SOARS: An Insider’s Look at Scripps Ocean Atmosphere Research Simulator

[MUSIC] Good evening, everyone. My name is Harry Helling. I'm the Executive Director of Birch Aquarium at Scripps UC San Diego. I'd like to welcome you all to the Jeffrey B. Graham perspectives on Ocean Science Speaker Series. This evening, we were anticipating welcoming two speakers, but unfortunately, Dr. Grant Deane is unable to join us. We're delighted, however, to welcome the other half of that dynamic duo. That's Dr. Dale Stokes, who will be presenting both his own part of the Scripps Ocea

n-Atmospheric Research Simulator story, as well as on behalf of Grant. Dale is a research oceanography in Marine Physical Laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He received degrees in biology and geology from Queen's University in Canada and received a PhD in oceanography from Scripps. After his PhD, Dale did two years of postdoctoral work at Stanford University before returning back here to Scripps. Dale's diverse background in biology and physics allows him to work on projects

as very distropical and polar ecology, air-sea gas transport, and marine aerosol formation. His field experiences include dozens of ship and land-based research projects around the world, including three seasons in the Arctic and seven in the Antarctic. He's worked on five different saturation diving missions, including Noah's last scientific mission from Aquarius with Dr. Sylvia Earle, an avid photographer. Dale's images and texts have appeared in publications around the world including Nationa

l Geographic, BBC Wildlife, Natural History magazines, among many others. He's also worked on numerous documentary film projects as scientific advisor or cameraman, including BBC's Blue Planet, PBCs Nature: Under Antarctic Ice, to name only a few, and also of note, Dale was awarded Teacher of the Year here at Scripps. I know that because I was the one who nominated him for his [LAUGHTER] inspiring work with students here at Birch. Dale is a co-principle investigator on one of Scripps most ambiti

ous research infrastructure projects to date. The Scripps Ocean-Atmosphere Research Simulator , or called SOARS. SOARS is undeniably the world's most sophisticated ocean simulator and you're about to learn all about it. Please join me in welcoming Dale for his talk entitled SOARS, an insider's look at Scripps Ocean-Atmosphere Research Simulator. [APPLAUSE] Thank you very much, Harry, and Grant is very disappointed that he can't be here tonight. I'll do my very best to try and essentially wing it

through what his portions of the talk we're going to be. First of all, thank you all for coming and enjoying in the excitement that we really have green SOARS to Scripps. Ideally, I would take you all down the hill to see SOARS, but there's no way I can get all of you into the back of my car, so [LAUGHTER] this is going to be the best we can do for now. We're going to show you a bit about SOARS and how it all came together. I'd like to get some acknowledgments out of the way right at the start.

SOARS was a collective effort and it started, we call ourselves the gang of five. There was Dr. Farooq Azam, a very famous marine microbiologist here at Scripps. He was involved in SOARS. Myself, Dr. Grant Deane from the marine physics lab, the esteemed Dr. Ken Melville, who unfortunately passed away before he could see SOARS come to fruition, and of course, we have all the help from Dr. Kim Prather, who's one of the world's greatest atmospheric chemist. None of SOARS would have happened unless

we had a lot of collaborators around the institution. That includes engineers and administrators and project managers. We had the help from our director, Dr. Margaret Leinen, and of course, the chancellor of UCSD. We had an excellent external engineering team from Aerolab who helped us build SOARS, which was quite a monumental task. SOARS itself was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and from UCSD. It was absolutely incredible that this team could come together and build SOAR

