- All right. Welcome, everyone.
We're so pleased that you're taking your afternoon or evening to join us here for our
National Marine Sanctuaries webinar series.
So, this series is hosted by the NOAA office of National Marine Sanctuaries
and we find that it's a great way for us to connect with formal and informal educators
and other interested parties, to provide you with educational and scientific expertise.
As well as resources and educational materials training, etc. to support--
literacy in your classroom or in your facilities with your different audiences.
So, with that, I would like to let you all know that you've come in as an attendee.
We have 114 direct registrants that have signed up for today's webinar.
All attendees that are participating live will come in and listen-only mode.
You're welcome to type any questions you may have into the question box
in your control panel, on the right hand side of your screen.
This is the same area you can let us know if you're having any technical difficulties.
And I'll respond to them as soon as I can.
We are recording today's live webinar presentation
and we'll be sharing this archive with all registered participants.
And it'll live on our webinar archive page, in perpetuity.
So internet link will be provided at the end of the presentation and not to worry.
Typical government. It's super long, but we'll make sure to send it to you via email.
So, first, I wanted to do a just brief brief introduction
to the National Marine Sanctuary system, here.
You're looking at a map of North America and part of South Pacific.
And this is our network of underwater treasures.
So, the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries,
we, actually, are entrusted to manage this network of what we call underwater parks.
It's about 600,000 square nautical miles of special ocean and great Lake treasures
that NOAA manages.
And each of these blue dots on the map represent one of our National Marine Sanctuaries.
And, actually, just a few weeks ago, we had a formal designation for our first National Marine Sanctuary
in nearly 20 years.
This was our Mallows Bay-Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary designation.
The one before that was Thunder Bay, designated in 2000, and
this is the site we're going to be zooming in on on today's webinar.
So from the newest and then the formerly newest, back in 2000.
But it's important to note that these National marine sanctuaries help protect the ocean and Great Lakes.
And these areas are actually set aside for a wide variety of reasons.
We do have the National Marine Sanctuaries Act
which allows Congress to put aside special ocean areas or Great Lakes areas
for a variety of reasons it could be recreational reasons or aesthetics,
ecological, conservation value, and then even shipwrecks and archaeological significance.
and so we are mandated as staff of NOAA and the National Marine Sanctuaries
to conduct research and monitoring, education and outreach, active management
that ultimately leads to resource protection.
We also like to call these underwater parks-- they're kind of living classrooms.
This is a place where you can actually go-- to explore and see and learn and touch and feel
what a National Marine Sanctuary is.
So here is a father/daughter kayaking in our Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary
off of Santa Barbara California, which is where I am located.
So my name is Clare Fackler.
I am the national education liaison for the National Marine Sanctuary system.
And I will be the webinar host for today's presentation.
And sitting in not so sunny Santa Barbara, California, today,
I will also be running the Q&A with our additional guests, today, Stephanie Gandulla.
Stephanie is the acting research coordinator for NOAA's Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary
and she's going to give us a little more in-depth presentation on what is
the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
And then we'll have the privilege of introducing our guest speaker. So, take it away, Stephanie.
Thank you very much, Claire.
As Claire said, we are coming to you from the heart of the Great Lakes.
the largest fresh surface water system on the planet.
And we are the only freshwater, for now, the only freshwater National Marine Sanctuary
in the entire country.
And we were designated, as Claire said, in the year 2000
to protect a very special collection of shipwrecks.
These shipwrecks are archaeological sites that tell us an important part of American history
and are significant not just because of their quantity.
We estimate there's over 200 within the 4,300 square miles of sanctuary waters.
And not just because of their quality, frozen in time in the cold fresh waters of Lake Huron,
but also for their accessibility.
Many Thunder Bay shipwrecks are so shallow, you can paddle or snorkel to connect with them.
As you see right here in this image of the the sunken paddle wheeler, Albany,
taken by a storm in the late 1800s.
In fact, you can even see shipwrecks from a glass-bottom boat.
So, while we work hard to protect and preserve this this important history,
we also protect the amazing natural resources of the Great Lakes.
Natural resources, such as the submerged sinkholes, that you're going to be hearing about, tonight.
And we encourage scientists from all over the world, like Dr. Bopi, to conduct research in the sanctuary.
And were honored that he and his team are one of our longest standing partners
in sanctuary science.
Professor Bopi is an aquatic microbial ecologist,
who studies the movement of carbon driven by microbes.
and he's based out of the Annis Water Resources Institute in Grand Valley State University.
