Philippa Stevenson: Scientist shines new light on oceans' depths

Julie Hall is one of those people who's found how to put more hours into a day than the mere 24 the rest of us make do with.

She is a scientist, so it's probably due to some complex formula that expands minutes according to the degree to which you use them, multiplied by the value of the result. It'd be the opposite of garbage in, garbage out. More like work in, worth out (wiwo).

Whatever the reason, this dynamo of a woman has a pile of local and global research activities and responsibilities higher than her not particularly tall self.

Hall's day job is in Hamilton at Niwa (the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) where the biological oceanographer is group manager of aquatic ecology and ecotoxicology and where she also has responsibility for education co-ordination for schools and universities.

Periodically, that means the 47-year-old, who began messing about in boats to sample water on Lake Taupo in the 1970s, is now more likely to be found dangling monitoring equipment over the sides of large research ships. At the same time she could be connecting via the internet to any number of school classrooms where pupils are doing projects on the sea.

As well - and I have to conclude this only works because of the wiwo formula - Hall also leads a 10-year, worldwide project that aims to bring together research from several hundred scientists in more than 30 countries to try to understand how the oceans are responding to change and how that affects their life, that of the rest of the planet, you, me and succeeding generations.

Phew! And, by the way, Hall also soars off the planet in gliders, organises gliding competitions, gardens and keeps company with her scientist husband, family and friends.

From her small office in what feels like a prefab at the Niwa complex on Waikato University grounds, the internet makes possible Hall's role as chair of the project known as the Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (Imber).

Sometimes email is not enough, and so far this year Hall has made separate and brief forays to Paris, Shanghai, Beijing, London and Rome.

The project seems terribly big and, particularly as the acronyms swirl into an alphabet soup, terribly important. There's the ICSU, the International Council for Science, which in 1986 founded the IGBP, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, which set up eight global research projects, including Hall's.

Imber's other sponsor is SCOR, the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research, but neither sponsor offers funding for research. That's mostly up to the countries in which individual scientists work. And nations, as always, decide whether national interest warrants their shelling out.

National interest doesn't always parlay into international benefit, sometimes quite the opposite. That means Hall's job is as much if not more about networking and communicating as it is about research.

If she wants to deliver on Imber's goal to understand how the oceans respond to and force change, she must find out what research has been done, is being done, and what needs to be done.

"We want to be able to predict global change", says Hall. "We want to provide the science to back the decision making, make all the data available internationally, have a group of models for making predictions and bring up a generation of scientists who cross boundaries between biology and chemistry, natural and social science."

The planet's life forms may go from viruses to walruses or be an intricate "end-to-end food web", says Hall, but until now scientists have tended to study them only from the standpoint of their particular discipline.

So, one may know that carbon dioxide is rising in the atmosphere, another may know that is changing the oceans' pH level, while yet another can see the rising acidity is preventing a minute algae forming its shell.

What happens next? It's thought that in the past falling ocean pH triggered catastrophic extinctions.

A scientist in the Imber network told Nature magazine last year that chemical ocean conditions 100 years from now would probably have no equivalent in the geological past. "Key organisms may have no mechanisms to adapt to change," said German marine biologist Ulf Riebesell. "We owe it to people to tell them more about the ocean of the future."

Remarkably, it's likely to be Hamilton's Julie Hall who'll tell the tale.

* Dr Julie Hall speaks on global change at a public seminar tomorrow at 7.30pm, Room AG30, Waikato University.