S during a pandemic and during a global trade war. It really affected how everything came together. But we managed to get it done in about four-and-a-half years, so that was really remarkable. What are we even doing? Why are we even trying to bring something like SOARS into the world? Well, really, right now, we face many problems that have global implications and are of a global scale, and we're talking about what's happening with our future climate as the earth warms? What happens when sea lev

els rise? Forty percent of the eight billion people on this planet live within just a few dozen kilometers of the coast, so everything that's happening in the air and along the coastal oceans affects billions of people on the planet. These things are incredibly important and they're fantastically complex, and I hope you'll get an understanding of that as I go on. These fantastically complex processes that are happening across the planet cover an incredible range of scales, and we're talking abou

t spatial scales and temporal scales. But we're talking things that encompass the entire planet and involve processes that even happened down on the scales of nanometers. Nanoscale processes are all entwined in something that affects our global planet. When earth scientists get together and we talk about how we're going to model something as complicated as the earth, it gets broken down into these five very complex domains or spheres. There is the cryosphere, that's all the snow and the ice you

can think of at the poles and mountain glaciers. This is the cold part of our sphere. We have the biosphere, that's all the life on the whole planet. That's the ecology of the earth. That's microbes to little blue penguins and see dragons, that's all the life on the planet. We have the geosphere, that's the rock beneath our toes, underneath our feet. That's the crust and the mantle and the rest of the earth. Of course, we have the atmosphere. That's the air we breathe, that's from our toes up to

the edge of outer space, and importantly, for Scripps, of course, we have the hydrosphere, so that's all the water that covers our planet. What's really interesting to most, well, not most, to a lot of scientists, and particular to the group of five and the people working on SOARS, is what happens at the interconnection between these different spheres, and it turns out it's this interconnection and this exchange that happens between boundaries between these different spheres. What goes on betwe

en the cryosphere and the biosphere, or in our case, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere, it's processes at these boundaries that turn out to be incredibly important. The air-sea boundary now this is what we're talking about, the boundary between the atmosphere and the hydrosphere. This boundary covers almost three-quarters of our planet. We have a blue planet, it's covered in oceans, so this interface is really important to everything that happens on the globe. Thirty percent of man-made carbon

dioxide is exchanged directly through this interface into the ocean. Processes that happen here, they affect air quality. I've already mentioned all the people who live along coast. We have experiments going on right now. You might have heard of what's going down at Imperial Beach, where we're looking at what happens when processes that happen in the near shore get transferred onto land. It affects human health. It's very important. These interplays between the air-sea boundaries affect things l

ike glaciers. Ice caps, they're melting at the intersection between the air and the sea. What's going on for a lot of the planet, on the air-sea interface is driven by wind. The winds, they control circulation of the oceans. They drive start to source currents, and they importantly for us, they create waves and waves break, and they mix the ocean and the atmosphere together. When the ocean and the atmosphere mix by waves, we end up injecting little bubbles from the surface down into the upper oc

ean, and you might've heard myself or Grant up here before talking all about bubbles, and we can go on and on about bubbles and how important they are. But in this case, you just have to imagine a wave breaks. It forms sound, you've heard me talk about sound. You go down to the seashore, you can hear the roar of billions of tiny bubbles popping and exploding at the sea surface. Whenever one of those bubbles comes up, gets the sea surface, pops, it's injecting little bits of the ocean into the at

mosphere, and these are aerosols. That's one of the things we've come together to study. Aerosols, this is a spectacular animation that NASA put together, and we've hijacked it here. [LAUGHTER] What you see, the swirling clouds of color, are different aerosols generated around the planet. The different colors represent the different sources of these aerosols. We have the browns, whatnot, from like the Sahara dust, you can see coming off of North Africa. We have green biogenically sourced aerosol

s coming off of our giant rain and off the boreal forests. If you look closely, you can see little white puffs occasionally, that's associated with human-generated aerosols and things like forest fires that burn out of control around the planet. Right now you can see a whole series of cyclonic storms, those are generating marine aerosols there in the North Pacific. When you're looking at this spinning globe, a couple of major things should come popping into your head, and one of them is our Eart

h is dominated by the ocean, and that in the Southern Hemisphere in particular, it's mostly ocean. We're rotating now around. We've come down below Australia, we're starting to look at Antarctica, and we can see these roaring storms that circle the planet continuously see through the Great Southern Ocean, and they're generating billions and billions and hundreds of trillions of marine aerosols that are injected into the atmosphere. These processes, even those just coming from the ocean, can domi

