CO2: Love-Hate Relationships in the Air and Oceans

Everybody knows that air travel contributes to climate change through emissions. But we are only now beginning to understand how climate change will affect air travel. Rising sea levels and storm surges threaten coastal airports. Warmer air at ground level makes it more difficult for planes to take-off. Extreme weather may cause flight disruptions and delays. Clear-air turbulence is expected to become stronger and twice as common. Transatlantic flights may take significantly longer due to changes to the jet stream. Come and find out how climate change could affect your flights.

Just like plants in your garden, microscopic plants in the ocean (called phytoplankton) need light and nutrients to grow. Diatoms are a group of phytoplankton that build their shell out of glass. They are about the size of a pinhead and they thrive in the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica. Diatoms produce about one quarter of the Earth’s oxygen, as a by-product of photosynthesis. In this talk, I will show how the spectacular ‘bloom and bust’ life cycle of diatoms in the Southern Ocean has repercussions for global ocean nutrient distributions, and therefore ocean carbon dioxide uptake.