Dr. Jennifer Jackson of the Hakai Institute
Dr. Jennifer Jackson discusses her work as a physical oceanographer in British Columbia, Canada, where she focuses on how the ocean is changing and the ripple effects manifesting throughout this realm.
Quotable Moments
“I like to think of the major climate changers in the ocean. There’s three big ones. The first is temperature. So the warming of the ocean. The second is the deoxygenation or the loss of oxygen in the ocean, and the third is ocean acidification. And all three of those are somehow sort of interconnected. But also together they change the physical environment of the ocean and that has profound impacts on the ecosystem” – Dr. Jennifer Jackson
“A large amount of the of the drought depends on or ameliorating the drought would depend on having a decent snowpack in the winter for it to melt off gradually during the spring and supply a lot of those streams with the water they need in the groundwater recharge that farmers might need to plant their crops and to defer irrigation until later on in the summer. ” – Dr. Karsten Shein
“Depending on how the winds and the climate shifts, you can get either more southerly warm waters into British Columbia or more northerly cold waters into British Columbia. And when you bring the southerly warm waters in you also bring the zooplankton and the southerly zooplankton are a lot less nutritious than the normal northerly zooplankton, the northern northerly species, they have lots of fat, lots of lipid. And so when a juvenile salmon comes out of a stream and eats one of those zooplankton, it’s really good for the salmon. It gets lots of fat. It grows quickly. And so as it continues out into the open ocean, it’s in quite good shape to survive the years until it has to return to spawn. But when a juvenile salmon comes out of the stream and it has one of these sort of less nutritious, almost junk food like Southern copepods species, it needs to eat a lot more of them in order to grow and to build the fat stories that it needs. So that’s one of the reasons we’re thinking that the salmon just aren’t doing that well, is because these warm waters have sort of shifted in and brought with them these southerly species.” – Dr. Jennifer Jackson
“The recent NOAA, NASA study that just came out suggests that the Earth’s atmosphere is trapping about twice as much heat as the models had anticipated at this time. So that that does not bode well for future temperature increases, especially in places like the Arctic. But in turn, all of this additional heat is altering patterns of the jetstream, for example, forcing it farther north in the summertime, bringing storms up to those regions that didn’t used to get summertime storms and not as far south in the wintertime. So on top of that snow pack is is in many places decreasing and is even disappearing in the summertime.” – Dr. Karsten Shein