URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Fall_2017_Melissa-McCarthy

Walking on Thin Ice

written by Todd McLeish

© Sarah Searson

Measuring chunks of ice to determine the sea ice thickness.

B

rice Loose is a geochemist with a preoccupation for the polar oceans, so

He is trying to gain a better understanding of how heat and mass move into and out of the deep ocean and the role that ice plays in both processes. It is an especially important question at a time when the climate is changing rapidly, since the ocean absorbs 25 to 35 percent of the carbon dioxide humans produce. “In a world where we may need to carry out detailed carbon accounting to determine whether the climate treaty emissions reductions are having the desired effect, we have to know the natural carbon cycle very precisely. This includes carbon that moves through the ocean.”

he makes regular trips to the Arctic and Antarctic to investigate how methane, carbon dioxide and other chemical compounds move between the air, ice, ocean and back again. “Nowhere else on Earth is the atmosphere more directly connected to the deep ocean as at the poles,” says Loose, an assistant professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island (URI). “The exchange that happens there is really important, in part because of the fact that ice is in the way.”

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