URI bubble physicist counts bubbles in the ocean to answer questions about climate, sound, light
From a University of Rhode Island press release
NARRAGANSETT, R.I. – January 21, 2010 – The bubbles in your champagne that appear to jump out of your glass and tickle your nose are exhibiting a behavior quite similar to the tiny bubbles found throughout the world’s oceans, according to bubble physicist Helen Czerski.
But while the champagne bubbles are likely to raise your spirits, those in the ocean can cause clouds to form and affect the climate.
“Bubbles are little packets of gases that rise or fall and can be carried around as if they’re on little conveyor belts,” said Czerski, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. “They carry carbon dioxide and oxygen from the atmosphere down into the ocean, and then when they go back up again they pop and sulfur compounds from marine plants are sent upward, forming particles in the air that lead to the formation of clouds.”
Czerski is studying how to detect and count ocean bubbles of different sizes to help scientists in other disciplines create more accurate models. She said that scientists have found it difficult to judge the effect of bubbles on their data for years and usually have had to add a “fudge factor” to account for them.
“For instance, bubbles ring like bells when they are formed or when sound waves go past them, and if you’re studying sounds traveling through the ocean – like sounds from whales or sonar – bubbles can get in the way of what you’re trying to listen for,” said Czerski, who earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University before spending a year studying bubbles at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and then moving to URI.
“Bubbles also scatter light strongly in the oceans and make things cloudy, so if you’re studying light in the ocean you need to understand bubbles,” she added.
The URI scientist uses an acoustical resonator to detect and count bubbles of different sizes in the water column. The device can detect bubbles from 3 to 170 microns in size, and she is assessing the accuracy and uncertainty in the measurements.
She recently used the resonator to collect bubble data near the Hawaiian Islands and in the Santa Barbara Channel off Southern California. She counts bubbles down to 10 meters deep – most bubbles don’t go down much further than that, she said. The big ones float back to the surface while the smallest ones gets squeezed out by the pressure as they sink.
“Just after a wave breaks, there are loads of bubbles and they’re changing really, really quickly,” Czerski explained. “They’re stretching and squishing and bumping into each other and breaking into smaller bubbles and they’re doing it all too fast for us to see directly. Whenever they break up, each new bubble makes a ‘ping’ sound, and if you hear it you can say something about those new bubbles.”
Czerski said that understanding the physics of bubbles is increasingly important as climate models become more and more refined.
“We need to study bubble distribution and where they go in the water column to understand the exchange of gases that they carry,” she said.
According to Czerski, while carbon dioxide and oxygen get carried into the ocean via bubbles, a chemical compound produced by phytoplankton gets carried out of the ocean via bubbles.
“No one really knows why phytoplankton create dimethyl sulfide, but they do, and it passes into bubbles and is carried up and out,” she said. “These bubbles supply sulfur to the atmosphere, which acts as a seed for cloud droplets to form.
“Climate is made up of a whole bunch of little things, including bubbles, and these little things matter because there are lots of them,” Czerski said.
Czerski began studying bubbles after earning a Ph.D. in a field she described as “blowing things up,” which included becoming expert at high-speed photography. She then looked for disciplines in which she could apply this knowledge.
“I’ve always been fascinated by small things that do stuff that’s too fast for us to see,” she said. “And I like building experiments that help us see those things.”
She learned to scuba dive in order to deploy instruments for measuring bubbles, and she now believes that getting in the water is a vital step for any aspiring bubble scientist.
“You can’t really understand what’s going on under the sea unless you go there yourself,” Czerski concluded. “There is a huge benefit to directly experiencing the world you’re studying. The rules are different down there.”
“An upsurge in action at the grass-roots level is needed and it is our children and grandchildren that will face the brunt of our inaction,”
Since when is this any different than in the past. The future will take care of itself, if we leave it alone. Over a hundred years from now is our children and grandchildren, more like great great grandchildren. Evolving will solve any problems that exist in Dr. Hansen’s brain, for the rest of us mankind will adapt as it always has.
The line between GW and no GW is so small that we do not have the science or analysis to say now, and probably a hundred years from now someone will be saying the same about our quaint satellite data.
Hah. And you think you’ve got bubbles!
The little things that people see, but often overlook, might just be secondary to the big things we overlook because they are out of sight.
Just a thought.
Phil. (17:33:05) :
Ron de Haan (13:29:12) :
Let alone bubbles bringing oxygen and CO2 down, releasing the content and taking sulfur compounds up!
Unless you propose suspending Henry’s Law it could hardly be otherwise.
Kadaka
Truth be told, it’s our abundantly shedding cats that create the “dust bunnies” (I’ve done the research). I’m considering body-suits…
More bubbles formed in the ocean.
An apparent bubble really, a cavitation bubble that can be formed from the spin of a ship’s propeller. It is formed rapidly and being a vacuum, collapses just as rapidly causing a loud ultrasonic sound. If you have ever heard the annoying sound of an ultrasonic cleaner, then this is cavitation bubbles forming and collapsing. Very good for debris removal but I wouldn’t like to count them.
Candidate for quote of the week?
“There is a huge benefit to directly experiencing the world you’re studying.
physicist Helen Czerski
And I’ve got a bottle of sparkling wine that needs its bubbles counted.
See Dr. Czerski here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121135853.htm
Ray (14:03:26) :
“Ron de Haan (13:29:12) :
You are wrong… obviously you never drank a Guinness. The bubbles in there do go down.”
MMMMMM, Guinness on tap.
But you are wrong, they don’t go down, they just start out that way and slowly dance and swirl gracefully to the top. It takes a while, but it happens. Evidently you drank it down barely after it’s poured. Good man!
ooops, can’t believe I missed this one..
“From a University of Rhode Island press release
NARRAGANSETT, R.I. – January 21, 2010
Speaking of bubbles… “ Well, if you haven’t got a Guinness, you might as well, …uh, ….oh, I just can’t say it. I’d have to be pretty desperate. But I will say this for it, it’s better than Blatz.
I’m wondering if there are no West Ham supporters around…
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvuOtlpSAeY
James Lovelock reported the DMS/clouds effect back in the 1970s.
Fascinating. Thank you.
Sorry, messed up the link…
Martin Brumby (11:28:00)
But surely Scarborough is a very fair place? It was, after all, made “famous” by an American folk/rock duo with that theme. I might also say that it is a Grand place, but the reference is probably over the heads of most non Yorkshire people (grins). Have a Tetleys for me please, at the Grand if you like.
Richard (decidedly ex-pat)
Sorry about this, can’t resist — if we pollute the surface of the ocean with enough oil then waves are smoothed. It then takes higher windspeeds to produce the bubbles, reducing the uptake of CO2 by the oceans. It also reduces the amount of DMS above the surface which means less low level cloud. Low level cloud over the oceans increases albedo. Loss of that cloud warms the ocean.
So, oil on surface, more CO2 in the air, higher SSTs. Sound familiar?
How much oil would be needed to smooth the oceans? Google “NASA oil pollution’. That’s right, we spilled in 1995 enough oil to coat the surface with oil once a fortnight.
[swivels eyes, gibbers, get carted off by men in white coats]
JF
Ron de Haan (15:00:41) :
I simply don’t accept the claim of bubbles going down in a water column.
That’s it.
Have you ever seen the surf? Lots of downwards momentum there that has to be conserved pushing water and anything in it down. She is only talking of ten meters depth anyway. Waves in the oceans are different than waves in swimming pools.
For me it magnifies the fractal nature of the ocean surface as far as exchange of gases can go. Higher winds, bigger waves more CO2 coming out if ocean is warming, absorbed if it is cooling.
A couple of random thoughts;
– Traveling on boats and ships I was always struck by the volume of the hissing from the bubbles in the wake, and also the sheer length and breadth of the ensuing train. It seems to me that the amount of dissolved gases in the sea was much larger than you’d think, and also at quite a fine equilibrium such that any perturbation in the water above certain energy-level will cause a local drop in pressure, would result in considerabe outgassing. So what causes reabsorption, and will it be at the same rate? Is sea transport causing a permanent kink in the natural equilibrium of CO2 and the sea? I.e. does the increase in propeller-driven shipping activities correlate with the increase in atmospheric C02? And given the seasonal nature of much of propeller-driven boating, could this be observed in the fluctuation of the CO2 data?
– A possibly related observation is the bright ‘twinkling’ of reflected sunlight from the sea-surface which gives sailors that typical tan, but can be painful after a few hours of exposure on a clear day. This twinkling is caused by waves and wavelets forming concave relecting mirror surfaces which change focal length as they distort, and so will focus quite large amounts of energy into small areas on a momentary basis. And so, the same kind of thing must be happening under the surface, as the wave shapes refract sunlight to a focus. This momentary but quite powerful focus of energy could be causing all sorts of interesting things to happen in the seawater at the very small scale.
For whoever it was who had never seen bubbles going downwards (the scientist quotes waves driving them down which is a bit of a clue) then google “Youtube surfer underwater”. The top left hit shows bubbles being forced down by waves and by swimmers’ feet.
JF
Original presumably spam-trapped for mentioning b*k*n*s?
