Foundation created Eric Schmidt, former executive director of Google will finance the project for sending drones in the rough ocean around Antarctica to collect data that could help solve the key climatic puzzle. The project is part of the financing package announced today from Schmidt Sciences, which Schmidt and his wife Wendy have created to focus on research projects in the global carbon cycle. He will spend $ 45 million in the next five years to finance these projects, including investigating Antarctica.
“Ocean provides this really critical climate regulation service to all of us, and yet we do not understand that,” says Galen McKinley, Professor of the Environmental Science and Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and one of the main scientists on the project. “I’m just excited to see how much this data can really withdraw the community of people trying to understand and quantify the ocean model.”
The world’s oceans are its greatest carbon sinks, are absorbed about a third of the CO2 people in the atmosphere every year. One of the most important carbon sinks is the southern ocean, the body of water around Antarctica. Despite the fact that the second least of the five oceans in the world is, the southern ocean is responsible for about 40 percent of all acean-shaped absorption on the ocean.
Scientists, however, know a little slightly why, exactly, the southern ocean is such a successful carbon sink. What more, climate models that successfully predict the absorption of oceans in the form of otherwise elsewhere in the world significantly departed when it comes to the southern ocean.
One of the biggest problems with understanding more about what is happening in the southern ocean is simply a lack of data. This is very grateful in extreme conditions in the region. A passage from Drake who works between South America and Argentina, is one of the most severe parts of the ocean for ships, due to incredibly strong currents around Antarctica and dangerous winds; It is even spent in winter months. The ocean also has a particularly pronounced cloud blanket, says, which makes satellite observation difficult.
“The southern ocean is really far away, so we just didn’t do a lot of science there,” McKinley says. “It’s a very big ocean, and this is a dramatic and scary place.”
