Tessa Hill
Description: Tessa Hill is a professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and Bodega Marine Laboratory, leads the Ocean Climate Lab at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on climate change, both past and present, and understanding the response of marine species to environmental changes. In this episode, we talk about climate change, exploring the deep sea, and the future of environmental research & policy. Specifically, we spend considerable time discussing ocean acidification and the impact of changing ocean chemistry on ecosystems such as seagrass. Additionally we explore the growing need for collaboration between academia and industry in helping understand and mitigate our climate crisis.
Websites:
Publications:
Evolutionary Change During Experimental Ocean Acidification
Functional Impacts of Ocean Acidification in an Ecologically Critical Foundation Species
Resources:
Prospective Lab Student Information
Summer Classes for Davis Students
Undergraduate's Guide to Bodega Marine Laboratory
People Behind the Science Podcast with Tessa Hill
Books:
The Everything Green Classroom Book
Excerpt from Upcoming book “A Tidepool in Time”
Articles:
Show Notes:
[0:00:02] Introduction and Early Interest in Marine Science
[0:01:45] Early Career Research in Various Locations
[0:03:58] Discovery of Human Impact in the Deep Sea
[0:07:56] Exploring the Deep Sea with Advanced Technology
[0:09:35] Researching Corals and Shoreline Ecosystems
[0:09:54] Collaborating with ecologists on climate change impact research
[0:13:10] Funding agencies' focus on new research vs. maintaining old data
[0:17:54] The impact of carbon dioxide on seawater pH
[0:21:09] Positive feedbacks and the buffering effect of the ocean
[0:24:05] Investigating the Influence of Seagrass Meadows on Bay Chemistry
[0:32:12] Impacts of climate change and ocean acidification emerge
[0:35:27] Seagrass meadows and salt marshes store significant amounts of carbon
[0:38:52] Tangible changes in the ocean due to acidification and other factors
[0:41:49] Using Commercial Fishing Logs for Documentation
[0:48:23] Empowering Future Science Teachers with Hands-on Ocean Experience
[0:56:31] Understanding the Hierarchy of Decision Makers in Government
[0:57:26] Using Voting Access to Make a Difference
[1:00:52] Introduction to the Role in Public Scholarship and Engagement
[1:04:14] Connecting Science to Communities and Environmental Justice
[1:08:21] Introducing the upcoming book "Oceans of Change"
Unedited AI Generated Transcript
Introduction and Early Interest in Marine Science
Brent:
[0:02] Welcome, Professor Tessa Hill. Thank you for coming on.
Tessa:
[0:05] Thank you so much for having me and for coming out to beautiful Bodega Bay for the conversation.
Keller:
[0:11] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit more about your story.
How'd you get to Davis and what got you interested in marine science?
Tessa:
[0:18] I think I was interested in marine science as a very young child.
I grew up near south of Seattle in a city called Tacoma and I grew up sort of on the shores of Puget Sound.
So I often tell people that I think marine science was sort of, I don t know if it was in my genetics but it was definitely in my childhood.
I went to college in Florida, to Eckerd College, a very small liberal arts college that has a remarkably strong marine science program for undergraduates.
And it had an amazing way of sort of shaping my life in a lot of really positive ways.
I had a wonderful experience at this small college, got to get involved in research at a very young age, and really got sort of bitten by the research bug.
Pursued my PhD at at UC Santa Barbara and was lucky to get a postdoc at UC Davis.
And I was a postdoc at UC Davis for two years. That's sort of a research position that you take on after your graduate work is done.
And during that time, I was given the opportunity to apply for a full-time tenure track position at Davis to stay. And I've been at Davis since.
And I've been at Davis since.
Brent:
[1:36] Was it hard transitioning from doing research on East Coast waters and then coming to the West Coast waters.
Early Career Research in Various Locations
Tessa:
[1:45] No, not at the time. I think actually in my earlier stages of my career, I did research in a lot of different places in the world.
So between undergrad and graduate school, I did research in the Gulf of Mexico, on the Oregon coast, the California coast, the North Atlantic.
So I like, I traveled a lot to do research.
In, you know, more recent years, I've sort of specialized more in the California coast and the sort of the currents and the oceanography and the climate off the California coast. And so I'ma little bit more centered here now.
But at that stage of my career, I really was sort of like excited to do research anywhere. Yeah, definitely.
Brent:
[2:23] Yeah.
Keller:
[2:24] Is that common, I guess, to try different types of research throughout the beginning stages?
Tessa:
[2:29] Sure. I mean, I think I always kind of tell students that it's a little bit like adding tools to your toolbox.
So getting different experience as an undergraduate, like maybe working in some different labs as an undergraduate and then getting your graduate degree and then maybe you dosomething slightly different in a research position after your graduate degree.
Each time you do that, you're adding tools to that toolbox. And then you can, as a researcher or as a faculty member, you get to decide, you know, what tools you want to use that day.
Brent:
[2:57] Yeah, certainly.
Tessa:
[2:57] Yeah.
Brent:
[2:58] And then before we hop into your specific research, when we were preparing for this podcast, we really were captivated by the article we read about the message in the bottle. CouldCould you explain what that was?
Tessa:
[3:10] Sure, so I do, a lot of the research that I do is based on big ships.
I also do research that's coastally based.
A few years ago, I had an opportunity to go out on a research cruise that would use submersible submarines to basically explore parts of the California coast that we had never seen beforevia submarine.
And I actually couldn't go because I was teaching my summer class in Bodega.
But they let me participate as a shore-based scientist.
And so they were actually just offshore here, just offshore Northern California in Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary in a part of the marine sanctuary that had never been seenbefore by submarine.
And they were deploying submarines into the sanctuary. And...
Discovery of Human Impact in the Deep Sea
[3:58] I decided as a shore-based scientist that I would weave this into my class because I didn't want to miss much of what was going on on the cruise.
And so we were sitting here one day in my class watching a live stream of this sort of, you know, one of the first deployments into this part of the ocean that had never been exploredbefore.
And the submarine reaches the seafloor and the very first thing that we all saw was a plastic bottle.
[4:23] And I'm not the only, you know, sort of oceanographer or deep sea scientist who has had, you know, an experience like that.
It's actually fairly common in the deep sea research community that part of what we document in this place in the ocean that we've barely started to learn about, we document the humanfingerprint. It's everywhere.
In fact, I have a wonderful colleague at UC Santa Barbara, Dave Valentine.
He and his students have spent several years now documenting essentially a field of DDT waste containers that were deposited, you know, decades ago by companies trying to sort of getrid of DDT, which is a pesticide that was banned in the United States.
And they happened upon it accidentally on a research cruise.
They found this sort of, you know, field of giant canisters of this pesticide waste that that had, you know, that company had used the ocean as its disposal site.
And so I think this is part of being an oceanographer at this point, part of being someone who cares about the surface of the ocean, but all the way to the deep is understanding just howhuge our human impact has been on the planet. Definitely.