nate everything we see on Earth. You've seen an outer scale, the planet. Now we're looking at a microscopic scale. This is a close-up of a little bubble that's floating on the surface of not so much the sea, but on the surface of one of our simulators, just a few millimeters across, and you can see the little hump of the bubble. This is an unusual picture because it's got funny colors in it. What you're actually seeing is bacteria that glow a certain color, and larger algae that glow a different

color. We use fancy photographic tricks to get a picture like this. What's really interesting when you look at this bubble is that there's a very distinct differentiation between where the bacteria is, the green sitting at the top of the bubble, that's where this very thin soap bubble like film is, and then the reds and the yellows down below dominated by the larger algae. There are processes going on, on these very small scales that do things like move certain organisms to certain parts of the

bubble. What happens when one of these bubbles comes to the sea surface now in pops. This is a split-second sequential set of pictures. The bubble has popped and the first thing that happens is that soap bubble like film that was full of the green, very microscopic bacteria, it pops and it flings the green bacteria up into the air, and after that ring of exploding film drop shoots out, a jet drop, it's called, shoots up from the center of the collapsing bubble, and ejects jet drops into the atm

osphere. If you look at that, the jet drop is full of more of the larger algae. right there, a process happening at the sea surface, every time a wave breaks, is doing some quite interesting differentiation and filtering of what ends up in the atmosphere. It's processes like this that we're very interested in understanding, and it brings us to source. We're very interested in waves breaking for these bubble related processes, and typically, we're at Scripps we go out to sea in big ships, and we

study these things and it is still the way we really need to understand the planet. We have to go out there and we have to make measurements and we have to get sea second, all those things that go along with [LAUGHTER] the ship, and we do study all of these processes. There are some huge problems going out to sea to do this work. First of all, it's expensive. It costs at least $10,000 a day to go out to sea in a ship, and we often have to go out for weeks at a time to get the conditions that we

want, and it becomes increasingly expensive and just isn't tenable. It isn't a way we can really do the work. The other problem is when you're out at sea on a ship, you were at the mercy of mother nature. You do not know what you're going to get. I want to study storms, and sure enough, we're going to go out for three weeks and be calmed. There will be not a ripple on the surface and everyone's crying because it cost $10,000 a day to sit there. You're at the mercy of the weather that's around yo

u, and the ocean conditions, you can't really control very much of it. The other thing is, there are a lot of all of these other aerosols floating around all the time. If we're looking to understand just those aerosols that are coming from the sea surface, it's very difficult to go out into the environment and study them. You could be offshore San Diego on a windy day and we're looking at a lot of particles that are coming from land and automobiles and all these things, so the signal that we get

from the sea surface is very hard to find. We decided we had to bring the sea surface into the laboratory where we can recreate what happens at sea. We can make gale force winds, we can make waves, we can break them, we can study them up close, but we wanted to do it over the whole surface of the planet. There are other wave channels around. In fact, I'll show you some pictures of other ones we have at Scripps. But what we didn't have was a way to get at these intimate processes that we knew we

had to control and understand. These other facilities just do not exist, so we had to build one. We wanted to re-create the ocean surface anywhere from the poles, right to the equator in the tropics. We wanted to be able to create in the laboratory our present atmosphere as well as future atmospheres. We want to know what's going to happen when things change. Everything we've learned over the last, I would say, decade and a half, has told us that these processes that are happening are absolutel

y intimately linked with the biology and the chemistry going on in the upper ocean. The only way we could recreate what's going on at sea and have a real reasonable facsimile, we needed to ensure that we could recreate the biology in the laboratory. We had to construct all of SOARS out of completely nontoxic materials. One of the ways we did that was work very closely with Harry and his staff who are very used to building big tanks of water that know how to keep things alive, so we had their exp

ertise to help design SOARS. Altogether, it is totally unique, it's the only one on the planet, and building it took an enormous amount of work and we had all problems, and I'll be chit-chatting about some of those things as we go forward. This is just a quick schematic of SOARS. You're going to be seeing more of this in a minute. As I said, we wanted to reproduce the entire complex dynamic series of scales, series of interactions in the laboratory, so we could fully control it. You might ask, w

hy are you just doing this in a computer? Is a computer simulation? Well, it turns out when you're talking about all the scales that we're talking about now, from the scale of the whole planet, now down to the less than a micron scale of these microscopic aerosols and the processes that happen that generate them, we're talking at least 8-10 orders of magnitude in scale. If we had the biggest, fastest supercomputer on the planet and we had a whole room full of them, it would take thousands of yea

rs to get anywhere close to doing the simulations that we can do in SOARS. I actually like to think of SOARS as a giant analog computer that we can run experiments on, we can turn the knobs, we can run our experiments, and look for answers. First, I'm going to go back in time. SOARS only exists because of what happened at Scripps more than 60 years ago, and there was a team of people headed by a very groundbreaking coastal oceanographer, Douglas Inman, and they said," to study a lot of these flu

id dynamic processes that we see in the near shore and along the coast, not only do we need to build the tools to do this work, we need a place for scientists to do it." He went to the National Science Foundation in 1964 and they built the Scripps Hydraulics Laboratory. Here it is, it's over 20,000 square feet. It's just down over the side of the hill. It is a spectacular piece of architecture. It is constructed almost entirely of redwood. We could never build a building like this again. It is s

pectacular, and redwood was chosen because, as many of you know, it's very resistive to saltwater corrosion and sea spray and all those things, and they knew they were building a building that was going to have saltwater in it and it was going to corrode if they didn't build it out of something like redwood, so they did that. The roof alone has 146,000 board feet of redwood in it. It's held together with 46,000 pounds of nails. It is an amazing building. Ever since 1964, this is Dr. Inman here o

ver the tank with some students and they're examining breaking waves in one of the first smaller glass channels. The glass channel is still exists, we still use it. We studied smaller wave processes. We can extrapolate some of those processes to larger scales. But there it is. It's also housed incredibly large instruments. On the side is a picture of, it was the wave base. Imagine a three-dimensional, very large tank that they could simulate what was going along the near shore. They could put in

peers, they could study the transport of sand along a beach. They figured out how rip currents work. All these things were done in a very analog fashion before we can simulate things in a computer. It's done all analog and it was done inside the hydraulics building. It was big enough to support these large instruments. When it wasn't in use, it was boarded over and was used as a dance floor. [LAUGHTER] I wish I was here because apparently the H lab really hosted some rocking parties [LAUGHTER]

after it was built. I talked about other wave channels. This was the larger wave channel that was built inside the hydraulics building. This is one of our engineers. He's standing here. He's actually all soggy wet because he had to swim inside the tank and put some instruments on the bottom. Yes, we've had tanks of the scale of SOARS, even inside the hydraulics building. But now it was time for something new and something that brought in all these other capabilities that we're talking about, com

plete environmental control. When SOARS was built, we decided to run a time-lapse camera. This is a time-lapse. It's not at the start of the construction, but a little bit after. SOARS runs down the center of the hydraulics lab building. The main channel is 120 feet long and about think of it as 10 feet wide and 10 feet tall. The original plan was to design it freestanding and constructed of stainless steel and aluminum. With a trade war, the cost of that in one day went up fourfold and we could

no longer build it. We very quickly, it was called design-build. We had engineers and designers working as the construction was underway. They decided we would build it like a swimming pool. We would dig it into the floor and build it out of concrete. That gave us quite a few actual advantages. In the end, it was easier to insulate and it also brought the total height of the facility here you can see the solid walls lower so it was easier to fit into environmental health and safety regulations.

