultaneously. Using modern “next generation” genomic technologies Aylward and colleagues were then able to evaluate the daily gene expression cycles in microbial communities in the wild.

Generally microbes from coastal (California coast) and open-ocean (North Pacific Subtropical Gyre) waters have been thought of as completely distinct communities that are shaped by very different environmental conditions. Waters near Hawaii experience high levels of sunlight and warm temperatures year round, for example, while coastal California waters are colder and undergo marked seasonal transitions.

“Surprisingly, however,” said Aylward, “our work shows that these extremely different ecosystems exhibit very similar diel cycles, driven largely by sunlight and interspecies microbial interactions. This suggests that different microbial communities across the Pacific Ocean, and likely waters across the entire planet, behave in much more orderly ways than has previously been supposed.”

“There is a lot more order out there in the ocean than we had previously thought, on vast spatial scales,” remarked Edward DeLong, UHM professor of oceanography and senior author of the paper. “Each day, as sunlight hits the water, a very highly orchestrated cascade of species-specific activities takes place, with each microbe chiming in at a very precise time, each and every day. This sort of predictable pattern may allow us to better predict the specific timing of matter and energy transformations that are catalyzed by microbes on a daily basis.”

Because of the large volumes of carbon dioxide sequestered by microbes in the oceans, this work has important implications for understanding the factors that shape large-scale carbon cycling in the biosphere. Because interactions between microbial groups appeared to be conserved between environments, this work also has implications for understanding fundamental patterns of how the activities of microscopic life give rise to ecosystem-level phenomena at much larger scales.

Along with their collaborators in the newly established, UH-based initiative called the Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE), the team hopes to achieve finer resolution sampling in space and time using improved robotic sampling devices currently being designed at MBARI. This will help identify more precisely how microbes are interacting with each other in seawater and how they respond to environmental stimulus.

* * *

Frank O. Aylward, John M. Eppley, Jason M. Smith, Francisco P. Chavez, Christopher A. Scholin, and Edward F. DeLong (2015). Microbial community transcriptional networks are conserved in three domains at ocean basin scales, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi:10.1073/pnas.1502883112
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/03/05/1502883112.abstract

— UH News story

Lake Tahoe research provides new insights on global change

A recently published study on how natural and man-made sources of nitrogen are recycled through the Lake Tahoe ecosystem provides new information on how global change may affect the iconic blue lake.

“High-elevation lakes, such as Lake Tahoe, are sentinels of climate change,” said Lihini Aluwihare, associate professor of geosciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at UC San Diego and co-author of the study. “Small changes in the lake’s chemistry can have big impacts on the entire ecosystem.”

Lake Tahoe’s nitrogen concentration is one of several factors that helps maintain its crystal clear waters. To keep Tahoe blue in the future, the researchers say it’s important to keep a close eye on the nitrogen balance in the ecosystem over time.

“The things we do, as humans, affect change in nature. We know the Lake’s foodweb is changing due to warming and nitrogen inputs. Our marine and aquatic ecosystems across the globe face many of the same environmental stressors. What we’ve learned about how aquatic foodwebs recycle nitrogen in Lake Tahoe may be applicable to the clear waters near Hawai‘i,” said Stuart Goldberg, lead author of the study and post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (Goldberg was a post-doctoral researcher at Scripps Oceanography during this research).

The study, published in Nature Communications, tracked nitrogen, including that produced from the burning of fossil fuels, in the Lake Tahoe ecosystem. Nitrogen can affect both the productivity of lake foodwebs and the composition of the microbes that support nutrition for those food webs.

A main goal of the study was to understand how the nutrient is being cycled through the microbial food web. Goldberg compares the foodweb to a cafeteria that sends out a variety of different dining options that support the community as a whole. Nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon come in, and the foodweb changes them into different types of nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon – proteins, sugars, and fats, for example. Some types are easier to eat than others, and are reused or eaten almost instantly. Other types, like the proteins isolated for this study, aren’t easily consumed and accumulate in the Lake.

Using radiocarbon isotope techniques, the researchers dated the molecular components of these proteins and discovered that some nitrogen was preserved in proteins and unavailable for biological consumption for 100 to 200 years.

“It is unusual for organic nitrogen to be sitting around for long periods of time in an ecosystem,” said Aluwihare. “This changes our view of how quickly nutrients are recycled in high-elevation lake ecosystems.”