He grew up in the lush tropical sub-- excuse me-- the lush subtropical mountains
of Southwest India
and came to the U.S. in the 1980s to get a PhD in ecology from the University of Georgia.
Subsequently, he went on adventures at the Alpha Wegener Institute for polar and marine research,
in Germany.
the National Institute of Oceanography in India,
and the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Texas.
And he's been to Brazil studying and doing research, and at the University of Minnesota.
So he comes to us with a lot of background and skill and experience.
For the last 15 years, he's been at Grand Valley State University
and studying the microbial cycling of elements in the Great Lakes.
Exploring life in extreme environments, such as the sinkholes that we're going to be exporing tonight.
So, with that, I would like to hand it over to Dr. Bopi
and I know you will enjoy and learn from his fascinating research and findings.
- Thank you, Claire
Thank you, Stephanie.
In the next 30 minutes or so what I'd like to do is share with you the excitement of
about 15 years of discovery and exploration
of some of the most interesting and extreme ecosystems on planet Earth.
All of this in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Huron, in the Great Lakes.
Of course, I didn't do all of this by myself.
I had a great bunch of collaborators from oceanographers to genomics.
The first three here, you see here, Steve, Tom and Scott, were there from the very beginning
and then were joined by Stephen Nold, Greg Dick and Tony Weinke
who brought in their own skillsets to solve subsequent problems that we're facing.
So I'll share the excitement of all that with you.
I also want to acknowledge, at the very beginning,
funding they received from several national federal institutions.
So I'll cover in this seminar.
Objectives:
Do the sinkhole ecosystems resemble those of the shallow anoxic and sulfuric Seas of the early Earth?
Can the life in submerged sinkholes serve as analogs in our search for ongoing life in extraterrestrial waters?
When the strategy is going to be very simple.
^ search from shallow to deep sites.
^ search from near to far
and this stage, I want everyone to kind of relax because it's going to be mostly a picture show.
And I will share data or short data only when it's absolutely necessary.
So, we're going to the heart of the Laurentian Great Lakes,
the largest contiguous body of freshwater,
containing nearly 20% of Earth's liquid surface water.
Note it's going to northwestern Lake Huron
that were the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary is.
That's the study area.
And this is a geological map of the bedrock aquifer of the Great Lakes basin.
And one thing you can see is, apart from the Lake Superior and Upper Great Lake,
all the lower Great Lakes are underlined by limestone and dolomite-- sedimentary rocks.
And this is a great importance because limestone is very porous and holds lots of groundwater.
The other thing you can see is that
in the Michigan Peninsula the there are layers of the bedrock are bent.
So consequently the aquifers are too.
So focusing on the Alpena area, you can see that there is limestone karst bedrock,
and also dolomite-- calcium carbonate containing limestone.
And then there's gypsum, which is calcium sulfate,
which is left over by Paleozoic marine evaporites.
These are seas that dried up four hundred million years ago and left their salt behind.
So, the groundwater washing through these ancient marine evaporites
and today will carry those salts, high sulfates
And the long canoe time takes out all the oxygen because everything there is respired.
So, in the end, when we have water coming out of these layers,
we have no oxygen and high sulfur.
These are the very conditions that prevailed in the smelly shallow seas of the early Earth.
One thing you will notice, here, is that in this kind of layered pattern,
a groundwater that's trapped between a porous upper layer and an impervious lower layer
can either try to go down
or if the depth is too shallow, too deep, then it can actually emerge in a shallower areas
like in the bottom of Lake Huron. That's what creates sinkholes.
So, sinkholes are just gradual erosion of the bedrock,
preferably limestone, which is more easy to degrade than other igneous rocks.
And so, this is a schematic of how, over time, the groundwater can erode away limestone
and form sinkholes.
As you can see, sinkholes can also appear on the land.
Those are inland sinkholes.
Then you can have submerged sinkholes in the bottom of lakes, such as the Great Lakes.
And the interesting thing here is that
the venting waters always a steady approximately 9 degrees Celsius,
which is the reflection of the average temperature at the surface of these zones,
of these biomes
across the last millennium, last 1,000 years.
So,
these areas will stink of sulfur.
They're like just like pre-- very early Earth, which was full of sulfur. So fewer seas.
There is a library fountain in the middle of Alpena town
which stinks.
here the water is tapped from 600 meters deep
and it taps into that marine evaporate layer we were talking about.
So it is coming out with high sulfur and low oxygen,
and you can see it fuels an upside down sinkhole
with purple cyanobacteria in the bottom
and white chemosynthetic sulfur oxidizing bacteria at the top.