I just noticed that nobody specifically credited Don Ho for singing “Tiny Bubbles” in 1966. I suspect that’s the inspiration for the headline, and a significant percentage of readers might be too young to remember it. Or you might have encountered it during the Pro Bowl half-time.
REPLY: I wondered how long it would take for somebody to notice, congrats – A
Jeff Kooistra (12:16:34) :
“…but if any of the “honest” AGW scientists had possessed Czerski’s attitude, they would have visited the places where their data actually came from, and seen that “the rules are different out there” from what they’d been assuming.
Agreed.
The “climate Scientists” should have gotten off their lazy butts and validated the correction factors used when a surface station was moved instead of using some mumbo jumbo artificial fudge factor derived from torturing the data. The history of the moves should have been documented at least in some cases so a temporary weather station built to historical specifications as close to the original spot as possible could be erected and correction factors could be validated based on real experimental data. Good grief what else are grad students for besides this type of grunt work. There are about 15000 stations used so deploying grad students or even undergrads to do the validation would not be that hard to do. It sure beats crawling into caves and chiseling out chunks of limestone or catching blind crayfish, the studies I got roped into helping with as an undergrad.
As mentioned above, bubbles are pulled down to considerable depth by breaking waves or even events like dolphins jumping and re-entering the water. Wales swimming near the surface entrain air with their tail flipper and if you watch video of them swimming near the surface you will see entrained bubbles pulled well below the surface as they swim. Obviously the major mechanism would be breaking waves in deep water, but ships motions, ice bergs calving into the ocean, and other mechanisms all would contribute to the process.
If you watch any video clips of surfers in heavy breakers they are at risk of getting slammed into the ocean bottom at depths of 30-40 ft all while surrounded by water filled with small bubbles.
Very small bubbles act like very small dust in the air. When they get small enough their density difference is so small, compared to other forces that they move freely with the prevailing motion of the fluid.
We all know rocks cannot float in the air, but very fine dust can stay suspended for very long times when it gets small enough. Viscous drag, and mass motion of the fluid completely dominate the density differences between the dust (very small rocks) and the air. The same mechanics apply to very small bubbles.
At a depth of only 11.6 ft the gas bubble is under 5 psi pressure head due to the water column above. This averages out to about .433 psi/ft for fresh water and a bit higher for salt water due to its higher density.
Since breaking waves can easily mix water to depths in excess of 30-50 meters, the small entrained gas bubbles are put under significant pressures at those depths.
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/pressure-head-water-d_1354.html
At 50m depth (164 ft) you would have gas pressures in the bubble of approximately 71 psi (depending on the density of the water column due to salinity etc).
This concept (bubbles and opacity of the water) also adds yet another variable to the issue discussed before regarding turbidity of the water and its heating depth due to solar radiation.
Larry
For very small bubbles of air in water or very small droplets of water in air, it must be remembered that volume rises with the third power of radius but surface rises only with the 2nd power. This means that forces acting on the surface affect small bubbles and droplets much more and can overwhelm updrift in the case of bubbles or gravity in the case of droplets. Otherwise, there could not be fog or clouds. Underwater micro-bubbles are the counterpart to fog. Just like fog can rise, these bubbles must be able to sink.
Drat — burned by spell check and no edit
whales swimming not wales swimming (although the country of Wales would make a pretty big splash).
Larry
I was down at my local beach again today. Couple of guys fishing, but nary a soul counting bubbles. I hope that they are not using that AGW system of gridding to allocate a bubble count for Natal from a beach in Hawaii.
If you’ve ever been out at sea in a storm you quickly notice how much foam and froth is produced by white caps. In a force five hurricane there must be an incredible amount of churning and mixing, and lots of stuff getting swept from the warm sea-surface right up to the upper atmosphere.
Elements ending in “ine,” such as Bromine and Iodine and Chlorine, react with Ozone. There are some interesting debates about how much such elements contribute to the “Ozone Hole,” and whether the Fluorine in spray cans should have received as much blame as it did.
All in all I find the chemistry of the sea, and its interactions with the atmosphere, fascinating. I don’t mind a cent or two of my tax dollars going to a woman who might prefer studying in warm places to studying in cold places, as long as she is honest and churns out truthful data.
When you think of how huge the seas are, and contemplate the vast surface area involved, you become aware we are not talking about a few tiny bubbles. We are talking about an enormous exchange going on between the deeps and the heights, and gigantic effects which likely make people who focus on CO2, and CO2 alone, look a bit silly.
hotrod ( Larry L ) (11:07:27) :
Thanks for your explanation.
Let’s write a law of the bubbles.
1. In a static water column a bubble will always go up.
2. In a water column moving downwards the bubble will move with this water column with the speed of the water column minus the rising speed of the bubble.
Now bubble up and let’s go.