Contact:
Stephen Loy
LSU News Service
504 388-8654
[email protected]
Mark Benfield
504-388-6372
[email protected]
BATON ROUGE -- Recent talk of global warming has some groups pointing fingers and looking for culprits.
But an LSU researcher is part of an international team of scientists studying ocean currents, tides and ocean plankton of an area off the coast of New England that will hopefully help us to understand how climate change may influence other regions such as the Gulf of Mexico.
Global climate change would have an impact on ocean currents, circulation patterns and temperatures, according to Mark Benfield of the LSU Coastal Fisheries Institute. The premise of the U.S. GLOBEC (Global Ecosystem Dynamics) program is that global warming probably exists, so the researchers are trying to look at Georges Bank over a five- to seven-year span to see how it functions over time.
"We are performing a long-term, detailed study of a specific area which will hopefully, one day, improve our understanding of other ocean regions, including the Gulf of Mexico," Benfield said.
More specifically, Benfield and colleagues from Cornell University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., are looking at how global climate change might affect the distribution, survival and migrations of planktonic organisms called copepods--the main diet of young cod and haddock.
The cod and haddock fisheries, once a thriving economic staple for Georges Bank (located on the eastern edge of the Gulf of Maine), were closed in the early 1990s because of low fish populations, and have not recovered since the closure. Scientists now suspect that the area's physical changes have played a part in the population declines, Benfield said.
"The Georges Bank area, like Louisiana's coast, is economically dependent on commercial fisheries, so we can certainly appreciate the economic devastation of closing a once-thriving fishing area," Benfield said.
While the Gulf of Maine and the Gulf of Mexico are physically different, they do have several similarities. They both have a loop current which transfers water in and out of their basins, and they are both "connected" by the Gulf stream. "Our research may have parallel applications in the Gulf of Mexico," Benfield said.
Researchers will take the data that Benfield and the other researchers are collecting and use it to create computer models that can predict how plankton interact with predators, food, currents and other factors in response to temperature changes. With these "what if" scenarios, researchers will improve their abilities to predict how plankton, and the fish stocks that depend on them for food, will respond to global climatic change.
"Once we understand what is happening to the cod and haddock on Georges Bank, we can adapt our models to try and help interpret changes in aquatic life observed in other parts of the world," Benfield said.
GLOBEC chose Georges Bank for several reasons, Benfield said. First, it used to support a large and commercially valuable fishery. Secondly, the area seems likely to be more heavily impacted by climatic variation than other areas in the North Atlantic Ocean, and, finally, many of the traditionally important fish populations have already collapsed.
"Even though our research is on Georges Bank, we have set up an international data bank connected through the Internet. We are trying to understand one particular area in a great deal of detail so we can ultimately come up with more general predictive models," Benfield said.
This multi-year study involving physical, chemical and biological oceanographers and mathematical modelers is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation. For more information on the project, go to its Web site at http://globec.whoi.edu/globec.html.
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