Brent:
[5:35] Even with talking with all these different professors of different backgrounds for us, it seems that from economists all the way to oceanographers, the limnologist, everyone's talkingabout the human impact and how their research is some way tied to the environmental crisis we're experiencing.
Tessa:
[5:53] It's just so pervasive at this point. Yeah.
Keller:
[5:57] And you talked about the use of summaries to explore. Two questions with that. One.
What percent have we explored of the ocean? Because there's always like these different stats that get pulled out.
And then also within the submarines, how common or how long have we been using those to document?
Tessa:
[6:14] These are great questions. I should know the answers right off the top of my head and I maybe don't. But so the answer around the fraction of the ocean that we explored is there area lot of different answers to that.
I think the percentage of the ocean floor that has been mapped at high resolution is like below 20% still.
So when we think about looking at high resolution maps of like mountains or of the moon, we understand, you know, the surface of the earth and the moon better than we do the deepestparts of the ocean.
[6:49] Submarines were really brought into use initially for military reasons.
And then by industry looking for oil or other mineral deposits.
And then that technology sort of trickled into the scientific community.
It really became extremely important in the scientific community in probably the 1960s, 1970s.
And then there's been sort of a revolution around that work because we actually can do quite a lot of it now without humans in the submarines.
So, we use remotely operated vehicles.
And so, there are still there's still quite a bit of research that's done with humans in the submarines, and there's great arguments for doing it that way.
People see things and experience things and observe things differently when they're physically in the environment.
But in terms of like cost and risk to human.
Exploring the Deep Sea with Advanced Technology
[7:56] Life, we actually can see a lot driven around by people at the surface.
It's amazing technology. So, just think of all those video games that people have played where they've driven vehicles around. Well, that is like, you can do that in the deep sea.
And you're not putting any human lives at risk and we can actually see and learn about a lot of the seafloor that way.
So, yeah, I mean, the technology has evolved and we use, you know, both technologies. We use the like humans in submarines technology and the remote to see the deep sea. That'sfascinating.
Brent:
[8:31] Very cool to see how technology is advancing and allowing more research to be done.
Could you explain a bit more about how your research is performed?
Because you started to touch on it with a different type of technologies, how you can be involved with the research that's offshore while you're still on land. Could you just maybe breakthat down a bit more?
Tessa:
[8:49] Sure. So I'll just, I'll preface it by saying that I often tell people that I look at how climate change impacts the ocean and sort of the past, present, and future.
And so there's sort of one foot of my research lab that's grounded in understanding past climate change. And then there's like one of our feet is really sitting in like today's ocean.
And so to do that work, actually we spanned, you know, a variety of different techniques. My students and I go out on research vessels. We take samples of water or sediments or coralsfrom research vessels.
Researching Corals and Shoreline Ecosystems
[9:35] Corals. We also do a lot of that work right along the shore.
We deploy instruments, place tell you more about in a little bit and we we extensively.
Collaborating with ecologists on climate change impact research
[9:54] Collaborate with colleagues who are ecologists and so they're trying to understand how are living organisms being affected by climate change and so we might do field work or lab-based experiments with those ecologists.
And then I would say in the last five years, and some of this was influenced by the pandemic, but some of it actually started to happen before that, my research group shifted also towardstrying to think about synthesis studies where we take a lot of research that has already been done and bring it together on one platform.
And so, you actually don't have to go in the field or the lab.
You're pouring through, you know, maybe decades of research to try to pull it together in one place and say, you know, how can we see how the ocean has changed from like compilingexisting data.
And so, there's a couple of examples of that, but one that I'll just mention is that we We have this project where we've been trying to compile all of the publicly available oceanographicdata for the US West Coast.
So this is like all the data that, for example, a federal government lab might collect or federally or state-funded researchers.
[11:03] People tend to post their individual data sets publicly, but no one had ever brought them into one place.
And so my students and I have been working on this for years, and we actually just posted a public data set that has over 14 million data points about the oceanography of the US WestCoast going back decades and anyone can use it to ask and answer questions about how the ocean is changing. It's a public resource.
Brent:
[11:29] That's amazing.
Keller:
[11:30] Was there any particular reason that wasn't?
Already unified or is it just an organization?
Tessa:
[11:36] It's simply like logistics and funding.
We had to apply for research grants and tell people like, we're not actually going to generate new data. We're just going to work with like these mounds of data that already exist. And wehad to find funding agencies that were going to support that idea.
And actually, it's something that worries me a little bit about the research that we did all this work, but our funding is actually going to come to a close on that project, and I'm not surehow someone, me or someone else, is going to keep it as a living resource.
So, you know, five years from now it will be out of date if like someone doesn't take that on. Yeah.
Brent:
[12:18] That's what I was going to ask is how can we, moving forward, continue to update that document in?
Because we've talked to a few other people about open sourcing and it sounds like it is an open source document. So, are people able to add their data as they collect it?
Tessa:
[12:34] They, I mean, they can pull all the data that we have and then add their data in.
But part of what we're trying to arrange right now is sort of a handoff maybe to some federal agencies where people would sort of keep, you know, a home for the data where other peoplecould submit, you know, new data sets.
So, I mean, we're thinking about that. We're worried about it. But fundamentally, this is a tension in oceanography, and I actually think this probably exists in like all aspects of science,but funding agencies tend to want to like fund something new.
Funding agencies' focus on new research vs. maintaining old data
[13:10] Like, what new thing are you going to do, not like maintaining something old?
And so, there's a little bit, you know, we create all these data sets, but there's a little, there's then there's this barrier to like, how do we get them all in one place?
How do we quality control them? How do we archive them in a place that everyone can use? And I think it's, you know, it's a challenge that science is facing.
Brent:
[13:34] That's right.
Keller:
[13:35] Yeah. That's something we've seen like talking to all these different professors is at these institutes there's often one person in charge of collecting all the old data. Sure. had had thechance of the funding to do it before.
And then with that, did you guys have a chance to analyze the data yet or just unify it?
Tessa:
[13:52] We have, yeah. So I have, I'm very lucky to be able to work with several graduate students as well as postdoctoral researchers on this project.
And we have one paper that's already coming out about that data.
We have multiple other papers that we're writing right now.
So yeah, all the students, and actually it's been a fun project We've also been able to employ quite a few undergraduate students from UC Davis on this work because there's a lot of justsort of regular, like, things need to be downloaded and cleaned and organized, and there's sort of this regular work that has to be done day to day.
And that's been really fun to be able to mentor people at a variety of different career stages. But yeah, so everybody involved in the project has also been working on interpreting. Yeah.
Brent:
[14:37] Yeah.
Keller:
[14:38] Yeah. cleaning really quick. It might be a little rudimentary, but.
Tessa:
[14:42] Yeah, sure. I mean, in this case, what's happening is all these data might be coming from different sources. People might be using different instruments to collect the data.
So, we're doing some really basic work just to look at like, what are the qual- what's the quality of the data set itself?
Are there worries that we have about the instruments that have been used?
