Summary:
As you watch the video, think about the following:
Captions:
Dr Tracy Rogers: I am, I work at a place called the Australian Marine Mammal Research Centre and I’m the director of that
so what I do is I sort of design projects, I get people together, teams together,
get funding and off we go and do different sorts of research projects.
And it’s a collaboration between the University of New South Wales and the Zoo, Taronga Zoo.
And we’ve run about twenty-two different research projects.
So, I’m really lucky I get to sit over all sorts of things on whales, penguins and seals
and all sort of different projects which is really fun.
And I’m part of the Evolution and Ecology Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.
So, a lot of the work that we’re doing is looking at particularly ecology type questions.
And this beast’s a leopard seal and that’s what I’m sort of famous for.
I’ve pioneered the work on this beast.
And one of the tricks to being really good at something is to pick something that no one else wants to work on
and then it’s really easy to be good because you don’t have much competition.
And when I started working on these guys no one did anything on them.
So it was really easy to be fast tracking being good at something.
Summary:
As you watch the video, listen to what Tracey has to say about the following:
Captions:
Dr Tracey Rogers: Now, where I work at the moment is on the western Antarctic Peninsula, which where that little red circle is around,
it's where the finger of Antarctica comes up to South America.
Now where I used to work is around the other side of Antarctica
I worked about twelve years on the other side which is directly below Australia around to India.
And why I worked over there, we changed the place that we're working is the Western Antarctica Peninsula has,
is the hottest spot on earth with climate change.
When they talk about temperatures changing and
increasing the change now on the west coast of the Antarctica Peninsula is 6.2 degrees increase.
Which is enormous.
The average I think is about a degree but there it's about 6.2 degrees,
and up until a couple of years ago it was 5 degrees and everyone was saying, 'wow that's remarkable!'
Now 6.2 degrees.
And where we work, at this little station called Primavera; there are ice cliffs all around.
It's sort of a little bay.
And there are ice cliffs all around us.
And we would sit there, in our cute little orange huts,
and watch the ice cliffs falling into the ocean and the icebergs, there's all icebergs everywhere
'cause that's where the icebergs are formed - are from these ice cliffs -and in six months of living in a hut off
the eastern Antarctica I'd see two icebergs roll.
In the Western Antarctica Peninsula we'd see them rolling like every fifteen minutes and when
glacier ice is full of air bubbles
so when it's in water it starts to melt and it pops, it goes 'pop, pop, pop'
and the only way you can hear them off the Easern Antarctica is if
you have headphones on, whereas, again sitting there off Primavera,
a couple of weeks ago, you could hear the popping everywhere.
We'd just sit in the hut and you'd hear popping in the air
was so loud you could hear it everywhere and there was moss everywhere and it's steaming.
And I was working with a woman from National Geographic who is a filmer and she started to cry.
It was so, like it's such a remarkable difference that's happening there off the western Antarctic Peninsula.
Summary:
Listen to Tracey as she talks about her work and think about:
Captions:
Dr Tracey Rogers: Now, what we're seeing is krill decline over the last thirty years there's seen a decline of eighty percent of krill stocks.
Glaciers, huge glaciers are calving off and along the western Antarctica Peninsula.
All the glaciers are in decline.
Whole penguin colonies are disappearing and being taken over by other species.
And so that the research work that our group is really now getting behind is part of an international study.
Again, being a scientist, it was a great talk about all the different things you can go to,
but one of the fantastic things is doing this interdisciplinary research with a whole stack of other international scientists.
And that's what we're doing at the moment.
It's part of a coordinated program.
We're working with all sorts of different people, there's about nineteen different research programs.
We're all working together, on all different components within the systems
some people are looking at mosses and lichens, others at
some people are looking at mosses and lichens, others at
the glaciers, different evolution biodiversity sediments, plankton
all sorts of different components within the system and our job
is to look at the top of the food chain.