Climate change, fisheries, mineral resources: 240 scientists are researching the sea in all its profundity at a unique Cluster of Excellence based in Kiel.
Anyone who looks out to sea on a stormy day can feel the expanse, the depth, the immense power of the ocean. The roaring waters seem endless, almost threatening. They can devour ships and shatter coasts, yet they are also the origin of life, a source of food for billions of people. Above all, however, these so powerful, vast oceans are also vulnerable. Humans hunt for fish with gigantic trawler fleets. They tip trash, poisons and thousands of tonnes of fertilizers into the sea. They penetrate its depths to drill for oil and gas. And climate change is also hitting this global habitat hard. All over the world scientists are attempting to find out more about the state of the sea: a huge challenge bearing in mind how diverse and complex marine life is. So it’s no surprise that the ocean can only be understood if specialists from different disciplines get together. Biologists can determine species of fish and count stocks. Economists know the value of different fish on the world market. However, they can only find out how to save an overfished species if they work together.
Anyone who looks out to sea on a stormy day can feel the expanse, the depth, the immense power of the ocean. The roaring waters seem endless, almost threatening. They can devour ships and shatter coasts, yet they are also the origin of life, a source of food for billions of people. Above all, however, these so powerful, vast oceans are also vulnerable. Humans hunt for fish with gigantic trawler fleets. They tip trash, poisons and thousands of tonnes of fertilizers into the sea. They penetrate its depths to drill for oil and gas. And climate change is also hitting this global habitat hard. All over the world scientists are attempting to find out more about the state of the sea: a huge challenge bearing in mind how diverse and complex marine life is. So it’s no surprise that the ocean can only be understood if specialists from different disciplines get together. Biologists can determine species of fish and count stocks. Economists know the value of different fish on the world market. However, they can only find out how to save an overfished species if they work together.
It is this insight that has led German scientists to join together in a unique research collaboration to be found nowhere else in the world – the Kiel-based Cluster of Excellence called “Ocean of the Future”. Since 2006, marine scientists, geoscientists and economists, as well as medical experts, mathematicians, lawyers and social scientists have been trying to gain a comprehensive understanding of the world’s oceans. They work at research institutions in the Baltic city of Kiel – at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität (CAU), the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR), the Institute for World Economics (IfW) and the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design. Excellence Clusters, an initiative of the federal and state governments, have been set up at several higher education locations to study various topics. The Kiel Cluster encompasses a total of about 240 scientists who want to understand how the oceans are reacting to climate change and other threats – and how they can be better protected in the future. The key question is how we can use the ocean without destroying it. “We want to find paths to a sustainable management of the oceans,” says Martin Visbeck, Professor of Physical Oceanography at IFM-GEOMAR and spokesperson of the Excellence Cluster. “At present there is probably no other institution that is addressing marine research in such a diverse and interdisciplinary way.” Thirteen new posts were created for junior professorships alone to bring more specialists on board. Only in this way is it possible to study the ocean in all its profundity.
Martin Quaas, for example, came to CAU as an environmental economist to analyze world fishing. He collaborates closely with fishery biologists from IFM-GEOMAR. “The biologists determine the species of fish and their stocks in the oceans and estimate the maximum tonnage that can be fished while maintaining stocks at a sustainable level,” says Quaas. “However, this is not enough to ensure sustainable fisheries management in future.” Fisheries policies must change fundamentally, says Quaas. As an economist he knows what needs to be done and, in particular, how to create incentives for a new and better system. As a first step, total allowable catches need to be reduced considerably, because otherwise the number of sexually mature animals will decline and there will be no offspring. “That is fatal and must be changed.” Today, annual fish catches are divided into fishing quotas by weight. Each company gets a certain percentage. “It would make more sense to specify a certain number of fish rather than a tonnage; that would create incentives to catch only large fish,” says Quaas.
In South America they have found another way to harvest seafood in a sustainable way. There, stocks of mussels and sea urchins have been placed in the care of local fishermen. Since then the increase in personal responsibility has meant that fishermen have taken care to harvest only the number of marine animals that ensures that there will also be enough in the subsequent season. According to Quaas, the combination of expertise in fisheries biology and business know-how in the Cluster has closed a gap in Germany. Now the Excellence Cluster is in a position to give politicians clear policy recommendations that are both sustainable and cost-effective in the long run.
Fascinating biodiversity
Quaas himself does not estimate the size of stocks, but works on computer simulations that predict how quickly species could disappear, i.e. how hard they are hit by fishing. Rainer Froese supports him in this. He is a fish expert who has worked at IFM-GEOMAR for many years. He is one of the researchers at the Excellence Cluster. His speciality is gaining an overall view of biodiversity in the oceans. Together with Philippine researchers he has built up one of the most comprehensive fish encyclopaedias: www.fishbase.org. Experts from all over the world can report newly discovered species of fish to Fishbase; they can also pass on new scientific knowledge on distribution areas and other features. Froese and his colleagues check the findings and incorporate them into the database. The researcher is proud that Fishbase is regularly cited by other scientists as a reliable source of data. “Our data appear in more than 1,000 top-notch publications,” says Froese. That is a real accolade. The Kiel-based biologists launched another online service in 2010 – www.aquamaps.org. Among other things it presents the distribution areas of (currently) approximately 11,000 marine animals as easy-to-read world maps. It now includes all marine mammals and half of all known fish species. AquaMaps was a lot of hard work. Hundreds of thousands of individual observations by a large number of oceanographers have been incorporated into the marine-animal archive. This is complemented by encyclopaedic knowledge from hundreds of scientific publications on the organisms’ habitats and their preferences in terms of water temperature and salinity.