Have they been able to like reproduce the data? So, we do sort of a scan of just what's That's the quality of the data.
And some data sets get removed at that stage, maybe they were collected using an instrument that's not as reliable as the rest in the data set.
But we also do a lot of just using a little bit of oceanographic knowledge, you can sort of quality control data because you can identify data that seems to be outliers.
[15:29] And we're actually not removing anything, we just flag it.
So if someone else comes and uses the data set, they see that sort of our initial screening where we've said, we're a little worried about this cluster of data, you should look at it closely. It'snot removed, it's still there.
But like, if I were to plot up the data, I probably would remove those data set because they look, you know, there are some reasons why, you know, sensors fail, laboratory analyses are notalways perfect.
There's lots of reasons why data may not really be that useful.
Um, so we do, we don't really data clean in a way that like removes things, but we data clean in a way that like alerts other people that they should put thought into the datasets beforeusing them. Yeah.
Brent:
[16:13] Certainly. Yeah. And I'm assuming one of the points that you guys are collecting and compiling is about ocean acidification. Correct?
Tessa:
[16:21] It sure is. That's a big focus of the project. Yes.
Brent:
[16:24] Could you maybe expand a bit more about your personal research in ocean acidification? Sure.
Tessa:
[16:31] I think we're all aware that due to a variety of different human activities we are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
So that happens through our fossil fuel emissions, it also happens through land use changes, there are contributions from agriculture, things like that.
So we are changing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
It turns out that the ocean is a tremendous sponge for carbon dioxide.
If everybody goes back and remembers their high school physics, you might recall that gases have different amounts of solubility in water.
And so, some gases enter water really easily, and other gases have the tendency to not enter and be soluble in water.
Turns out carbon dioxide is very soluble in water. And so, the ocean literally absorbs about 30% of what we put into the atmosphere.
For a long time in the scientific community people thought that was like Like, oh.
Thank goodness the ocean is absorbing 30% of what we're putting in the atmosphere.
Otherwise, we'd really be in trouble. There'd be even more in the atmosphere than there is today.
And then there was this slow recognition that that was actually influencing the chemistry of the ocean itself. And so, that's what we're talking about when we talk about ocean acidification.
The impact of carbon dioxide on seawater pH
[17:54] Carbon dioxide, as it enters seawater, becomes a weak acid, carbonic acid, acid, and it fundamentally changes the pH of the seawater.
It's subtle. It's not literally making the ocean an acid. It is making it more acidic.
[18:13] But it is measurable. We can already measure this change as Ari started, and we can also sort of predict where that change will go in the future as long as we continue on the sametrajectory in terms of carbon emissions.
And it turns out a lot of organisms and ecosystems in the ocean were like very well adapted to the chemistry of the seawater that we used to have that is now changing.
And so there's a variety of different ways that this impacts organisms in the ocean.
And the first one that people became very concerned about was how organisms build their shells.
So, any organism that builds a shell, so like a coral reef that builds its hard parts or a clam that's building its shell, a mussel, a sea urchin that builds its like hard skeleton with the spines,all of those hard parts rely on basically components of the seawater.
And the availability of those components is determined by the chemistry of the seawater. And so as we change the chemistry of the seawater, we make it harder for all of those organismsto build their shells.
Brent:
[19:24] Which was cool. What is the general pH, say, of the ocean right outside here?
Tessa:
[19:29] Yeah. So it was pre-industrial, so pre-CO2 emissions, the average ocean pH was 8.1.
And it is that I'm you know I say average because of course you could go to different places and it would be different and it also changes seasonally.
And that is because plants in the ocean that are using photosynthesis are every time photosynthesis is happening they are actually removing carbon dioxide from the ocean.
And so if you're in a place where a lot of photosynthesis is happening there would be less carbon dioxide and that pH would actually be higher.
If you're in a place where a lot of like decomposition of plant material or animal material is happening, so like decay and like you know animals or plants have died and or maybe you're inan environment where things are actually sort of breaking down, that carbon dioxide gets returned to the seawater and so you actually would naturally drive the pH a little bit lower.
So there are always some shifts you know seasonally and in terms of location but we're imposing a larger you know, a shift on top of that that is due to our carbon dioxide emissions.
Brent:
[20:50] Are we seeing an amplification especially in the coral reefs as they're starting to bleach and die because we have emitted so much CO2 the pH is dropping and then those animalsdie and then decay and then further amplify the pH dropping?
Tessa:
[21:07] Sure, so you're asking basically about positive feedbacks?
Positive feedbacks and the buffering effect of the ocean
Brent:
[21:09] Yeah.
Tessa:
[21:10] Yeah, I mean there are certainly places that you might see that.
That. I mean, one thing is that the ocean is big, and it's pretty well mixed.
So, you know, the ocean is constantly being sort of churned around by wind and waves, and it's always sort of getting in equilibrium with the atmosphere.
It's always interacting with the atmosphere. And so, those local changes then get sort of buffered or like smoothed out by sort of the bigger processes that are happening around them.
But it's certainly, we do see in the climate system in general, we see positive feedbacks like what you just described where like one thing happens and it then sort of amplifies the next step.
Brent:
[21:54] Yeah, definitely.
Tessa:
[21:55] Yeah.
Keller:
[21:55] And have you guys looked into any solutions within like smaller areas, smaller local areas of, or if we increase the amount of plankton or different things that might help readjustthat balance?
Tessa:
[22:07] Sure. So one of the things we've been doing here at Bodega Marine Lab for quite a while, a decade is raising organisms in the lab.
Under these sort of future more acidified conditions.
And so this was done, my ecologist colleagues led this work and we've raised quite a few things in the lab, but we tend to sort of specialize in California or West Coast species.
So things like oysters, mussels, sea urchins, and you can think about it a little bit like a time machine.
We sort of have a laboratory tank that maintains maybe lower CO2 concentrations like pre-industrial pre-human impact.
And then there would be a tank next to it that we would basically set the chemistry like the year 2100, so we can sort of compare how the organisms respond.
And one of the things we found, you know, very early on in these experiments with things like oysters and mussels is that they tend to make thinner, weaker shells, and they're moresusceptible to predators.
So if you then add a predator into the tank, the predator actually will go after the animals with thinner and weaker shells.
But even without a predator, you can imagine with a thinner and weaker shell you'd be more susceptible to like a crashing wave or drying out in the sun.
But one of the other local environments we've been very interested in is seagrass meadows.
[23:33] So seagrass is just like the grass on your lawn but it has actually adapted to live in the water. So it's a grass just like on terrestrial systems.
And if you go out and look at estuaries in California, so like places along the coast where maybe a river or a stream is coming into like a bay and then it opens up to the ocean so you havelike a calm bay-like environment, oftentimes they are covered in seagrass.
This is, you know, a native species in California.
Investigating the Influence of Seagrass Meadows on Bay Chemistry
[24:05] And we do quite a bit of work with folks at Hog Island Oyster Company.
This is a long a long-standing collaboration which I can tell you more about if you'd like to know.
