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Robot Offers Rare Glimpse Into Antarctica's Colorful Underwater World

Scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division sent a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) down to take a look under the ice in east Antarctica, capturing a small forest of underwater organisms in bright purples, yellows, and pinks. The organisms survive in water that 29.3 degrees Fahrenheit and covered in thick sea ice for most of the year. The research team is collecting data about sea water acidity, salinity, and temperature to help them understand how the region will be affected by climate change - particularly ocean acidification.

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] hey we [Applause] yeah you hold it there [Applause] yep woo yes

    00:02:25 bab five all right [Music] [Applause] [Applause] hey [Applause] yes you hold it there [Applause] yep woo

    00:04:55 yes all right hi my name is Dr Glenn Johnston and and I'm an applied benic biologist at the Australian Antarctic division so the footage was filmed under sea ice in O'Brien Bay which is 5 km from Casey research station on the eastern coast of Antarctica and that's around about 3,800 km below Perth so we're doing an experiment there to look at the effects of ocean deification on

    00:05:23 Antarctic Marine forer we're looking at how antartic Marine forer May react to the pH levels that expecting to see by the year 2100 so one of the major threats to Global Marine systems is climate change and Antarctica is particularly susceptible to ocean acidification decreasing pH levels because of the cold water cold water soaks up more carbon dioxide than warm

    00:05:47 water and so Antarctica is where we may see changes due to ocean acidification before we see it around the rest of the world now the Antarctic F experiment has been run by the Australian Antarctic division over the last four or five years to explore this issue and to try and understand how Antarctic Marine systems will react to a future ocean scenario so the pH levels we expect to

    00:06:12 see in seawater in the year 2100 everybody knows about penguins and seals and whales and they're the iconic species that we all think of when we think of Antarctica uh but when you get under the sea ice and onto the seaf Flor that's where all the color is where all the biodiversity is it's where all these different groups of marine animals live and it's a great privilege and a

    00:06:31 pleasure to get under that se ice to dive or to to use a remote operated vehicle and to get some footage and to to look and start understanding those environments so we've got a a GoPro camera mounted on top of a remote underwater vehicle so that's a a small underwater submersible that we can see on the surface we can see the vision as it comes feeds into the cameras and it's

    00:06:54 got lights so we can drive it around and we've deployed that through a hole in the sea ice that was sea ice is about 1.5 M thick and the vision that you're seeing is of a reef at around about 30 M below that sea ice the sea ice that covers the uh sea there for up to 10 months of the year sometimes longer that allows these animals to have a relatively stable environment there's

    00:07:19 very little or no current there's very little wind generated or wave generated current because you've got that cap of CI sitting over the top of it and it also have a very cold temp at- 1.5° of seawater but that's stable throughout the year so that doesn't change so the organisms are adapted only to a very small temperature change over their year where animals up here in the temperate

    00:07:44 or tropical zones maybe have to adapt to a much broader range of temperatures over their year so all of that color that you're seeing there all of the organisms are different Marine invertebrate groups there are the same ones that you might see if you went for a snorkel or a dive on a reef in Tasmania or in Northern Australia or anywhere in Australia or anywhere in the

    00:08:03 world so we've got sponges we've got aidans we've got sea stars sea cucumbers worms there's flowery looking things are actually worms uh we've got sea spiders pnon uh there's a range of different kinds of sea stars um huan SE cucumbers there as well so it's a very diverse mix of different species and different groups of marine animals