We can see the slow construction of the solid walls. Now they're bringing in all the infrastructure, the wind handling in the duct work along the channel. These were constructed outside of San Diego and then trucked in and then very rapidly assembled on site like this. In the center you can see the solar tubes. We'll talk about those more in a minute. You can see the slow building up of all the plumbing that has to go into something like SOARS. There is a large amount of ready work that the uni

versity was responsible for before we could actually build SOARS. We're zooming along it now from the air as it's being finished. That is, we had to reinforce the floor with pylons to support the weight of the tank. Then they had to bring in a lot more power from a substation up the street underground into the hydraulics building to support all the instrumentation and support SOARS itself. How it works, we can bring in water into SOARS. We can bring in saltwater straight from the ocean. We can f

ilter it or not. We can mix it with freshwater or not. We can run straight freshwater. We can make any mix of water inside the channel that will simulate the sea surface. It's brought in at one end, there is a very large piston panel. With this, we can generate waves up to about a meter in height, so little over three feet or we can make waves just capillary size, just a few centimeters tall. We can recreate the sea surface by generating waves. We can control the temperature of the water in SOAR

S. We can vary it from warm temperatures like you'd see at the tropics. Or we can actually make it colder than -1.8 degrees C, which will make sea ice. We don't bring it down that low or we end up freezing the pipes. But what we do is we bring the temperature of the water down just a little bit about zero. Then we can blow very cold air across the top of it, and that starts to form sea ice inside the channel. This I've always found interesting. It sounds easy. We're going to make sea ice. It tur

ns out it's not. We spoke to a lot of experts when we brought the design together and talking with the Army Corps of Engineer, who has a lot of experience building tanks that can simulate things in the Arctic and whatnot. They said, well, if you're going to make sea ice, you have to be careful because what happens is the ice preferentially nucleates along the sides of your channel. If there's any water motion, it grinds up the side of your channel and breaks up the CIC. You end up studying a mar

garita [LAUGHTER] rather than a big scab of ice. As entertaining as that was, we did not want to study margaritas. We wanted proper pancake and sea ice. What you have to do is heat the sides of the channel. All of SOARS is lined with heaters. What we do is we heat this wall interface just a fraction of a degree above zero so the ice can't nucleate and freeze on the sides and then instead it floats in the middle and it never breaks up. It was this kind of interaction with engineers across the cou

ntry that let us design something like SOARS. We've made our waves. Waves break, we're generating aerosols. I hinted at some of the problems when we go out to sea, it's very difficult to study just the signal from marine aerosols if there's all these other aerosols around. We have the same problem inside SOARS, the processes and the signals that we're trying to study that come off the sea surface are incredibly tiny and they're overwhelmed by atmospheric pollutants, by cars driving by all these

things. SOARS is a sealed headspace. It is solid topped. We filter the air that goes into it. We over pressurize it. If there's any leakage, it leaks out rather than in. Then we can drive the air through these big separate air filters and we drive it around and around like a race track and we can end up scrubbing out just about all the particulates, all the toxins, all that stuff. We end up with a very pure atmosphere. When we do generate things inside the tank, we know they're coming from the o

cean and not from elsewhere. The airflow is driven by two different sets of oh, I'm ahead of myself. Pause it. Again, we're trying to recreate what's going on in the open ocean. I call them bugs and the Biologists get mad at me. But this planktonic community, that we're trying to grow and keep happy inside the tank is extremely fussy. One of the things they're fussy about is light. Plankton needs a lot of light. The Sun is incredibly bright. When you go inside a building, it's dark. We brought i

n solar tubes. There are solar collectors on the roof of the H lab and then conduits that pump daylight straight into the top of the tank. This provides enough light, as well as the right wavelength of light. Turns out plankton are incredibly fussy about the wavelength of light as well. We have solar tubes and we also supplement that with 40 kilowatts of additional LED lighting. If you need even more light, we can turn on big chandelier is of lights and supplement the light that's coming in thro

ugh the solar tubes. All the air is driven by two large wind turbines. Right now, we can generate winds almost hurricane force, so 63 miles an hour. The National Science Foundation is already planning to upgrade sores for some future work. We're going to be upgraded to full hurricane force winds, probably in about nine months. That's going to be exciting for us. Lastly, I've already hinted at this, we need to control the temperature of the air as well. We can chill the air down to -20 degrees Ce