But at one point we were sort of standing out looking at Tomales Bay and our colleagues at Hog Island Oyster Company said, you know, I wonder could we figure out how much influencethose seagrass meadows were having on the chemistry of the bay?
And we were, you know, our research team was like what a wonderful idea.
And so we started a several year research project where we placed sensors in the seagrass meadows basically to try to understand how the chemistry inside the meadow was different thanthe chemistry outside the meadow.
And so this was directly asking, you know, answering your question, like, are there small local environments that actually might make this ocean acidification process not quite as bad.
[25:00] And what we found, we looked at, we studied, I think, six or seven estuaries in California over many years, and we were able to show that the habitats inside the seagrass meadowwere sort of less acidified than the habitats outside of the seagrass meadow.
So anything living in the meadow or sort of living in like the halo of the seagrass meadow was basically experiencing lower carbon dioxide conditions because the seagrass itself is usingphotosynthesis and removing carbon dioxide from the water.
And as a cool follow-up to that, a member of our research team was able to actually raise, we had seagrass in the lab and oysters in the lab, and she actually sort of set up this experimentwith like a low amount of seagrass, a medium amount of seagrass, a high amount of seagrass.
And so the seagrass basically changed the chemistry of the water.
We didn't manipulate it in any way. the seagrass modified how much carbon dioxide there was in the water, and then she raised oysters in those tanks, and she was able to show that theones with high seagrass, with like the lowest carbon dioxide, the oysters grew the fastest.
[26:09] And so that is, I mean, that doesn't solve our like bigger problem, right? Because our bigger problem is, you know, human-caused carbon dioxide emissions.
But it offers us some tools we can use locally that might sort of help address that problem or keep the worst of that problem from coming.
And so, you know, the main thing we learned from that is that everything we can do to restore and protect those seagrass meadows that we have on the U.S.
West Coast is a step in protecting those environments from sort of the oncoming carbon dioxide. Certainly.
Brent:
[26:49] I have a few questions about that. Are we able to purposely stress some of these animals that make these shells in a lab setting to make them more used to a more like acidicenvironment to then be able to reintroduce them?
Tessa:
[27:02] Yes. So, we aren't really actively doing that as a research project, but it's certainly something.
So, I mentioned Hog Island Oyster Company. There is a very active community of aquaculture on the US West Coast. that's basically farming shellfish in the ocean.
And, you know, these shellfish farmers tend to be small family-owned farms, but they are, you know, very interested in exactly the question you just asked, which is, you know, can wedevelop, are there genetic strains that might help us be resilient to these changes in the future?
And so, there have been quite a few collaborations between the aquaculture industry and academic research to try to identify those sort of genetic tools.
And we've also, there have been, there are some other tools around when you're raising them in a farm setting, could you feed them more or could you feed them differently that wouldactually help animals sort of be more resilient to these stressful conditions.
And so I think all of of those tools are really of interest to sort of the farming side of the industry.
It doesn't really change what's happening in like the natural environment, which is that things are sort of headed in one direction and we can't like, you know, genetically modify all theorganisms in the ocean to prepare them for climate change. It's not gonna work.
Brent:
[28:26] Yeah.
Tessa:
[28:27] Yeah.
Brent:
[28:28] And then when it comes to the animals, they struggle in a more acidic environment overall.
And then do the plants like it more?
Tessa:
[28:37] Yeah, in some cases, yes. So in some cases what we see is that there are, you know, plankton or other photosynthetic organisms that will actually do well in these conditions.
In general though, the challenge is that carbon dioxide was never what was like limiting to plants in the ocean.
So if you think about plants in your garden and like what limits their growth, You have to make sure that you water your garden and you give it nutrients or fertilizers.
That's like what makes your vegetable garden grow bigger.
Um, when we think about plants in the ocean, it's kind of similar.
They're sitting in water.
And what they're waiting for in terms of like what enables photosynthesis to really take off are those nutrients.
And so they're, there's like, you know, they're not being held back by the amount of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is everywhere. Yeah. So you can crank up the carbon dioxide and likethe plants in the ocean, some of them will respond and some of them will just keep doing exactly what they're doing it for.
Brent:
[29:38] So there's not really a hope of, oh, this will cause more plant growth and eventually raise the pH again.
Tessa:
[29:44] Well, since you've been asking about a lot of like, you know, mitigation tactics, you know, one of the ones that has been floated around for decades now is that we could sort offertilize the ocean with nutrients that plants would use and like ramp up plant growth in the ocean in order to uptake more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Um, the challenge is that there's always a domino effect, right?
So like when you, if you create an area of the ocean with a huge amount of plant growth at the surface, that plant growth is eventually going to die out.
It's going to sink to the deep sea.
You're basically taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and exporting it or sinking it to the deep sea. It's going to degrade in the deep sea.
And then you have like a pool, a mat of, you know, degrading plant material in the deep sea.
So none of these techniques come without a consequence, right?
If this was an easy problem to solve, we would have already solved it.
Brent:
[30:43] CB. Certainly. BT.
Tessa:
[30:44] Yeah. CB.
Keller:
[30:44] And with regards to the shellfish and the other animals that are being directly impacted, you talked about the growing them in the lab and pretending it's going to be year 2100.
What is the degree of the adaptive capacity of these animals and how does that differ? Like how does adaptation differ from evolution?
Tessa:
[31:05] Well, I think in general what I would say is we do see scope for adaptation in the lab.
And we see that like if we raise a whole bunch of oysters in the lab under these conditions and those oysters come from different families, so they have like slightly different genetics, theydo not all respond exactly the same to these stressful conditions.
And so we see, okay, there's a hint there, like some organisms in this tank are doing better than others, and so that tells us there's some capacity for adaptation, right?
I think the challenge is that the rate at which we are changing the environment is so fast that for a lot of these organisms, it's too fast for evolution to sort of keep up.
And so we're changing through climate change, through ocean acidification, we're changing things at a rate that may exceed these organisms' abilities to adapt.
Keller:
[32:00] Yeah. And what, this is like a more broad question, but at what point did that rate of change and just kind of hit the point where it was just kind of too fast.
Impacts of climate change and ocean acidification emerge
Tessa:
[32:12] That's a good question. I mean, I'm not sure that I wish that I had like an evolutionary biologist sitting here with me to answer that question.
You know, I think the way I would answer that is that in the scientific community, we really see sort of the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification starting to emerge from likebeing able to see it compared to background.
I mean there's always background environmental variability, but being able to actually see the impacts of climate change emerge from that background signal, you know, probablyhappened in like the late 1990s, early 2000s.
And so that is the point where people became sort of alarmed, like the climate change impact is no longer in sort of the envelope of normal variability.
It's now like moved the ocean and terrestrial habitats are experiencing this too, have moved into this new realm.
And so, I mean, it's been a while, is my answer to that question. It's not new.
We've been able to sort of see and understand that, you know, how climate change is impacting environments separate of natural variability.
Yeah.
Brent:
[33:25] And then when you were talking about the ocean acidification being a gradual process, you talked a bit about how there is a seasonal flux.