We, actually, did the education and outreach poster board for the library, working with them.
And here is two my students trying to see whose the first to close his nose at the smell.
This is a map of-- bathymetric map of Lake Huron Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary
where we have found sinkholes.
The on the left are online sinkholes.
There are also falls. They are usually round in shape and contain groundwater.
And then there are the shallow sinkholes, ones where you can wade into, such as El Cajon Bay
and a Middle Island sinkhole about 23 meters deep,
where about 5% of the surface water still gets down to the bottom.
And then isolated sinkholes which is
which is way off offshore around, over 100, 110 meters deep.
There's no light gets in.
And then, in recent years, 2016 and 27 you've discovered a field of offshore karst sinkholes,
which are even more deeper and aphotic.
And we will look into all of these a little bit in the seminar.
So, starting with the shallow sinkholes.
On land sinkholes. You can see them this is an aerial photo that I took.
And to off to the right corner you have Lake Huron there.
Shallow Lake Huron, your Shallow Springs.
Ones that are variable and ones that can be pretty deep, like 70 feet deep.
So groundwater emerging from shallow submerged sinkhole springs
are characterized by green algae on the surface and purple sulfur of bacteria,
cyanobacteria in the depths.
So that's green algae at the surface,
then you have you can see the actual springs bubbling out
and you can see some bits of purple here and in the very origins of that
in the between about one meter deep depth you can see in low-light and pure ground water
which is sulfur later, you know, as cyanobacteria.
Going off in the in the increasing depth gradient, they're off to the middle island sinkhole
which is 23 meters deep.
And you can see there is research vessels for scale it's the areas of our a football field built.
And the question what's going on inside?
So we did bathymetric mapping using side-scan sonar.
So you can see there are there's a shallow alcove, here.
That's where groundwater fills in and then cascades out in an underwater waterfall
into this broader area which we call arena.
A high resolution multi-beam bathymetry showing all the details.
Again can see that alcove, here, that just dissolved and gone away.
And that's the source of groundwater
and water comes out there 23 meters and spills over a 15 meter a ledge on to the 23 25 meter arena, here.
So it is an interesting limbno oceanographic situation here.
You can clearly see lake water overlain by dense groundwater, almost like a mirror effect,
where turn in a pickup line the density differences and thermocline.
Temperature differentials stand out very strongly in a reflective fashion.
So to prove that point, we did see DD cast which is temperature conductivity and depth profiles.
And you can see, the conductivity is higher, about tenfold.
pH is whole unit lower in venting water, related to ground waters. Sorry about that.
And then you can see also dissolved oxygen is almost zero in the venting water.
It's well oxygenated in Lake Huron water and sulfate concentrations are over a hundred fold higher.
So groundwater emerging at different sites has essentially the same chemical signature.
Whether it be the fountain in the city center, they're tapping into the same aquifer,
El Cajon Bay, or middle island are even further off offshore.
So just think there's a unique, uniform, large aquifer. So common source.
Early Earth's shallow seas also had low oxygen and higher sulfur conditions.
Something to remember.
So it profiled here, it's very interesting,
and you can see there is specific conductivity increases by tenfold
in when it hits the bottom groundwater.
Groundwater hugs the bottom because it's very salty.
That's what specific conductivity is telling you.
It's more denser than the lake water.
Similarly, you can see the temperature is being the summer,
there's a summer thermocline in the surface and then again a very super sharp thermocline
when it hits the groundwater.
And then, dissolved oxygen, Vera Vera oxygenated almost saturation point
goes to almost nothing in the in this oxic line.
And similarly there is a there is a big change in there all kinetic acidity rasnge.
pH dropped by almost one whole unit in the groundwater.
So there is the shallow sunlit sinkholes,
where there's sign of bacteria doing photosynthesis
and then there will go on to the deep sites where there's no sunlight.
there's no synthesis for layers.
Chemosynthesis, organic matter is synthesized not with photosynthesis
where electrons from hard water are used here.
Chemosynthesis organisms use electrons from hydrogen sulfide,
hydrogen, and other metallic compounds.
So there's a schematic of this very simple showing photosynthesis
and chemosynthesis using in the energy in chemical bonds.
Well, this is important because we have to be as we go on we wonder whether
whether microbial ecosystems, like this, photosynthetic ones that were dominated by cyanobacteria
in modern day or have are analogous to what were there in early Earth
and have had a role in oxygenating the planet and during its turbulent childhood.
So the actors in this game, we can look in and you see, in under the microscope,
this purple cyanobacterial cell amongst, which are photosynthetic.
And this special accessory pigments called phycocyanin which help them tap sunlight
and make organic matter.
And then you have this chemosynthetic sulfur oxidizing bacteria elements
that are dark, many of them have sulfur granules in them post sulfur sulfur oxidation.
So details, here you can see a couple of types of cyanobacteria
and a couple of types of dark darkly stained chemosynthetic sulfur oxidizing bacteria.
Seems like that the community here is very taxonomically simple ,
but you'll see that they're very first functionally versified.
So now then in GA it's 16 years ribosomal RNA sequencing of the bacterial portion
of the community showed that cyanobacteria dominate.
Okay so you can see that the community seems to be taxonomically simple,
subsequently see that if we really very versatile.
Alright, this is a good place to start.
This is a cross-section of the intact sediment with the the surface layer of
photosynthetic organisms at the purple sign of a tree at the very top.
This cyanobacteria can do both oxygen and anoxygenic photosynthesis.
So oxygenic photosynthesis is the common method right now in grasses to trees
and phytoplankton in the sea.
But anoxygenic photosynthesis was the one that was prevalent very early in early early Earth.
Here, hydrogen sulfide instead of H2O is used in the end of preparation of organic matter.
Okay. So there's that layer is followed by chemosynthetic sulfur oxidizing bacteria
that's followed by sulfate reducing bacteria,
and then a bunch of carbon rich sediments including methanogens.
so this is like a strongly interconnected consortium
where the waste of one is the food of the other.
So, there's the so far the real biodiversity and the potential for methodical value of these of the sequences
microvilli they dominated ecosystems is still unknown.
So we're seeking answers to them.
I mentioned very very strong functional and behavioral diversity.
So, here's an example of us bringing these stamp mats into the into the lab
and dispersing them in a petri dish,
and putting a phone cut out of our University logo, Grand Valley State University.
And then shining light on it.
And then, within a couple of hours, you can see all the filaments are gathered into the lighted area.
So they're phototactic so they can travel millimeters in minutes,
which is like a rabbit, not a turtle,
If you look at body lengths traveled per minute.
So, very fast.
And also we have evidence for vertical motility.
Here's the case where we have we put white shelf pieces on the surface,
and, after about six to eight hours, they are covered up by purple cyanobacteria
which are don't like to be shaded, they are always seeking sunlight.
So they come up to uncover it.
So, this might be a mechanism for bearing carbon.
Whatever's up there, they go over it and push it in the bottom where there's anoxic sediments
which preserve organic matter.
So, in fact, the importance of organic carbon burial cannot be overstated.
That's the basis of the carbon pump,
which takes up carbon mostly carbon dioxide in the oceans and fresh waters .
This carbon gets buried an equal molar amount of oxygen gets released.
That's how the earth presumably began to get oxygen.
That experience net oxidation oxygenation in the in the early phases of the biosphere.
So this is an acoustic sub-bottom profile,
and you can see that there is lots there's this water here and that there's a lot of certain socks
18 meters of sediments.
This is an amazing amount of water if you take off sediment.
If you think it's only been six ten or fifteen thousand years since the Great Lakes formed.
So those rates, one to two liters sediment accumulation for millennium, is the highest rate anywhere.
This may not surely know how to bury carbon.
So, another behavioral thing we have always observed before but we never got to check
he is changes in the day and nighttime coloration of these mats.
From purple in the day and white in the-- at night.
We observe these in the lab but not in the field.
So, we deployed this GoPro camera over 48 hours.
time like photography and they also collected additional course for lab studies.
And you can see in this over two days sun's at sunset
because during the day at the end of the day it was purple at night turned started turning white.
And before pre-dawn it was mostly white.
And early right no-- in the early morning it was quite white.
And so it goes through this purple and white settings.
From our hours our thinking is that, during the day,
where a purple cyanobacteria come up to harvest the sunlight,
and during the night,
the white chemosynthetic sulfur oxidizing mats come to harvest the excess sulfur hydrogen sulfide
that's on the surface.
In fact, lab studies of intact course confirm this.
That during day it's purple, but it at the end of the night, they turn white.
This year, this summer, we confirmed this, again, that during sunrise, purple changing to sunset
So, you know, we wonder: was this the first tango?
Could this have been the largest daily synchronized mass moment of life on early Earth?
Yeah, maybe it was just moment through millimeters,
but that was all that might have been there.
And this might have been the biggest mass moment
daily mass moment of life on the planet, at one time.
So we're after the deep, deep sinkholes
where we deployed big ROVs and mapped at the bottom.
And you can see there's this white widget or or chemosynthetic mats in the bottom.
They're similar toward the Alvin sees in deep-sea vents and seeps.
So you can see in a map of close to the lake floor,
there's this hot spots of conductivity high conductivity water,
which coincide with hot spots of temperature,
which is the temperature of the ground water is warmer than the lake water at this depth.
So those are the venting groundwater spots.
And you can see an Nepheloid layer where this venting water comes and stabilizes.
Stabilizes. And in this venting more these venting
these Nepheloid layers are hotspots of microbial activity.
Teeming full of life, where everything is 10 200 times faster than elsewhere.
And a close-up of these maps reveals there's real structure to these mats.
And there's this large cells, too, which we think are which might be Thiomargarita species,
which is following around deep-sea vents.
And also a large sulfur bacteria from similar to deep-sea vents.
All these things make us infer that these communities are really similar to deep-sea communities,
which have sulfur driven.
So, in addition to this, we were fortunate to discover new field of aphotic sinkholes in offshore areas,
and that is well offshore of the isolated sinkhole we just looked.
Worried about that...
So in 2015 and 2016, we discovered seven such sinkholes using side-scan sonar
and early footage caught white mats around it.
In 2017 and 18, we discovered 14 more using multi beams.
That's just like wearing a new set of glasses and seen twice as much as before.
And some of these sinkholes, twin sinkholes, some of them had 18 meters depth.
You know, we're deep, below the lake floor .
This very astonishing and some of them are actively venting.
So, those will be future areas where we'll conduct explorations.
So, putting that all into the context of the early Earth,
you can see that this is you can the y axis here is on a log scale, so
you can see that oxygen concentrations were minuscule for the longest time.
And then one of our only one percent of what it is today, for about two billion years.
This during this time, there was this battle between
between anoxygenic and oxygen cyanobacteria.
And eventually oxygen and cyanobacteria won over.
And then we made this 21% accumulation in that last year.
So the idea is that the modern day sink holes.
there's the cyanobacteria we see are analogs of these mix it versatile communities
that might have prevailed over these very long periods of Earth's history
when oxygen content was very low.
And today they're in refuge low oxygen, high sulfur, refugia, here and there,
in different corners of the world, yeah of the earth in small to large sizes.
So where on earth are such microbial communities found?
These are images from the dry valley lakes of Antarctica.
Okay and you have similar protrusions and this is of course Middle Island Sinkhole
which we call these are we call them purple Ridge Mountains or Hills.
They're just about a foot or two foot high and very similar runs in Antarctica, too.
So, they're just filled by methane and hydrogen sulfide that builds up in the sediments
under these mats.
And then get pulled up into more ridge type, this thing.
So, on the other hand, the deepwater sites resemble very much very much what the Alvin sees
in the deep sea. These white chemosynthetic bacterial mats.
So, there are other shadow buyers piercing in our middest. Very possible.
I mean, there are similar systems in the Yellowstone National Park, for example.
Then elsewhere, outside of the Earth,
there they're not on Earth could such microbial mat communities be formed.
There are at least nine extraterrestrial oceans in the solar system.
Find just Europa alone. The Europeís oceans alone contain more water than all of the water on Earth.
And spaceships buzzing by Europa
have noticed them, know this water it proves that it shoots out from its ocean
and it's a big target of NASA's in the next investigation.
There's also, Titan has a lake district of unknown depths.
Although, not purely water, it's also it's liquid and that's it may work in investigation.
Back here, this is an image that we that just came out in Eos
which is the Earth and space names of an american geophysical union.
It's still live in the very bottom of the page.
that's suggesting Lake Huron sinkholes could be very good models,
moral analogues for practicing there search of Earth lakescape as
a model for life in extraterrestrial waters.
So what might we find under the lakes of Titan or the oceans of Europa?
There's more habitable exoplanets we've been discovering in the last decade.
and there's almost systems like the solar system like the TRAPPIST system
with all really about three of the planets in the habitable zone
or similar to earth.
Fine just this the Kepler telescope discovered the K2-18 B
which is orbiting at our planet orbiting around the dwarf Sun
that has water in the atmosphere.
And even more promise.
And even find them similarly interesting is that the Gaia satellite in 2016,
peering into our own Milky Way galaxy,
called twice as many stars in our galaxy as we knew before.
