Oceanography | September 2015
Oceanography
THE OFFICIAL MAGAZINE OF THE OCEANOGRAPHY SOCIETY
VOL.28, NO.3, SEPTEMBER 2015
SPECIAL ISSUE ON
RUSALCA
Russian-American Long-term
Census of the Arctic
Oceanography | Vol.28, No.3
Oceanography | September 2015
100
SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE RUSSIAN-AMERICAN
LONG-TERM CENSUS OF THE ARCTIC
18
INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE. Russian-American Long-term
Census of the Arctic: RUSALCA
By K. Crane and A. Ostrovskiy
24
The Climate of the Pacific Arctic During the First RUSALCA Decade
2004–2013
By K.R. Wood, J. Wang, S.A. Salo, and P.J. Stabeno
36
Assessing Ocean Acidification Variability in the Pacific-Arctic Region as
Part of the Russian-American Long-term Census of the Arctic
By N.R. Bates
46
A Synthesis of Year-Round Interdisciplinary Mooring Measurements in
the Bering Strait (1990–2014) and the RUSALCA Years (2004–2011)
By R.A. Woodgate, K.M. Stafford, and F.G. Prahl
68
The Relationship Between Patterns of Benthic Fauna and Zooplankton
in the Chukchi Sea and Physical Forcing
By M.N. Pisareva, R.S. Pickart, K. Iken, E.A. Ershova, J.M. Grebmeier,
L.W. Cooper, B.A. Bluhm, C. Nobre, R.R. Hopcroft, H. Hu, J. Wang,
C.J. Ashjian, K.N. Kosobokova, and T.E. Whitledge
84
Abundance and Production Rates of Heterotrophic
Bacterioplankton in the Context of Sediment and Water Column
Processes in the Chukchi Sea
By L.W. Cooper, A.S. Savvichev, and J.M. Grebmeier
100 Long-Term Changes in Summer Zooplankton Communities of the
Western Chukchi Sea, 1945–2012
By E.A. Ershova, R.R. Hopcroft, K.N. Kosobokova, K. Matsuno, R.J. Nelson,
A. Yamaguchi, and L.B. Eisner
contents
VO L .2 8 , N O.3, S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 5
Oceanography
Oceanography | September 2015
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Oceanography | Vol.28, No.3
CONTACT US
The Oceanography Society
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SPECIAL ISSUE SPONSOR
Publication of this special issue of
Oceanography was made possible with funds
from the Arctic Research Program, Climate
Observation Division of the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, and the
United States Arctic Research Commission.
SPECIAL ISSUE GUEST EDITORS
• Kathleen Crane, Arctic Research Program,
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration
• Jacqueline M. Grebmeier, Chesapeake
Biological Laboratory, University of
Maryland Center for Environmental
Science
• Russell R. Hopcroft, Institute of Marine
Science, University of Alaska Fairbanks
UNCORRECTED PROOF
UNCORRECTED PROOF
First Decade
of RUSALCA
Next Decade
of RUSALCA
Barents Sea
Fisheries
Warming
Atlantic Water
116
190
218
Oceanography | Vol.28, No.3
116 Time-Series Benthic Community Composition and Biomass and
Associated Environmental Characteristics in the Chukchi Sea During
the RUSALCA 2004–2012 Program
By J.M. Grebmeier, B.A. Bluhm, L.W. Cooper, S.G. Denisenko, K. Iken,
M. Kędra, and C. Serratos
134 Spatial Patterns of Bryozoan Fauna Biodiversity and Issues of
Biogeographic Regionalization of the Chukchi Sea
By N.V. Denisenko and J.M. Grebmeier
146 Assessing Bioresources and Standing Stock of Zoobenthos
(Key Species, High Taxa, Trophic Groups) in the Chukchi Sea
By S.G. Denisenko, J.M. Grebmeier, and L.W. Cooper
158 Ichthyofaunal Baselines in the Pacific Arctic Region and RUSALCA
Study Area
By C.W. Mecklenburg and D. Steinke
190 Sediment Geochemistry and Diatom Distribution in the Chukchi Sea:
Application for Bioproductivity and Paleoceanography
By A.S. Astakhov, A.A. Bosin, A.N. Kolesnik, and M.S. Obrezkova
202 Source, Origin, and Spatial Distribution of Shallow Sediment Methane
in the Chukchi Sea
By T. Matveeva, A.S. Savvichev, A. Semenova, E. Logvina, A.N. Kolesnik,
and A.A. Bosin
218 The Next Decade of RUSALCA
By K. Crane
Oceanography | September 2015
Editor
Ellen S. Kappel
Geosciences Professional Services Inc.