Is that where the coastal carbon flux comes in?
Tessa:
[33:39] Yeah. So, I think, you know, we think about the ocean, the way we've been talking about the ocean so far in this conversation is simply that it's uptaking carbon dioxide from theatmosphere.
It's actually a little more complicated that, of course, there are places that are are like soaking it in at any given time, and there are places that are actually sort of exhaling carbon into theatmosphere. So like I said earlier, there's this constant exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere.
[34:06] When we talk about coastal carbon flux or coastal carbon storage, we're usually thinking about are there habitats that we can think about as storing carbon for the future.
And so one of the interesting things about seagrass meadows is that the actual grass itself, of course, is engaging in that photosynthesis we were talking about earlier.
[34:32] But there's also the part that's sort of where the roots of the grass go into the sediments.
So, you could think about like when you walk through a forest, you think about like all the trees above you are engaging in photosynthesis pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.But we also think about sort of the soils below the forest are storing a lot of carbon, right?
So the same thing happens in marine environments.
So in seagrass meadows, what we see is that there's a lot of carbon being brought into the seagrass itself through photosynthesis, but there's a lot of stuff that gets kind of stuck in theseagrass, in its roots, in the sediments, in sort of the equivalent of soils below the meadow.
And what we've learned is that the carbon that gets trapped there is probably trapped for centuries and it gets trapped more efficiently than just like an open estuary.
Seagrass meadows and salt marshes store significant amounts of carbon
[35:27] So if we compare a seagrass meadow to just like an open mud flat, there is more carbon being put, you know, stored and pulled in essentially permanently below seagrass than thereis in an open bay.
[35:39] And so this is what we refer to as blue carbon. So blue carbon are things like seagrass meadows and salt marshes in particular, that are actually like in the sediments below thehabitat are storing a huge amount of carbon, just like we think about soils on land.
Brent:
[35:55] And then from my rudimentary understanding of terrestrial carbon sequestration, fungi play a large role in that.
Do we have fungi in the ocean that are playing a role?
Tessa:
[36:06] Oh, that's a great question. I mean, I think the answer is certainly yes, but that's beyond my area of expertise.
Yeah, I don't know. I would say there are certainly microbial processes that are playing a role in that sequestration in these environments that I've been telling you about.
Keller:
[36:23] And are there researchers looking at the breakdown of nutrients in these ocean sediment areas compared to soil and trying to draw that bridge?
Tessa:
[36:31] Yes, so I think there's been a fair amount of work done trying to figure out, you know, where can we sequester carbon?
Forests, grasslands, agricultural habitat, seagrass meadows, salt marshes, all of those are very effective places to try to store carbon.
The next logical question is, well, how do you store carbon there?
The best way you do it is to basically preserve those habitats.
You don t, you know, you don t, you basically conserve and protect them so that they continue storing as much carbon as they are today.
And then anywhere where we maybe have lost those habitats, so some of those seagrass or saltmarsh habitats have been lost due to our uses of the coast, you know, our building of homesor businesses along the coast.
Anywhere that we can basically build back saltmarsh and seagrass habitats are going to be places that we reclaim some of that carbon storage. Yeah.
Keller:
[37:29] And is the storage that takes place in the sediment, is that different from what goes on with the relationship with carbon in the photic zone.
Tessa:
[37:37] DR. HOFFMAN It's all connected. So, you know, we think about the photic zone is essentially anywhere at the sunlit zone of the ocean. And so, that's the zone where you actuallyget photosynthesis happening because you need sunlight.
And then so you can imagine at the surface of the ocean, there are blooms of plankton, which are basically very small plant-like organisms.
And so, they're using photosynthesis at the surface, and then they eventually die and they sink out.
And we're talking about basically trapping that, you know, the decaying organic material from that surface productivity, trapping some of it for sort of long-term storage. Dr.
Brent:
[38:20] Kilby Hayes Yeah, because when those organisms die and sink to the bottom, if there were seagrass there, it would use those nutrients to grow and use more, and that would helpsequester?
Tessa:
[38:32] Some of it actually is not, there isn't really, it's not benefiting the seagrass necessarily, it just gets trapped there.
Just like sort of how like, when you think about in a forest where like leaves fall into the soil and they get sort of, you know, there's like layers of material that builds up below a forest.The same thing happens in seagrass meadows and salt marshes.
Tangible changes in the ocean due to acidification and other factors
Brent:
[38:52] Very interesting. And then I think we've started to touch on it, but could we maybe talk a bit more about some tangible changes we have seen in the ocean due to acidification orwhatever else is happening?
Tessa:
[39:05] Sure, so I mean, I think we did touch on this a little bit, but I think there's growing evidence that we can document these human impacts on the ocean.
Any environment in the ocean at this point is seeing multiple different stressors.
So climate change in terms of the actual temperature may be changing at particular sites.
[39:28] The chemistry of the ocean in terms of ocean acidification may be changing, and then sort of hand in hand with that we see changes in oxygenation, so the amount of oxygen in theocean water.
And there are a variety of different reasons behind this, but one of the really fundamental ones is that as the ocean water warms up, it actually holds less oxygen.
So a warmer ocean in the future actually will have less oxygen in it, just even if we did nothing else.
And so we're seeing in any ocean environment, I would say we're seeing multiple different changes all at the same time.
They could be temperature, oxygen, chemistry, you could see other human-caused changes like invasive species or pollution, things like that.
So I guess this is my roundabout way of trying to answer your question by saying we see a lot of these changes in the ocean, but it's complicated because it's not one thing that's Yeah, andso we see, you know habitats like coral reefs that are struggling because of all of those changes And we see evidence For example, we've had heat waves in this area of California in sortof between 2015-2016 and there we had like.
[40:47] Um, much warmer than normal ocean temperatures. And we saw, uh, die offs of organisms.
We also saw tropical species that you might expect to be in like San Diego or Mexico moving their way northward along the coast because those warm waters basically sort of facilitate,um, you know, warm water loving species to move. Yeah.
Brent:
[41:10] I remember that year. It was a great year for fishing.
Tessa:
[41:13] Yes. It was an interesting year for fishing. Like you got probably really different species than you're used to.
Brent:
[41:18] Yeah, a lot more yellowtail. Bluefin tuna really came up from Mexico.
Tessa:
[41:21] Right.
Brent:
[41:21] Right. That's rarely ever seen like that far north.
Tessa:
[41:24] Yeah. So I think some of the observations we can make around temperature in particular are fairly clear-cut in that way, and we've been making them for a while.
And so we can watch sort of the march of these species.
You know, each year people go out and do surveys in tide pools or fishery surveys and can actually document that the species they're seeing are different than they saw in 1990 or 1980 or1950.
Using Commercial Fishing Logs for Documentation
Brent:
[41:49] Are you aware of any scientists using the, like the commercial fishing logs as a way of documenting it?