That doubles the chances of having twice the chances of habitable planet exoplanets
within our galaxy.
So back on our home planet,
time, water, and geological forces have converged to create underwater sinkholes
that oxygen for its sulfuric groundwater supports microbial mats resembling life
very similar to that early Earth.
Whereas the photosynthetic cyanobacteria in the shallow sinkholes may resemble
the Proterozoic or the geological past,
the chemosynthetic mats in the deep water eroded sinkholes.
So, as the analogs of deep-sea vents and sea communities in today's oceans.
Both of these types of microbial communities could be used as analogues for our search.
When I searched life beyond them, beyond Earth.
I want to really thank the incredible dive team of the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary
that made all this possible.
Russ, Wayne and Stephanie have been there from the very beginning.
John, Phil, Joe, and Tane joined us along the way.
What I wanna thank, thank you. This work would not have been possible without you.
and I will show now a video audio video overview of the sinkhole system.
Most of it should be self-explanatory based on what you what we've been through.
If you have questions, be sure to ask me at the end of the seminar.
Thank you.
- [Claire] All right, thank you for a really interesting presentation on sinkhole ecosystems.
So, we have time in our webinar here to take any questions that some of our attendees may have.
There's several ways of doing this,
One way is type your question into the question box in the control panel
and we'll go through them and have the professor respond.
If you're feeling ambitious, you can actually raise your hand in the control panel
and I will unmute you and you can actually ask your question directly to Professor Bopi.
So I will, in the meantime, wait to see if anyone's brave and will raise their hand,
but we do have a question that has come in via the question box.
So, Michael's asking:
Might these sinkholes and the venting waters from them have any positive positive impact
on the fishery environment?
That's an interesting question.
They've never never figured out if these are quantitatively significant to the Great Lakes as a whole,
you know, enough to raise the water level.
So, certainly, it's potentially possible. In the immediate vicinity of these sinkholes? Yes.
You're correct. It does have an effect.
Basically, man oxygen is so low and sulfur is so high, fishes cannot exist.
Indeed, even invertebrates cannot exist.
So, it's mostly microbial. So in the immediate vicinity, there is no fishes.
But they hang out in the fringes because there's all this lush purple lawn of productivity
that we see many of them coming and taking nibbles on them in the periphery .
But in the core of the sinkholes there's no larger organisms like fish and larger invertebrates about.
but because we think they're scattered here and there
but there are small in quantitatively these ecosystems.
The impact, the negative impact is not significant.
But it's important in that particular ecosystem because it excludes all the larger organisms.
And that's why it's say it's true and what totally microbial system just like
maybe how it was in the shallows of yours so oxygen less water.
- Okay, great. Thank you.
I, I'm gonna test this. It doesn't always work out,
but it looks like Ronald Young has raised his hand in the control panel.
Sometimes people do that, accidentally.
Oh. No. The hand has been removed so that was an accident. So I won't unmute you, Ronald.
But if anyone else would like to raise their hand in the control panel, I will unmute you.
You can ask your question. Otherwise, go ahead and type it into the question box.
I personally had a question.
In the photo and the video at the end, when it was showing the deeper sinkholes,
Was that wood? Or was that bones? you know that particular--
- Oh, yeah. That is interesting.
Indeed, some of the very first NOAA ocean exploration when he came into this for archaeology,
not for biology or chemistry,
because the idea was that, you know, yeah everywhere everywhere in the lake or the ocean,
things fall from top to bottom.
Okay, and in fact archaeological effects will be covered up by falling debris.
But here is the situation where actually water is venting from the bottom.
And so, anything that falls, like a piece of ship rags or let's say Native American canoes
or things, building structures, would be exposed
because ground waters rafting away any any settling particles.
and those things artifacts would be visually available.
you know, to a ROV or can be caught in a side-scan or a multi beam scanner.
So, no. To answer your question, we were hoping there would be, but there was not.
In fact it was on a on a mid-lake ridge that travels between across Lake Huron
in a north from a northwest to southwest.
So, we had a reason to think that those debris might be actually wood
that native peoples might have used in the past.
But, no such luck. Yeah.
I think they're just being rounded up by tumbling around for a long time until they found a low spot
and settled in.
- So with an ROV, did you actually take samples through that ocean exploration work?
- Yeah. Things to do for exploration actually took pieces of that.
- Alright I'm gonna give folks another chance to ask your questions, here.
Type them into the question box or raise your hand in the control panel.
And then, Stephanie, if you're still there, if you have any questions or some food for thought,
feel free to join in.