5610 Gloster Road
Bethesda, MD 20816 USA
t: (1) 301-229-2709
ekappel@geo-prose.com
Contributing Writer
Cheryl Lyn Dybas
cheryl.lyn.dybas@gmail.com
Oceanography
W W W.TO S .O R G /O C E A N O G R A P H Y
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Gregg J. Brunskill
84 Alligator Creek Road
Alligator Creek, Queensland 4816
Australia
g.brunskill@aims.gov.au
Margaret L. (Peggy) Delaney
Professor of Ocean Sciences
Ocean Sciences Department
University of California, Santa Cruz
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA
t: (1) 831-459-4736
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delaney@ucsc.edu
Charles H. Greene
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Program
Department of Earth & Atmospheric
Sciences
Cornell University
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Evolution Research
JAMSTEC
Tokyo, Japan
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INSTAAR
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THE
OCEANOGRAPHY
SOCIETY
P.O. Box 1931
Rockville, MD 20849-1931 USA
t: (1) 301-251-7708; f: (1) 301-251-7709
www.tos.org
The Oceanography Society was founded in 1988
to disseminate knowledge of oceanography and
its application through research and education, to
promote communication among oceanographers,
and to provide a constituency for consensus-
building across all the disciplines of the field.
OFFICERS
Susan Lozier, President
Alan Mix, President-Elect
Mark Abbott, Past-President
Susan Cook, Secretary
Susan Banahan, Treasurer
COUNCILORS
William Balch
Kristen Buck
Amy Burgess
Lee Karp-Boss
Gail Kineke
John Largier
Steven Lohrenz
Julie Pullen
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Jennifer Ramarui
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Oceanography | September 2015
Oceanography | Vol.28, No.3
08
16
Oceanography | Vol.28, No.3
ON THE COVER
The Russian research vessel Professor Khromov plows
its way through thin ice over the Chukchi Plateau on a
US-Russian collaborative multidisciplinary mission to dis-
cover causes and consequences of diminishing sea ice
cover on the Russian and US sides of the Chukchi Sea.
Photo credit: Aleksey Ostrovskiy
DEPARTMENTS
05
QUARTERDECK. Launch of the New Oceanography Website
By E.S. Kappel
07
FROM THE PRESIDENT. Sharks and Miami Lawyers
By M.S. Lozier
08
RIP CURRENT | NEWS IN OCEANOGRAPHY. Recent Sargassum
Inundation Events in the Caribbean: Shipboard Observations Reveal
Dominance of a Previously Rare Form
By J.M. Schell, D.S. Goodwin, and A.N.S. Siuda
12
COMMENTARY. Mediterranean Sea Ship-based Hydrographic
Investigations Program (Med-SHIP)
By K. Schroeder, T. Tanhua, H.L. Bryden, M. Álvarez, J. Chiggiato,
and S. Aracri
16
RIPPLE MARKS. One Fish, Two Fish, Cold Fish…Warm Fish?
Opah is First Known Warm-Blooded Ocean Fish
By C.L. Dybas
220 HANDS-ON OCEANOGRAPHY. Turbidity Currents: Comparing
Theory and Observation in the Lab
By J.D. Ortiz and A.A. Klompmaker
228 THE OCEANOGRAPHY CLASSROOM. How Broad is Your Course?
By S. Boxall
230 BOOK REVIEWS. Discovering the Deep: A Photographic Atlas of
the Seafloor and the Ocean Crust • Biogeochemistry of Marine
Dissolved Organic Matter (Second Edition)
233 CAREER PROFILES. Shelby Walker, Director, Oregon Sea Grant •
Cynthia J. Decker, Executive Director, NOAA Science Advisory Board
220
Oceanography | September 2015
Over the last few months, The Oceanography Society has embarked on a project
to update the Oceanography website (http://www.tos.org/oceanography). In addi-
tion to refreshing the site’s look and feel, we want to provide the community with
two important features: responsive design and citation export tools. Responsive
design provides fully viewable and easily navigable Web pages whether you are
on a big screen, laptop, tablet, or smart phone. The Web page resizes as the frame
gets smaller or larger, depending on your device screen size or browser area,
so that you don’t have to scroll around to find information. Menus collapse to
“hamburger” menus (those three horizontal lines in the upper right area of the
screen) so that you have all options available, even on a small screen, without
scrolling. Most journal websites have not transitioned to responsive design yet,
but we feel strongly that it is an important step to take since users now search
for information on a variety of devices. We also want the Oceanography pages
to match the responsive design of the main TOS website. The planned citation
export tools will provide users with the ability to download Oceanography cita-
tions to various applications such as EndNote, BibText, and Reference Manager.
Our users have asked for this feature for a few years, and we are now pleased to be
able to provide this tool for the community.
The new Oceanography website is scheduled to launch before the end of this
year. We hope that you will exercise the site vigorously and notify me by email (at
ekappel@geo-prose.com) about any bugs or broken links so that we can take care
of those problems immediately. We also ask for your patience as links to article
pages will be changing. If you link to specific Oceanography pages or urls already
from your own Web pages, or have bookmarked pages, you may need to update
those links. DOIs for articles will, of course, remain the same, but the specific urls
they link to will be updated. We are doing everything we can to make sure that the
website launch goes smoothly, and we apologize in advance for any inconvenience
the updates may cause. Our goal is to provide the community with an attractive
website that is easily navigable on all devices.
Launch of the New
Oceanography Website
QUARTERDECK
Ellen S. Kappel, Editor
Oceanography | Vol.28, No.3
Call for Abstracts
It’s time to register and reserve your hotel in New Orleans
for the 2016 Ocean Sciences Meeting, 21-26 February.
Early Registration Deadline:
31 December 2015
Housing Deadline:
28 January 2016
osm.agu.org/2016/
Housing and Registration Now Open
Oceanography | September 2015
I have taught undergraduates and graduate students for over
20 years. And just as a parent would never admit to a favor-
ite child, I am loath to favor one set of students over the other.
However, I will admit to being particularly fond of a charac-
teristic trait of undergraduates rarely displayed by graduate
students—namely, the willingness to ask unfiltered questions.
Graduate students routinely ask me about mixing parameter-
izations, flow instabilities, Lagrangian dynamics, and most any-
thing else within a comfortable reach of a physical oceanogra-
pher. And then there are the questions from undergraduates.
Last week, in my class, Ocean and Atmosphere Dynamics, I was
describing recent changes in Arctic summer sea ice when a hand
shot up. Clearly engaged with the material, the student asked,
“I heard from a friend that the increased incidence of shark
attacks off the North Carolina coast this summer was due to the
cooling of waters at the poles. Is this true?” See what I mean by
unfiltered? And yet, I relish these questions as they give me a
toehold of interest with which to work. I like to unpack these
questions and see where they take the class discussion, which is
usually in a direction I had not anticipated at the start of class.
I enjoy these unfiltered questions for another reason: they
illustrate a curiosity about the ocean and an awareness that the
ocean is changing. But they also highlight considerable confusion
about what is changing and why. Since I started teaching under-
graduates, there has been a steady increase in the news coverage
on the ocean. Articles or news releases focused on ocean issues
such as sea level rise, plastics, the great ocean garbage patch, sea
ice loss, and acidification have been fairly commonplace for a
decade or more. But even though the news is commonplace, it
does not mean the information has been clearly communicated
or understood. As a case in point, consider the question about
the sharks off the North Carolina coast.
To simultaneously capitalize on student interest and provide
context on the modern challenges facing the ocean, oceanogra-
phers around the country have been revamping how they intro-
duce students to the study of oceanography. I have been par-
ticularly impressed by a course that a colleague of mine here
at Duke, Nicolas Cassar, has been teaching for a few years:
The Changing Oceans. This course takes a problem-based, rather
than a disciplinary, approach to the study of ocean sciences.
But what interests me the most about this course is that Nicolas
has the students interview, via Skype, authors of recent articles
focused on how the ocean is responding to human impact. The
students select the topics and the articles, and they ask the ques-
tions during the interview. Rather than learning oceanography
from a disciplinary framework, this course introduces oceanog-
raphy through the lens of curiosity. As I have learned through
the years, that curiosity rarely has disciplinary constraints. As an
added bonus, the class content and format, according to Nicolas,
have provided “fuel for interactive learning and critical thinking.”
The unfiltered questions from undergraduates are also inter-
esting to me because they allow a window into how the gen-
eral public perceives our changing ocean. This perception never
ceases to surprise me. Last spring at a reception for Duke alumni,
a Miami lawyer explained to me that he absolutely believed sea
level was rising, but he did not believe any of the “nonsense”
about global warming. When I asked him why he thought sea
level was rising, he quickly responded, “Because ice is melting.”
Deciding to stick with that line of reasoning, I asked him why
he thought the ice was melting. After a long pause, he told me
he would have to get back to me on that one. I am still wait-
ing. But I am also still wondering why the link between warm-
ing and sea level rise was not obvious to this individual and
whether as a community we can do a better job of communi-
cating these linkages.
The story about shark attacks and the one about the Miami
lawyer (a juxtaposition completely unintended but now appre-
ciated) converge with a suggestion for how TOS might facili-
tate communication to students and the general public on ocean
issues. I would like to suggest that TOS’s website serve as a reposi-
tory for the interviews conducted in Nicolas’s class and any other
such interviews of oceanographers both in the United States and
abroad. I also suggest that TOS create an FAQ page on com-
monly asked questions about the ocean. With TOS’s interest in
engaging early career scientists in our professional society, we
might consider this initiative a means for these scientists to edu-
cate the public about ocean sciences. At least it would be a start.
And for the perfect kickoff question, I have one about sharks!
If either of the two ideas above interest you, let me know
(susan.lozier@duke.edu). I am open to suggestions.
FROM THE PRESIDENT
M. Susan Lozier, TOS President
harks and
Miami Lawyers
Oceanography | Vol.28, No.3
RIP CURRENT | NEWS IN OCEANOGRAPHY
Recent Sargassum
Inundation Events in the Caribbean
Shipboard Observations Reveal Dominance of a Previously Rare Form
During June 2011, pelagic Sargassum began wash-
ing ashore along Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, West
African, and Brazilian coastlines in unprecedented
quantities. Tourist beaches were covered by more
than a meter of seaweed. Economic impacts of
this Atlantic basin-scale inundation event drew
international media attention (Higgins, 2011). By
summer 2012, our shipboard observations sug-
gested the Caribbean portion of the event had
run its course. However, another similarly exten-
sive Sargassum inundation was underway by April
2014, persisting through 2015 (MercoPress, 2015).
Did the invading pelagic Sargassum drift out
of the Sargasso Sea, a vast region bounded by the
currents of the North Atlantic gyre (Smetacek and
Zingone, 2013)? Alternatively, is its source the
North Equatorial Recirculation Region (NERR),
as suggested by satellite- derived observations of
Sargassum mats (Gower et al., 2013) and hind-
cast models of Sargassum landfalls (Johnson
et al., 2013)? Our recent net sampling indicates
that the invading Sargassum did not come from
the Sargasso Sea.
In late November 2014, Sea Education
Association’s (SEA’s) SSV Corwith Cramer departed
the Canary Islands. We sailed across the eastern
Sargasso Sea without a sighting, but on day 15,
after heading south into the tropics, we were sur-
rounded by Sargassum. For the next three weeks,
twice-daily surface net tows contained more
Sargassum than ever recorded by SEA voyages.
We noticed the seaweed looked different from the
Sargassum fluitans or S. natans with which we were
familiar from 20 years of sailing in the Sargasso
Sea, the Caribbean, and Florida Straits (Figure 1a).
Most resources assert pelagic Sargassum is com-
posed of two species, S. fluitans and S. natans.
However, each species exhibits a diversity of
FIGURE 1. Characteristics of three pelagic Sargassum forms (left to right:
S. natans I Parr, S. fluitans III Parr, and S. natans VIII Parr) collected during the
2014/2015 Caribbean inundation event. (a) Fronds showing arrangement of stem,
blades, and bladders. (b) Section of stem highlighting presence/absence of thorns.
Bladders and blades removed. (c) Bladders highlighting presence/absence of
spines. Bladder stalk is directed downward in each photo. (d) Mean and standard
error for length (mm), width (mm), and length/width ratio of blades. *Hydroid colonies
are often present on Sargassum and can be mistaken for spines or thorns.
By Jeffrey M. Schell, Deborah S. Goodwin,
and Amy N.S. Siuda