Tessa:
[41:57] Certainly, yes. In fact, there's some interesting work where people look at, you know, what they can go out and sort of measure and catch today, and then they use the logs goingback 100 years and can actually sort of reconstruct how the fishery has changed. Yeah.
Keller:
[42:16] Talking about going back in the past, could you talk about how you guys have used some of the historic geological information to inform how some of these changes that we'reseeing, how they might play out?
Tessa:
[42:28] Sure. My students and I are really interested in exploring past climate records in order to understand what the impacts of future climate change might be.
And so, we sort of look to the past with those kinds of questions.
And for that reason, we tend to focus on the very near past.
So, we tend to, from the perspective of a geologist, we work in very, very recent time periods.
So, we tend to work over, you know, the past couple thousand years or maybe the past ten thousand years or maybe even back to twenty thousand years.
But at this, you know, at this moment, my students and I don't tend to, like, look much beyond that.
So, we're sort of thinking about, one way to think about that is that the configuration of the continents was exactly the same in all of those time periods.
The way that the ocean sort of worked was the same.
Like the ocean currents that existed 10,000 years ago are the same sort of general ocean currents as far as we know. So, the like boundary conditions are very, very, very similar, but wecan still study how climate has changed through that time period.
Brent:
[43:35] That's fascinating.
Tessa:
[43:36] So we've had a recent paper that came out that was led by students in my lab where we pulled together all of the.
[43:46] Climate studies that we could find that spanned the past 10,000 years for the western U.S. So it has both terrestrial paleoclimate records as well as ocean paleoclimate records.
And we basically looked at how did the past 10,000 years evolve.
And there are some interesting things in there. Like, for example, it's sort of in the middle of that time period where we start getting a lot more upwelling along the coast.
So that's when cold water comes up from the deep, up to the surface, and it sort of fuels a lot of the productivity at the surface, because it brings a lot of nutrients with it.
[44:22] And, but along with that, it drives, some of that really cold water coming up to the surface drives the production of fog on the California coast.
And so we see an increase in the plant species and the tree species that are associated with fog showing up at that time period.
So the ocean folks can tell us through their records, well, this is where we start to see upwelling really ramp up.
And then the folks who study trees on land and records of trees on land can say, well, that's also when the redwoods really expanded their sort of where they were found in California.
And so there's these connections between the ocean and terrestrial climate, which are just really fascinating, I think.
So I think part of, we learn a couple of things from these paleo perspectives.
One is sort of how connected everything is. So when there's a subtle change in the ocean or on land, we tend to see this sort of ripple effect across other systems.
Brent:
[45:23] That makes a lot of sense. and then you briefly touched on it, could you explain like what causes fog?
Tessa:
[45:30] I mean, in general, it's like basically moist air that is, you know, sitting over the, I mean, this is marine, this is like marine layer fog.
So what causes fog on land is a similar process, but not exactly the same.
But like the coastal fog that we see that is like so characteristic of California in May and June right now is that there's, you know, basically cold water at the surface the atmosphere, thewind is sort of blowing over that cold water and actually picking up some of the moisture from the water.
And then the land is warmer than the ocean is.
And so, the land, that actually sort of sets up a difference in pressure systems between the land and the ocean. And so, the land tends to sort of then suck that moist air in over the land.Very interesting.
Keller:
[46:19] Yeah.
Brent:
[46:20] Yeah. I thought it was a good tangible example of people could like recognize it. Yeah. the coastal communities, everyone knows the June bloom.
LSW – Totally. That's right.
Tessa:
[46:28] Yep, May gray and June bloom. CB – There you go.
Brent:
[46:30] LSW – Yep.
Keller:
[46:30] CB – And then transitioning out a little bit, you do a lot of outreach beyond your research.
Can we talk a little bit about that, I guess, starting with some of the education programs you do with K-12 education as well as industry?
Tessa:
[46:42] LSW – Yeah, sure. So, I was very fortunate to have, a federal grant from the National Science Foundation for five years that supported my research group in working with future Kthrough 12 science teachers.
So these were UC Davis students who had declared their interest in going into science teaching in the future. So they were not yet teachers, but they're going to become teachers.
[47:10] And these were students through the CalTeach program, which all of the UC schools have a program that basically supports students who want to go into K-12 teaching.
So, this is the Davis equivalent of that.
And I got to do a series of really fun things with the students in this program.
One is that we had a class every year where students worked with me to develop educational modules about the ocean, about climate change, about marine ecosystems that they would usein a middle school classroom.
And so, we developed we sort of workshopped them. Some of them were student teaching, so they would go and use them in their classroom. We would come back maybe the next yearand like tweak them.
We worked with teachers in the Davis area who were in middle school and high school settings, and those teachers were using the modules and sort of adjusting them and, you know,making them better.
And so over the course of five years, we were able, I think we worked on a dozen different modules.
And, you know, I think five or six of those we ended up like really comfortable, really happy with that like they're posted publicly on my website and they've been tested by both studentteachers and teachers.
Empowering Future Science Teachers with Hands-on Ocean Experience
[48:23] And so, that was one exciting thing and then we also got to, I was able to fund some of those future science teachers to come out and take classes at Bodega Marine Lab.
So each year, and actually I've been able to maintain that a little bit, even beyond the duration of the grant, so I pretty commonly have been able to host a couple of those sort of futurescience teachers to come out and live at the Marine Lab for six weeks over the summer and they get to take these hands-on oceanography and marine science courses that we offer.
And the whole idea is sort of that we want future teachers to have this hands-on experience with the ocean.
We want people to be able to teach about the ocean from a place of experience, of having like been to the ocean, experienced the ocean, of you know thought about research in the oceanand then they go back and they become science teachers and hopefully they you know they bring those experiences with them. Yeah.
Keller:
[49:16] And you talked about breaking down the modules and getting it to five modules because those were the successful modules. Could you define, I guess, what you're looking for inmodules? Like what makes it a good module?
Tessa:
[49:27] Yeah, sure. I mean, it was this like iterative process with students and students who were preparing to teach and also existing teachers.
And we were looking for a couple of things. We wanted, part of our goal was that we wanted students doing hands-on experiments or working with real data.
So all of the modules either have them experimenting with something or working with data that's maybe provided by our federal government or something like that.
So they're not sort of made up. They're like, they're real examples that the students were working with.
And then we worked very closely with the teachers to align them with our, the science teaching standards.
So that teachers, because that, in California in particular, can't really use things in the classroom unless you can figure out how they align to the state and federal science standards.
And so we did some of that work with teachers so that future teachers would be able to open up one of these modules and be like, oh, great, I can put this, you know, right in the unit whenI talk about density.
I can talk about seawater density. Or right when I talk about biodiversity, I can use this module on kelp forest biodiversity.
So we did some sort of the pre-planning for teachers around how does it fit in to what you're required to teach in order to encourage them to like be able to actually use these modulesabout the ocean. Okay, that's great.
Brent:
[50:50] Yeah. It definitely seems like a great resource that was created.
And then when you focus...
So that seems like the public facing side of education. How does education extend to industry?