lsius, simulating what's happening up at the North Pole, for instance. Then we can blow that cold air across cold water and form sea ice. This is the diagram view of the system. Now we're going to just see a few different shots of the mechanisms in place. This is the drive section that drives the paddle. There's the giant puddle and again, the paddle again, it's a wall 10 feet wide, 10 feet tall. It's airbag. There's air on the back, so it has a big seal and an electric motor counterbalanced by

some giant air springs. Moves this paddle back-and-forth at an amplitude and a frequency that lets us generate all sorts of different wave types inside that tank. All of soars is controlled inside one of the primary observation rooms. We have a control panel. We control all the systems. We can change the temperature, can do this all on the fly. We also have a very large window, and it's nice to be able to look inside the tank. But at the same time we need a clear window because we do some optica

l measurements through that wall into the tank. We do particle image of ellipsometry, we do laser Doppler, these things. Let us know and study the water motions and the air motions inside on the other side of that glass. Now if any of you grew up in the Northern climates and you got up in the morning and you jumped in your car and it was January. What happens? Well, the window is fog up. You can imagine what's going to happen in San Diego when we're in polar mode. To get around having a frosty,

foggy window, the easiest thing for us to do was matched the temperature inside the observation room with what's inside the channel. The observation room is actually built out of a giant commercial meat locker. [LAUGHTER] The observation room and another reaction room can be sealed off and then we match the temperature. When it's in polar mode his mom would say, you put on a hat and you put on a jacket and you get a nice clear window. But it's a little chilly in there. You'll see some controls h

ere and you can see the waves coming down. These are obviously large amplitude waves. Another view, so we can see these breaking processes going along, along the channel. That's Brian from Rasmus all excited. At the far end, the opposite end of the channel from the paddle is the beach. All the energy we're putting into soars using the paddle has to be absorbed. We absorb that using a beach just like seashore, down at the far end so the waves don't come down bounce and then roll back down to wher

e they're generated. We'd end up having a sloshing bathtub, which is what we don't want. We have a beach at one end. This is just a quick shot showing what it looks like when you have gale force winds blasting inside this channel. The wind is blowing and ripping the sea surface part and it's blasting down the channel. You can see spray being generated. There's just even just from waves themselves. It's blasting along the channel. We study the bubbles that are being formed just by wind itself. Yo

u can see the absorption of this energy at the beach, and you can see here why we get all excited is the generation of all these little bubbles underneath the sea surface. Just another view of that. You can see some of these bright chandeliers, oh we've jumped all of a sudden to solar panels opening up on the roof. Then there was, a glimpse there of sea ice and polar mode. These are the LED lights running. Then here we have looking down on the finished soars and then flying through it again. It

was an incredible team effort. Again, we can't say enough about the wonderful engineers who worked with the scientists. Now this is footage of our very first campaign. This is the first large experimental campaign that we started last summer. It's still underway. We had 50 researchers here from around the country and actually from overseas, all their teams of students. This is just a small fraction of the equipment that came in to do this first study. You could hardly move inside the entire H la

b building. It was so full of equipment. But all this is here. These are teams, in this case, atmospheric Chemists and we had Biologists, and we have Physicists altogether doing this study. What you're actually looking at right now are many flavors of mass spectrometer actually. People are drawing out samples from inside soars during different environmental conditions and different wave conditions and wind conditions, and then studying these particles as they come out. An incredible effort, and

right now, we're actually validating results from the summer. We're still in the process of duplicating essentially the first set of experiments to make sure we got it right. This is actually a special picture to me. It was an accident. This picture is from a sample of the sea surface micro layer. A little sample of water taken close to the interface. I got it underneath the microscope and I didn't preserve it correctly. What happened was I spontaneously form these little aerosols. This is one o

