The Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies

Hi, I’m Andrea Emmanuelli, an incoming third year Geology and Environmental Chemistry student at Florida State University! This summer I had the opportunity to intern at CICOES with Dr. Bonnie Chang, who studies marine nitrogen cycling and the origin and air-sea flux of marine nitrous oxide. While working with Dr. Chang, I shifted my focus slightly from studying nitrate and Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) in a wet chemistry lab to studying another aspect of ocean climate change, using marine nitrous oxide (N2O) concentrations measured on global research missions (GO-SHIP cruises) to train a Random Forest algorithm using Python. Understanding the processes that contribute to atmospheric N2O concentrations is crucial because N2O is a potent greenhouse gas, so at smaller concentrations than CO2 it packs an even bigger punch.  Traditional methods of measuring marine N2O have a limited spatial and temporal footprint, so training an algorithm to predict N2O from other biogeochemical parameters can allow us to utilize autonomous floats such as BGC ARGO to calculate N2O over much wider areas! At first, I was nervous to take on this project because of my limited experience working with computer programming languages. However, having the summer at CICOES to fully focus on learning how to read and edit scripts in Python was a great opportunity to dive deep into understanding how machine learning works and how I can best utilize it. No matter what field I go into, machine learning skills are essential in a data economy!

By studying HABs and N2O, I’ve learned that climate change is affecting the ocean in all sorts of ways. Another component of climate change is called ocean acidification (OA). It’s commonly referred to as climate change’s evil twin: as we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the ocean does our planet a great service by soaking some of it up! However, this also leads to a series of chemical reactions in ocean water that in the end lower ocean pH and reduce concentrations of important minerals used by ocean organisms. During my CICOES internship, I had the opportunity to sail for the first time with Dr. Jessica Cross on a NOAA Gulf of Alaska mission to study this process. A recent risk assessment for Alaska’s fisheries sector showed that several regions in Alaska that are highly reliant on fishery harvests and have lower alternatives for employment face the highest risk from OA. One of the most vulnerable is southeastern Alaska, where we focused our work. On this mission, I also got to collect nutrient samples to take back to FSU, where I will be analyzing them for nitrate and nitrogen isotopes. This will hopefully give us insight to some factors that may contribute to algal blooms occurring in the Gulf of Alaska. Ocean acidification could be one of the factors exacerbating the impacts of harmful algal blooms.

In addition to learning how to collect samples at sea, sailing on the R/V Rachel Carson for almost three whole weeks was such an amazing and one-of-a-kind. Getting to analyze a CTD (conductivity-temperature-depth) sensor cast live is such an insightful experience because it shows how geology, biology, physics, and chemistry work together in real-time. One of my favorite parts of the mission was getting to sample right in front of Margerie Glacier in Glacier Bay National Park. I love visiting National Parks, so being able to make a meaningful scientific contribution to the park service through this mission felt really personal.

This summer has really been my biggest adventure yet and it has shown me how much I love research, especially environmental research that serves the public and promotes the conservation of our natural ecosystems.

Project introduction:

Research poster: