Antje Boetius: The fate of polar waters

In this edition of The Naked Scientists, deep sea microbiologist Antje Boetius explains how she discovered methane-consuming microbes, and why the seafloor is such a precious and important ecosystem...

Will - You are now, as previously mentioned, currently the director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, which operates quite heavily in polar waters, high latitude waters. What kind of research are you looking into at the moment?

Antje - I am working on a big program for Antarctica because first we have learned that the Arctic is warming so fast, four times faster than the globe on average. And Antarctica in the Southern Ocean, they were like, they always seemed a little bit like the place where everything is reliable and nothing changes. And so four or five years ago it started, however, that the Antarctic sea ice was on a rapid decline. And now we have already lost more sea ice in dimension in Antarctica compared to the Arctic. And so we have so little technology, so little infrastructure to actually understand what is going on there. I'm working with a lot of other people from many different nations on a program that we can come together to study Antarctica as we know it, to be prepared for the future. We could be that generation of people that still know the old Antarctica, and it may be gone and changed. It may be partially ice free in the summer also for centuries. And then it is our time that kind of, where I think science has duty to actually image, show, describe, learn, communicate, preserve, archive, all of that, what Antarctica is for us today.

Will - I did once, and bear with me here this does have relevance, but I was speaking to a theoretical physicist the other day who said he's worried that they're slowly going to run out of jobs because they've hit a wall in the amount that they can possibly know. I suppose that's one good thing is that you'll never have that problem.

Antje - That is true. And, we often say that we know enough to act. And of course you can also say it's also true. We know so much. And I'm always amazed when I look back into the history of climate change and the science of climate change. Like the first ones that computed the response to Earth to CO2 emissions. They were so right. They also predicted that one of the losses we will experience is the loss of sea ice. So in a way, yes, we know a lot to act, but then Earth always surprises us with different responses, with changes, with the unknown. And so I always think it's such a fantastic job that we scientists have, that we can simply help understanding how Earth and life functions and some of that knowledge is even saving lives. Sometimes this knowledge is simply there to be discovered a century later as really important and as a culture of humans as that what lives on, what remains from our times. And so I really like to think that being a scientist is of a meaning to humanity.

Will - And looking forward. As a final question, I've heard on the grapevine that you are set to become director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in May. What are you hoping to get done there?

Antje - Yes. So that came along a while ago. I'm actually very happy, I was very happy with my job at the Alfred Wegener Institute and the polar expeditions and all of what we did. But then parts of my studies were in San Diego and La Jolla at the Scripps Institution of Ocean Oceanography. And ever since I have a network of scientists I really admire. And many of them work and worked at MBARI. And so when they called me and asked if I could imagine applying, I immediately could picture myself at the great grand old Pacific. And working with those people that I know and being closer again to deep sea research. I mean, polar research is really important, but I also love the Pacific. I love the deep sea work and I really love to hang out in the deep sea, observe strange deep sea life. And so MBARU is the place where you get to do a kind of very free, open, innovative science because, different from other places, it is so well funded and it is actually in the DNA of the Institute, as David Packard invented it, that they are well funded and they should just experiment and try and be present at sea to deliver knowledge that no one has. And so I love that idea and I thought after working so hard, finding all the funding and doing things for the policies, why would I not have the best of all times returning to the Pacific, take a bit more time and observe.