The findings of this study suggest that something is preventing the efficient recycling of nitrogen in these ecosystems, and one possibility may be phosphorus limitation of the recycling bacteria (bacteria need both nitrogen and phosphorus to live).

The Lake Tahoe ecosystem is experiencing rapid change due to regional warming and shifts in precipitation patterns, as well as increased atmospheric nitrogen deposition, which has begun to alter the nutrient balance in the lake.

“This investigation has found that dissolved organic matter can store nitrogen in lake systems,” said Lina Patino, program director for the Earth Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at the National Science Foundation, which funded the research. “This result is important because to understand the environmental health of lakes, we need to know the sources of the nutrients and where they are stored.”

Goldberg and colleagues are planning to submit a grant this summer to further understand how the Lake’s foodweb processes nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus.

* * *

The study’s co-authors include: Goldberg, presently at the University of Hawai‘i (at Scripps Oceanography at the time of the study); Aluwihare and Ian Ball at Scripps Oceanography; Brant Allen and Geoffrey Schladow at UC Davis; Andre Simpson, Hussain Masoom and Ronald Soong of the University of Toronto; and Heather Graven of Imperial College in London.

Higher resolution images are available upon request.

For more information, visit: http://cmore.soest.hawaii.edu/

— UH News story

Hawaiʻi groundwater and geothermal data compiled for first time

The Hawai‘i Institute for Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP) at UH Mānoa recently launched a website, the Hawai‘i Groundwater and Geothermal Resources Center (HGGRC), and, in doing so, introduced an abundance of new data related to these natural resources.

Two HIGP researchers, Drs. Nicole Lautze and Donald Thomas, led the creation of this resource center to organize and publicly disseminate data on Hawai‘i’s groundwater and geothermal resources from private and public agencies and organizations.

“Our goal is to educate individuals and facilitate responsible management of these resources into the future,” said Lautze, HIGP assistant researcher.

“Creating this open data set is an important first step in revitalizing our understanding of Hawai‘i’s water resources, as new and enhanced geophysical methods today promise to update the foundations of our current knowledge, which has been based upon 80-year-old technology and studies,” added Dr. Rhett Butler, who serves as director of HIGP.

In the past, several disconnected repositories existed for groundwater- or geothermal-relevant documents in Hawai‘i. Lautze and Thomas noticed significant public interest in several projects, and realized the need to centralize these datasets along with historical photographs, slides and newspaper articles.

For example, now available through the HGGRC, the Geothermal Collection contains more than 1,000 geothermal-relevant documents. Hosted by the University of Hawai‘i repositories ScholarSpace and eVols, this collection has had approximately 100,000 document downloads since its creation three years ago.

In addition, daily updates will be available from HGGRC when the Humu‘ula Groundwater Research project commences drilling of a second 2 km deep hole in the saddle region of the island of Hawaiʻi. The second drilling effort will enhance understanding of the groundwater resources available there.

The Hawai‘i State Water Wells database shows data for the water wells in Hawai‘i (e.g. name, location, type, and depth) via an interactive map, with downloadable water well files. Previously, the only way to view this information was through physical files in a Hawai‘i State Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) office. Roy Hardy, Acting Deputy Director of DLNR’s Commission on Water Resource Management, emphasized that they are “thankful that the historical paper copies of data and information have now been digitized.”

As part of the Department of Energy “Play Fairway” project, researchers at the HGGRC continue to compile all data relevant to geothermal across the entire state of Hawai‘i into a probability map, which will indicate the likelihood of encountering a subsurface resource. This will provide the first updated resource assessment since the late 1970s, which found a potential resource on all islands.

While recognizing that discussions about developing groundwater and geothermal resources can be contentious, Lautze emphasized that the goal of HGGRC is information gathering. “In bringing together this wealth of information, we hope to facilitate innovative research on Hawai‘i’s groundwater and renewable energy resources,” she said. “Ideally, with sound knowledge in hand, scientists, resource managers, potential developers, policymakers, and the public will have the necessary information to protect and optimally utilize Hawai‘i’s natural resources and to plan for a sustainable future.”

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Photos of drill cores available for download:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/117276985112773993644/albums/5883513041783123537/5883513092917061602?pid=5883513092917061602&oid=117276985112773993644

— UH News story