f them captured here, an we're looking inside one of these water droplets before it gets shot up into the air. Inside there we can see all different colors and what that is, is the tiniest green ones are viruses. There are little bits of bacteria, little bits of plankton. This is now all in something just a few microns across. All this interesting, great stuff. This is going to be injected now into the atmosphere. One of the things we're trying to do is find out why some of the aerosols are so s

pecial. Some of them go up and they form clouds. But when you form clouds over the ocean, you end up affecting the climate of the whole planet. Everything that can happen in this little drop can then go on and affect what's going on on the whole planet. This is why we're really doing this. We're trying to understand these global scale processes. But to do so, we have to understand what's going on at this microscale. What makes things happening there so special? The other thing this reminds me of

is that building soars, it's a cliche, but it took a village, it took expertise from all the disciplines you can imagine. If we're trying to solve some of these big problems that we're facing, humanity, the things we're trying to deal with. It's going to take that same collective effort. What we're finding out now with the science is that it isn't going to be solved just by one discipline. It's going to take engineers, it's going to take Physicists and Biologists and Chemists, everyone working

together to solve these problems that are so incredibly complex. That's what we're up against. We've built soars not only to solve these problems and work as this great analog computer, but also to bring people together. We've really been successful at that so far. Not just an institution, but bringing in people from around the country and around the planet. All are getting together because it takes us collective effort to solve these big problems. Thank you for hanging in there [LAUGHTER] throu

gh all the problems [APPLAUSE] Thank you for a very wonderful and clear presentation of SOARS and its capabilities. [OVERLAPPING] But I was wondering, is there anything in SOARS that gets at the interface between the ocean and land where the waves crash, or is that a future thing? No, that's a great question. Of course, we have this beach at the end, but it's sterile. It's made of polycarbonate, and nylon, and uninteresting things like that. But one of the first things we did when we commission

SOARS is Scripps hosted an NSF workshop. In that workshop we brought experts in from all over the country again who'd never even heard of SOARS. We brought them all together. We brought in the funding managers as well because the scientists are going to go to their funding managers and say, Hey, I need 10 bucks, I got to go use SOARS and they're going to say, I don't even know what you're talking about. We all get together. One of the first things somebody said was they wanted to recreate a seag

rass bed in the near shore along the existing beach so they could study erosion, and how the seagrass binds the material together, and how it sequesters carbon, and when that decomposes, how it goes into the atmosphere. People are already thinking about how they can use SOARS to look at processes, even biological processes along the seashore. Thanks so much for the talk. I'm wondering, I can see how you can take local ocean water and put it through SOARS and see how the organisms in the water in

terface with the little droplets and then rise up into the atmosphere. How do you reconstruct other kinds of ocean, tropical oceans, or outbreak oceans? How do you do that? Excellent question. Right now, we are concentrating on what's going on essentially locally and you can imagine in this latitude and this little corner of the Pacific. I hadn't mentioned the water filtration. We filter water going in if we need to, but more importantly, we filter water on the way out. We're not allowed to take

anything out of sores and put it into the ocean unless it's cleaner, essentially then when it started. We filter and UV sterilize anything that goes out into the ocean. That being said, we are set up to then study little bits of the ocean and inoculate it with those organisms and that chemistry in SOARS and keep it alive to study these different processes. We're just not allowed to at the moment because we don't have the permits and we have to prove that we're not going to send essentially what

might be an invasive species offshore here. Things are going in place so that we can do exactly that, and the plan would be to then inoculate it with some polar plankton or whatnot. With the advent of severe weather, and we're also going to increase wind farms offshore and other energy producing mechanisms out in the ocean. What do you think the impact of more severe weather is going to be on these materials? I saw something recently that, for example, the blades on the wind generators are not

lasting as long already. [OVERLAPPING] I'm by no means an expert in that kind of engineering at all. But what I can tell you is there's already people lined up to do studies on essentially civil engineering questions in facilities like SOARS because they want to understand what happens. Well, the first group is looking at shipped super structures when you get freezing and high winds. They're looking at that. We've had multiple groups coming in already with our previous channel and that'll happen

