- Cameron McDonald
- Stanford University
You can never be more than a few hours drive from the ocean in my home country of New Zealand, so almost everyone grows up spending summers at the beach. I began life in the largest city of Auckland aka “the city of sails” which is situated on an isthmus between the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea and can remember seagulls congregating on the school fields as the first indicator of bad weather out to sea. Despite rumors though, New Zealand’s climate is temperate (not tropical), so the warm waters encasing aquarius make a nice change.
I hope to continue this warm water approach to oceanography in the EFML at Stanford by investigating the effect of anthropogenic CO2 on the world’s coral reefs and the importance of hydrodynamics in this interaction. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been steadily increasing in the last 150 years as a result of human fossil fuel consumption. Much of this CO2 ends up in the ocean, lowering ocean pH and making it more difficult for marine calcareous organisms to build their calcium carbonate skeletons — coral reefs are literally beginning to dissolve! It is important to understand the response of corals and other marine ecosystems to this human induced climate change to help protect them — they are simply too valuable to lose!
I will leave you with a thought from the great New Zealand sailor and environmentalist Sir Peter Blake who was killed tragically in the Amazon defending his research vessel from pirates. Think about this the next time you pass a polluted waterway or a lonely commuter on the freeway adding more CO2 to our atmosphere and oceans…
Earth is a water planet on which the quality of water defines the quality of life. Good water, good life. Poor Water, poor life. No water, no life.