Tessa:
[51:03] Sure, so I mentioned this earlier, but we have this very longstanding partnership with Hog Island Oyster Company, and we also have other sort of similar partnerships, although thatone is at this point, like really just fabulous and has existed for a long time.
So I love talking about it.
We've been working with them, I think for over 15 years or somewhere around there.
And I always have to remind people that this is an intellectual partnership.
It's not the, I mean, there are industry partnerships where maybe there's an exchange of money. In this case, there was no exchange of money.
We just were excited to work together.
[51:38] They are a family-run farm on the California coast raising a sustainable shellfish.
And so all the things we were talking about earlier about risks and stresses to oysters and mussels and clams are risks and stresses to their business.
And so we have worked together for a long time to basically sort of brainstorm research questions that were interesting to us as researchers and also interesting to them in being able toshape their decision-making and planning for their business.
And I gave you an example of that around the seagrass earlier.
But another example is that we've worked with them to get oceanographic monitoring stations basically placed at the oyster farms.
So there's quite a few oyster farms now in California where you can sort of think about like a weather station that we'd have on land.
There is that kind of station, but in the water. So it's monitoring temperature, salinity, pH, oxygen, all the things we've been talking about in this conversation.
[52:40] And so the oyster farms are basically hosting, physically hosting these sites where public monitoring is taking place for us to understand what's happening in the ocean.
[52:53] And so in this case, Hog Island Oyster Company is providing quite a lot of infrastructure, like physical space for these instruments. They're doing some of the maintenance on theinstruments.
And then we share in some of the maintenance tasks and the data are posted publicly through something that's called Central and Northern California Ocean Observing System.
[53:14] And so, you know, anyone who's interested can go on to their website and see a portal of sort of all the real-time ocean data.
So if you're a surfer or a fisherman or just an interested member of the public and you want to know like what's happening in the ocean, you can go online and there's all these sites of dataand quite a few of those at this point are being sort of hosted by these industry partners.
So it's become really important way that the ocean farming community, the sustainable shellfish community, and sort of the academic research community are like, you know, meeting andlike sharing resources and sharing knowledge and creating something that the public can use.
Brent:
[53:56] Is that where you as like academics hope to be able to show industry why we need to focus so much more on the environment?
Environment, be like, hey, we are measuring these tangible changes.
This is how it's going to impact your business and the future profits.
And sure, you might be able to pollute more now for next quarter, but when you come five, 10 years down the line, this will cause you a serious harm.
Is this like the goal of a lot of these partnerships and showing, hey, academics and industry can work together to really, one, clean up the world, and two, make you more money?
Tessa:
[54:30] Yeah, I mean, I like, I think that where you landed there was excellent.
I think, you know, most of these partnerships that I've been involved in, the sustainable shellfish farming industry is, first of all, like, very interested in the sustainability aspect of theirbusiness and also already very, you know, like, very aware of these issues.
So I, it was less about me coming to them saying, like, you need to know about this.
It was actually more about them coming to us saying, we're worried about the same thing that you're worried about.
You know, can we work together on that? But I do think it's a model for, you know, broader partnerships that university members can think about participating in.
So I think thinking about partnering with people where the outcomes are mutually beneficial, where we like sit around a table and think about like, you know, what are you worried about?
What affects your business? what affects your bottom line, what affects your ability to employ people locally, to pass this business on to your family, and then how does that overlap withknowledge that I can also bring to the table so that we are, you know, the partner is bringing knowledge to the table and the university is bringing knowledge to the table and we'rethinking about what we can do together.
Brent:
[55:46] Yeah.
Tessa:
[55:47] And specifically, to your point, thinking about what we can do together to address challenges and make the world a better place.
Brent:
[55:54] Yeah.
Tessa:
[55:54] Specifically. Thank you.
Keller:
[55:56] Yeah, I think we're definitely getting close to a point where that shift will start to grow at a really fast rate.
And then in some of your papers that we looked at to prepare, you mentioned how that relationship with business is great, but it's not all.
We need government intervention. Do you have any advice for students on just how they should, I guess, view policy in that relationship with government and academia?
Because sometimes I think students can kind of get lost in in that balance of government isn't listening, they don't really, they look at it more one-sided.
Understanding the Hierarchy of Decision Makers in Government
Tessa:
[56:31] It's such a great question. I sometimes do this exercise in my own undergraduate classes where I ask students, when you think about government and policymakers, like who are thedecision makers in the world?
And we make a list on the board, right? And it's like, Congress is a decision maker and the president is a decision maker and the Supreme Court is a decision maker.
And it trickles down to, people start to see, there's also local, okay, there's state decision makers. There's also decision makers in my county or the town that I live in.
So we eventually start trickling down to like.
Using Voting Access to Make a Difference
[57:26] Things that might feel more even though it feels dilute at times.
And even if it's not just our own vote, like we have the ability to improve voting access to other people.
So working for organizations that expand voting rights is a way of using our decision-making power.
But I would also say to students, and like I think about examples about this at UC Davis, but I think it applies at universities generally, there are classes you can take that like bring youinto the community in partnership with community organizations or with government organizations.
There are internships, there are paid internships where you can go, you know, work for a non-profit organization or a government organization and get right into where some of thosedecisions are happening.
So I guess I would encourage students to think about the things that they can do to actually become engaged in that like in that in that local community that they're in in the decision-making community that they're in.
Because I do think it can feel like it's really distanced from us but it's actually it doesn't have to be.
You know the people on the local town council are elected by the members of the town. Let's you know let's get involved in in local politics if if that's what you wanna do.
Keller:
[58:46] Yes, sir. Very important message, I think.
Tessa:
[58:49] Yeah.
Keller:
[58:50] And then another kind of broader question when we're preparing, you had many different roles that you've played at Davis.
To list a few, you had the President's Postdoc Fellow, Associate Vice Provost of Academic Programs and Public Scholarship, as well as a professor and a mentor.
I was wondering if you could talk about kind of that balance of playing different roles and having different hats, as well as with the Postdoc Fellow, kind of what that program is and whatit meant to be a mentor.
Tessa:
[59:18] LSG Sure. So, I mean, I think maybe I could start with that.
I was very lucky to be awarded a UC President's Postdoc Fellowship as I was exiting my graduate program. And that's what supported my first two years at Davis as a postdoctoralresearcher.
And that program supports scholars who are, you know, trying to push the excellence of their research program and also trying to improve access, diversity, and inclusion at the Universityof California so that we are really serving the needs and the mandate of our mission as a public institution.
And so everyone who's supported that program by that program is thinking about both their scholarly work and how we make sure that the university is truly accessible to as manydifferent people as possible.
[1:00:13] And I was deeply invested in that then, that was 20 years ago, still deeply invested in it.
So I've served on the advisory board for that program for many years and I've now mentored two postdocs myself through that program.
So I've been I've been able to sit sort of on the other side of the table where I am supporting and mentoring early career researchers who are at the beginning of their academic careers andfrankly those folks are really changing the way the university does its work and and it's wonderful to be involved in that.
Introduction to the Role in Public Scholarship and Engagement
[1:00:52] I was then able to start in a professor role and I have been a professor at Davis since and then three years ago I started in the role as associate vice provost in public scholarshipand engagement and this is an office on the UC at UC Davis that serves the entire university so every discipline every department every aspect of the, university and we aim, to basicallyimprove students, staff, and faculty who want to build those connections outside the university, who want to partner and and sit down with community members or government officials orindustry members and say how can we work together, how do we leverage the university knowledge and your knowledge and do something, you know, for good.
Brent:
[1:01:57] Definitely.
Tessa:
[1:01:58] And so that's really fun because, I mean, as you can tell, that's something I've cared about quite a lot in my research and teaching through my whole career.
And now in that role, I basically get to support other faculty and staff and students who are doing that work. So I get to be the behind the scenes person.
I get to, you know, provide logistical support, financial support, things like that for projects and partnerships that improve the university's connection to the outside world.
Brent:
[1:02:28] And then when you're thinking about trying to connect with more people, are we trying to redefine what success looks like in science, especially in regards to climate change?
Tessa:
[1:02:38] Yeah, I mean, I think this is where sort of all of the threads of this conversation start to weave together, right, which is that climate change is a big systemic problem.
It's not a problem that I alone can solve or you alone can solve.
It's going to require big systems changes. We're talking about changes in our energy system, changes to our economy.
But at the very center of that is impacts on people, which we actually haven't really gotten to talk about very much.
But, and that's not like, it's not my area of research.
Like I don't study how climate change impacts people, but I'm very aware that people are at the center of this.
Yeah. People's decision-making is at the center of this, but also issues around justice and equity in our country country and globally will be and are being challenged by climate change.
And so we can't really separate people from this problem because it's impacting people.
Brent:
[1:03:34] Yeah. A great resource for people will actually be one of our podcasts with Professor Warwick Vincent and he studies Arctic ice and how the Inuits are being really impacted andtheir right to be cold is like one of their taglines.
And so he gets really into all of that.
So that's another great place for people to hear a bit more about it too.
Tessa:
[1:03:56] Yeah, I would also, you could add in your show notes, there's a wonderful book by Selah Watt Cloutier and it is called The Right to be Cold.
There we go. And so, she really, I think, you know, probably started that conversation around that and it's a great book.
Connecting Science to Communities and Environmental Justice
[1:04:14] Yeah, so I mean, I think we have to be thinking about, we can't separate the ocean from the people, right? People are very connected to the ocean in many different ways,including we live near the ocean and many people are dependent upon the ocean for their livelihoods, for their food.
And so, as we think about, you know, we've spent a lot of time in this conversation sort of thinking about this as like impacts on organisms or environments, but part of what's beingimpacted is us and our communities.
And some communities are being disproportionately impacted. And so we have really that's so when we think about changing what science looks like, I think part of that conversation isabout seeing all of those connections and seeing that, you know, our conversation that we're having today is connected to that conversation about the Arctic, and it's connected toenvironmental justice, and it's connected to, you know, when you have conversations with economics professors, these things are all threaded together.
Brent:
[1:05:14] Certainly. I think the ocean, there's stats out there of the trillions of dollars that depend on the ocean's health and vibrance.
And then another interesting one was very recently, a nation, an island nation, like the South Pacific?
Keller:
[1:05:29] Tuvalu.
Brent:
[1:05:30] Tuvalu. There we go. Became the first digital nation because the sea levels have risen so much. Yes. So, there's plenty of resources people can find and we'll tag a bunch of themon your website. it.
Keller:
[1:05:41] And then looking at this, like for students that see that there's a massive problem and they don't really know what to do because they think they're one person, do you have anyadvice, I guess a twofold question, one for a student broadly who might not be in university but just a curious person, how they can get involved and make a difference?
And then as well as at Davis, if a student is interested in, you know, being a part of the change, especially with regards to marine science at Bodega Bay, what opportunities are out there?
Tessa:
[1:06:09] Well, I mean, the first one...
This is going to sound like I'm oversimplifying it, but I sort of feel like the first way to get involved and make a difference is sort of like learn about the ocean, become committed toconserving and protecting what we have, and then maybe pick something locally that you feel like you can do.
You know, we didn't really get to circle back to this, but like plastic pollution, huge issue, like maybe learn about ways that we can stop that pollution before it ever gets to the ocean.
So I think there are ways, I think people have like sort of an inherent connection to the sea.
I think even people who live nowhere near the ocean like feel attached to it, which is wonderful. And so I would encourage people to just think about, you know, what do you do with thatattachment? Like take action.
[1:06:59] For Davis students, yes, I would love to just tell you about this wonderful resource we have at Bodega Marine Lab which is that we offer summer courses both in summer sessionone and summer session two.
We're currently brainstorming an expansion to fall so there may actually be fall courses offered in the future.
And you can come live out here in our housing and take those courses.
There's also options we're aware that not everybody can do that so the sessions are set up so that there's options that like if you could only come out one day a week from Davis or from theBay Area.
There are some of the classes that are set up basically for commuting students.
So, you can come out like one or two days a week for six weeks and you get the you know the full summer experience but you don't have to give up your summer job or your summerhousing or things like that. So, you don't have to live out here but you can.
And those courses sort of run a full spectrum.
There's a wonderful marine ecology course that's taught. there's a course about global change ecology from sort of this marine perspective.
There's biological oceanography. There's coastal oceanography.
There's ecotoxicology that looks at sort of pollutants in the marine environment.
And like I said, we're looking at expanding, so there will be sort of even more course offerings in the future.
Brent:
[1:08:16] That's amazing. And then as we wrap up here, could you tell us about your book?
Introducing the upcoming book "Oceans of Change"
Tessa:
[1:08:21] Oh, yes. So we've touched on a lot of these topics today, but thank you for bringing this up.
I do have in about a year a book that will be coming out from Columbia University Press and the current title, although the title has changed multiple times, but the current title seems tobe Oceans of Change.
And it's a book that I co-wrote with a journalist and we sort of move through a sequence of different ocean environments and we talk to people who are observing how much the ocean ischanging and what that means to them and what they're doing about it.
And so, you know, we talk about tide pools and kelp forests and the open ocean and the they are.
Um, in the deep sea and we connect with people in each of those cases that are, um, are observing, are watching, are acting.
Um, and it's not always scientists. Scientists are like, you know, play a big role in the book, but we also talk to indigenous community members, um, fishermen, aquaculturists,conservationists.
So it's really, we often tell people that the ocean is the main character of the book, but the ocean needs a voice. And so there's There's lots of voices in the book that are telling us aboutwhat they're seeing.
Brent:
[1:09:37] Sounds like it's going to be a very beautiful book and tell a lot of powerful stories.
Tessa:
[1:09:40] Thank you.
Keller:
[1:09:41] It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Professor Hill.
Tessa:
[1:09:43] Thank you so much. It's great having this conversation with you.