with SOARS looking at wave generation systems. We've actually witnessed some spectacular failures inside the channel where they can test designs before they even try and put them in the ocean. I can't give you an exact answer on that. But SOARS is one of those facilities where scientists and engineers can study those sorts of problems. What's going to happen to offshore wind blades and these kinds of things when conditions change? Thank you so much. That was fascinating. I love the simulation a

nd the motion, the colors. In terms of chemical engineering, I'm just wondering if you're partnering with the chemical engineering department specifically experts in transport phenomena? We absolutely are. Great. In particular, the case project here at UCSD has rooms full of amazing chemists. Not just classical analytical chemists or into the more applied chemical engineering, but there's a large group that do computational chemistry, and they're actually simulating in the computers now the mole

cular and atomic processes that happen at the ERC interface. We have those people on the team as well. You've talked a lot about organics in the aerosols. What about non-organic, specifically things like microplastics? Microplastics. [LAUGHTER] You're absolutely right. When these aerosols are ejected into the atmosphere, we have essentially often a salt crystal in the middle and you're used to this when you park at scripts or park at the beach should come out in your windows are all crusty. That

's the salt drawing after these aerosols have impacted your car. At the same time, if we can get tiny particles and little bits of biology, we can get microplastics up into these aerosols, and they have been measured microplastics from the sea surface do get up into the atmosphere. But right now, even though there are trillions and trillions of little microplastic particles in the ocean, it's still a numbers game. The actual concentration of microplastics in that top meter is actually pretty tin

y. It's a very rare occurrence when a microplastic particle is captured by a marine aerosol and ends up airborne. That's not saying it's not a problem, it's a huge problem whenever you get the concentration of these microplastics, not just free floating ones that we're studying in SOARS, but soon as plankton start ingesting them and fish eat the plankton and whatnot. We end up with this intensification of microplastics [NOISE] higher up the food chain. Is a terribly difficult to scale the result

s that you're findings. If you're looking at things on a very small level and you have a simulator of this massive blue scale, then when you're looking to think about it on a much larger scale, is it hard to multiply the results of what you're finding? It absolutely can be. It really depends on the dynamic process that you're studying. On some of these micro scales, we're very good at it. We're talking about things that are happening over millimeters and centimeters, perhaps a meter or two, that

's actually representative of what goes on over about 20 or 30% of the regular wave breaking on the planet. We're pretty good there, but you're absolutely right. Our outer length scale is only tens of meters, not the hundreds of kilometers where processes are happening [NOISE] on the planet. To handle that, what we do is the information that we're generating in SOARS, they're used as parameterizations that are going into the latest climate models, for instance. Affiliated with SOARS and affiliat

ed with case, we have some amazing climate scientists who are doing exactly that, and they're the ones who know how to scale up and take the processes that happen on these small ones. Some of them aren't effective globally, but some of them are really important. These ice nucleating particles in particular, they're very rare, but they have a huge impact on the planet. In fact, one in a million goes up and it nucleates ice. But you multiply that over the scale of the whole ocean, and you can see

how you get clouds and you get large weather patterns that affect climate. Because we're talking the scale of the whole planet. A time for one more quick question. Hello, I'd like it if you would comment on how access to the source facility is managed. Is it managed as a national user facility, or as a control over this facility managed strictly at Scripps and decisions made by Scripps committee? The buck stops right here. [MUSIC] No. We have a user committee here at Scripps. But it is a nationa

l, if not international facility. Anyone can use SOARS. They apply to do work in SOARS. Obviously, money has to exchange hands. But if you're an educational institution, you're charged a certain rate. There are experts here who can help make that transition to doing their work at SOARS. That was expected in this large NSF funded project that it has to be available to everyone. We've done our best I think to get everyone involved and make it easy for everyone to access SOARS. Dale, I want to than

k you again. For an excellent presentation, let's give them another round of applause. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC]