The new endeavor is possible because of the generosity of Virginia Tech alumni Bill and Carol Seale, who have committed a $2 million gift to the project. Their generous support has enabled Weiss and his team to develop a comprehensive plan to begin ocean monitoring. “The Coastal Zone Observatory’s work is a critical step forward to help us become better stewards of the world’s oceans, which are arguably our most critical resource on Earth,” said Bill Seale.
Following the data trail
According to Weiss, our knowledge of the marine environment — apart from the presence of microplastics — is full of holes. That’s in part because the ocean itself is a fickle source of data.
“We know the resolution of the surface of Mars better than the surface of our ocean floor,” Weiss said. “But that’s topography just on the seafloor. Now imagine how little we know about how conditions are when the water in the ocean is constantly moving. How can we describe a condition in a certain area if it’s constantly changing? If the moment you measure it, it’s gone?”
Researchers at the Coastal Zone Observatory will collect ocean data such as temperature and turbidity — the ability of sunlight to travel into depth — in a way that adapts to the ocean’s transience. They’ll use sensor-equipped swarms of underwater robots developed by a team of engineers led by Dan Stilwell, an electrical engineering professor in the College of Engineering and director of the Virginia Tech Center for Marine Autonomy and Robotics.
“It is energizing to watch the Seale Coastal Zone Observatory rapidly take shape,” said Kevin Pitts, dean of the College of Science. “The pollution of our oceans is worsening by the day, and I’m excited to see researchers in the Colleges of Science, Engineering, and veterinary medicine collaborate to learn more about these issues and find ways to help mitigate a global problem.”
The approach “rethinks the way we take ocean data,” Weiss said. He believes it can help the team establish a data set that reflects the marine environment as it is shaped by climate change over time. Autonomous vehicles give researchers a much more dynamic method for measuring environmental conditions, with the ability to move through ocean depths and with currents to follow the data. Eventually, the team can then operate those vehicles to collect microplastic concentrations and learn how they’re affected by the ocean conditions in flux around them.
“Let’s say, in the future, we have a sensor that would allow us to determine in situ, very quickly, the concentration of microplastics,” said Weiss, who is director of the Academy of Integrated Science, also part of the College of Science. “We can follow the value of concentrations in the ocean, and by the motion of the vehicle, we can determine how these concentrations evolve over time. So that gives us a much more comprehensive, and full, data set to understand how microplastics move in the ocean. What conditions, like temperature, are they dependent on?”
As researchers gather data on the marine environment, others at the Coastal Zone Observatory will study the impact of microplastics on marine life as that impact extends from individuals to species and moves up the food chain. In the Chesapeake Bay area, biologists from the College of Science and veterinarians from the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine will study the effects of ingesting microplastics on fish used for seafood. Others will collaborate with biologists from Radford University and Connecticut’s Fairfield University to study microplastics consumption by tilapia and Magellanic penguins and learn which types of microplastics affect coastal organisms the most.
The Center for Coastal Studies is part of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute. Weiss launched the center in 2020 to coordinate research, teaching, and outreach aimed at ensuring a more sustainable coexistence of mankind and nature within coastal communities.
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