All right. Well, I'm gonna go ahead.
There, Stephanie.
And we do-- there are some educational resources that we would like to share with the group.
So, I'm going to... hold on a second.
get my presentation back up and running.
There is a question that has come in
that is asking about: Is it possible for the PowerPoint to be emailed?
And we won't actually email it to all participants. However, I will let you know that
in the webinar archive page, the material the PDF of the PowerPoint will be archived there,
along with the recording of this presentation.
There also be a link to the video and then there's more educational materials available related to sinkholes.
So I'll go through some of those, right now,
and, in your control panel, I have uploaded a handout.
sinkhole ecosystems educational resources. So, that'll also be in the webinar archive.
But if you are itching to see what those resources are,
you can download that handout from the control panel, right now.
I'm gonna cover two of those that are listed in there.
As the professor Dr. Bindada? Oh gosh, sorry if I butchered your last name, there.
But, when the NOAA ocean exploration office did the work, I believe in 2008,
they also developed a number of lesson plans and materials
related to the Thunder Bay sinkholes expedition.
So, the direct link is going to be in that educational handout I mentioned.
But if you also get to the oceanexplorer.noaa.gov website
and search for Thunder Bay sinkholes,
you'll get to that expedition and can click on the education link for all the materials.
I've also been informed that Michigan's Sea Grant has a number of Great Lakes science with data
and if you search Lake Huron shipwrecks, you will also get a number of lesson plans
and educational materials that will help you bring this into your classroom or your facility.
And, again, there is that edu--
list that will be provided to all attendees and all registrants of today's webinar.
No need to jot down that long URL because, as I mentioned in the beginning,
you will be given that link over email.
And everyone that registered will also get it.
It usually takes us about four or five days to get the webinar archive materials online
and in a proper fashion to be on a NOAA.gov website.
So, by next week, we hope to send out that email.
If you have follow-up questions that you didn't get around to, today,
but you would like to address,
you are welcome to send it to sanctuary.education@NOAA gov
- I think there is one-- sorry, Claire, but I think, yes.
But I can't read the full thing.
Hold on, I'll pop out and...
Okay, you said that the-- okay, so this is gonna be for you, professor.
You said the one foot protrusions in the sinkhole are filled with methane.
If you were to cut into them would the structure collapse?
Or is it solid? This is the question.
- Yes. No, it's dead, not solid, at all.
It's just like a lose carpet that's been buoyed up.
It's floating being floated by these bouyant gases which are fermentative gases in the arc
carbons with sediment underneath.
So, it's mostly methane and hydrogen sulfide.
In fact, we have sampled them by just putting an nee--,you know, needle with the syringe and
pulling it out and then sending it to a gas chromatograph.
All right. So, during the late part of the growing season there's still some control.
So like they start growing in April and during like late August/September, this peak of production,
these gasses build up and they're, actually, sometimes even can get torn away.
And they float on the top, in the surface.
And we believe that's a natural part of the lifecycle.
They get torn away, float and bob around and end up in a beach
and then they dry up and get airlifted and go places.
And they can fall in places like Antarctica.
Populate a whole new ecosystem there.
I know this may seem like just theory, but the atmospheric transport does take a lot of things.
There's live microbes floating up in the atmosphere and making from one place to another.
So, yeah, very good question. Yeah there you see we see torn patches all the time
and sometimes, even while we are working there,
you can have have small patches of mats,
but bubbles of gas is still inside, bobbing away in the waves.
- Oh yeah, that is great question.
Actually, we have a few more that have come in since I started the wrap-up.
So we have time to get to these.
So...
Probe be sent to one of the water planets and could it explore underwater areas
and somehow send information back to us?
So, talking about the extraterrestrial life on other planets is that
something that either NASA or other groups are considering or already have done or plan to do?
- Yeah, it's definitely considering because I was part of an NASA workshop
on like imaging for life detection elsewhere in extraterrestrial waters.
And part of the plan with the Europa is to actually send send a like an ROV autonomous vehicle
down there to explore and send imageries and data back to us.
So, how feasible all this will be is it is a big question.
But we're in in the experimental stages of these sorts of explorations jumped.
So, yeah. Definitely those are in the plans in the next five to ten years.
They will see preliminary results of what has been it some of these seas that are in our own solar system.
- Excellent. And another question, here:
How do Lake Huron sinkholes compare to sinkholes and other bodies of fresh water in the world?
- Really, there's very little known about underwater sinkholes
because just because to find them is so difficult.
It's mostly luck.
A lot of sometimes a lot of hard work
because they're usually such a small signature in a large body of water.
Like the Lake Huron is like in the ocean
and here you have table size and room size and at the most football-field-sized sinkholes.
And they'll leave no surface signature.
The groundwater that's coming into them is dense because it's very salty.
Like, remember, said be they washed room ancient marine evaporates
carry all those chlorides and sulfates with them.
So it's dance and it hugs the body.
In a way that's what I allows them to bathe us ecosystem so the mats can flourish.
You know, because that's where the groundwater is their nutrition.
But on the other hand, there's hardly any surface signature.
So, this layer of one meter of ground water in a hundred meter water column is
almost impossible to detect.
From the surface, especially when these ecosystems are very tiny.
So, that's the major main a major problem, yeah.
So these were all challenge discoveries, like I said, some of them were associated with archaeology
looking for shipwrecks.
And the ROVs ran into hurdles of high conductivity water.
And then, we, as biologists and chemists, went in and said oh look high conductivity water.
That's water with very different chemistry.
So, water with different chemistry's around maybe it's feeling a different type of life.
Let's go take a look.
And those are the that kind of follow up
with and chance discoveries was what led to some of these findings.
But, we think they are all over the lower Great Lakes, for example.
Just because the karst caused aquifers that underlay all these lower Great Lakes
which are pretty expensive.
In fact, there are known reports of these by divers in in Ontario and Lake Erie
and other parts of Lake Huron, as well.
So they may be numerous, but not well studied or recorded.
- When I think you can consider getting additional funds with that, you kind of just grazed by it.
But that these sinkholes are carbon sinks.
So when you think about climate change and our carbon emissions,
You know, we are finding that the ocean and then specific areas like mangroves and eel grass
sea beds and now these sinkholes are big sinks for carbon.
- Very good point. Other than their value as biodiversity hotspots.
I mean things that we don't know adding to the biodiversity of the life.
And also of the physiological potential.
Because they can do things that most other organisms cannot do.
that for its functional versatility for the ecosystem.
This attribute of theirs that they are one of the best carbon barriers is incredible.
I mean if they were you-- they could exist in more aerobic and valuated waters
we could industrially culture them or something and maybe they will help us out
in carbon sequestration. Yeah, that's a very good point.
Yeah. But as of now, I'm hesitant to put out my ship there.
Yeah, but it's the potential that definitely exists.
- So I'll take this one last question and then we'll continue the wrap-up.
Are there ocean sinkholes? and if so are they different than submarine trenches?
There are oceans sinkholes called pop marks all over, for example, the Gulf of Mexico.
And they they're usually full of brine.
And some of them also can-- which has more sulfur coming out
can have these sulfur oxidizing bacteria around them.
In fact, any sulfur losing system,
like including the shallower areas of Yellowstone Lake, in the Yellowstone National Park,
have the same communities, yeah.
But, in the shallow sunlit areas, you can have this vibrant cyanobacteria growing.
But if it's dark, you have this sul-- chemosynthetic dark loving white mats
which are bacteria and archaea which are even more ancient group of organisms
working together to make the best of the elements
that are there in their respective extreme environments.
We think they are, like I said, they are everywhere,
but they're in refugia now in low oxygen, high sulfur.
Here and there. hiding hiding in our midst in our midst. Yeah.
- Excellent. Thank you for answering those additional questions.
I will continue on, here.
So, all attendees that participate actually will get a certificate of attendance.
This is good for one contact hour of professional development.
And...
Okay, whoops.
Let me just tell you about some of our exciting webinars that are coming up in 2020.
In January, we have a--
learning how--
our role as climate communicators
and just how we address these challenges in our sanctuaries
and managing them for this changing climate.
We do have a great acoustic webinar that will be scheduled in February,
we just don't quite have the details available online, yet.
But then we have one, in March, that will talk about our NOAA Ocean Guardian school program.
And this is offered in a variety of states around the country.
And you can find out how your school can potentially participate
in making a commitment to environmental protection and conservation,
and get some some mini grant funds up to four thousand dollars to support your work!
So, most of our series is being built out for the 2020 year,
but several of these webinars are already available online.
A link to our current list of webinars will be included in the email that you get as a wrap-up.
So with that, I would like to conclude today's webinar
and thank you very much, Stephanie, for being with us, today,
to talk about Thunder Bay and to introduce our host.
And Bopi, thank you so much for being available this evening to give this live presentation
And with that,
Yeah, with that, it concludes today's webinar.Thank you.