Froese has linked the distribution maps with the climate predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – with alarming results: should the earth heat up as predicted, many species of fish will encounter problems by the middle of this century. This applies in particular to Arctic and Antarctic fish, which have become adapted to ice-cold water, because even a increase of two degrees in the water temperature can be fatal for them. It could also get too warm for tropical fish. However, the aim of the Excellence Cluster is not to spread bad news, but primarily to help change things for the better, as is the case with another Internet service set up by Froese as part of an EU project – the Seafoodguide. Fish lovers can use a smartphone to access www.seafoodguide.org within seconds and check whether the fish lying in the freezer in front of them was caught in a sustainable way and can be consumed with a clear conscience.
The medical researchers at the Excellence Cluster, Thomas C.G. Bosch and Philip Rosenstiel, are concerned with living marine resources of a very different kind. Using original organisms such as sponges and jellyfish, the researchers are trying to improve their understanding of human immune diseases, especially those that occur at the interface with the outside world – on the skin, the surface of the lung or the intestine. These include atopic dermatitis, asthma and Crohn’s disease (an intestinal condition). Today it is known that bacteria that are usually beneficial for humans play a role in these diseases – e.g. intestinal bacteria that control digestion. In some situations a finely tuned bacterial community seems to go haywire. The person falls ill. It’s astonishing that such seemingly simple organisms as jellyfish and sponges can help the researchers, but in fact the immune systems of these archaic creatures are surprisingly similar to those of humans. The researchers hope they will help them improve their understanding of the basic mechanisms of immune responses in order ultimately to heal people. Amazingly, immune disorders never occur in these sea creatures. In other projects, the medical people are searching for new therapeutic substances in marine organisms. Painkillers and cancer drugs extracted from marine snails and sponges have been on the market for several years.
Knowledge from the sea
It is thought that thousands of other promising active ingredients for drugs are waiting to be discovered on the sea floor. The Cluster will help discover new ones. Among other things, the medical scientists at Kiel are using expensive laboratory equipment to scan the genomes of marine bacteria for genes containing the molecular blueprint for promising proteins. “Cooperation with our medical colleagues is very valuable,” says Cluster spokesman Visbeck. “Their knowledge complements that of the marine biologists enormously – and not only in connection with medical issues.” They also study the detailed impact of environmental changes on marine organisms, on their individual cells and metabolism. The acidification of the sea is a major focus in this context: because the sea absorbs the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the sea acidifies like mineral water with CO2 bubbling though it. The scientists in Kiel want to understand what will happen to marine organisms in the future.
Carbon dioxide and climate change are the pressing issues of our time, and this is reflected in many projects at the Excellence Cluster. The geoscientists in Kiel, for example, are looking into the permanent disposal of carbon dioxide on the ocean floor. The principle is called carbon capture and storage (CCS). The idea is to capture carbon dioxide at gas- or coal-fired power stations, liquefy it and then transport it to the seabed by pipeline or pump ship. With marine biologists working nearby, the Kiel scientists can study precisely what impact this might have on the marine environment. The earth scientists are also looking into efforts to mine other valuable resources on the seabed: ores and manganese nodules. There are billions of these potato-sized concretions of minerals on the Pacific seabed, although it is still unclear how these massive deposits of raw materials might be harvested. The necessary technology is yet to be developed. This is another area of research in Kiel.
The law of the sea is also a subject studied at the Cluster. Although there has been a comprehensive legal system governing the oceans for several years – the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea – conflicts between nations still arise frequently. On land, borders are clear. But what about the deepsea floor far from the shore, which is a common human heritage? Who owns the genetic resources or future drugs that lie dormant in bacteria or fungi in the depths of the oceans? How should we divide up the huge gas and oil reserves that are currently hidden under the sea ice of the Arctic, but will become accessible in the future as the ice caps melt? Legal scholar Alexander Proelss is closely monitoring these marine disputes, for which there are often no precedents.
In some cases, the researchers in Kiel have submitted reports that have since become internationally accepted, as in the dispute over an iron fertilization experiment in the Southern Ocean. A German-Indian research team wanted to find out to what extent iron stimulates algae growth in this nutrient-poor marine region. Environmental authorities and NGOs intervened, and the scientists had to wait, while the research vessel Polarstern languished in the South Atlantic. Every day, the researchers hoped to get the green light. Proelss and Kiel’s marine scientists rushed to produce their reports. The result: a ban on the research was not justified on the basis of current conventions. The experiment could begin. “It’s cases like this that underline the new challenges that maritime law still faces today,” says Proelss, who has since accepted a professorship at the University of Trier. “But above all they show us how closely the various disciplines are interconnected these days and stress the importance of the interdisciplinary work we do in the Cluster.”
Author: Tim Schröder | Source: Magazin Deutschland [January 12, 2011]