Researchers at Mount Allison seeking greater understanding of climate change

Four researchers at Mount Allison University have combined their individual specialties in order to build better models for understanding climate change.
Zoe Finkel, a professor of environmental sciences at Mount Allison, and Andrew Irwin, a professor of math and computer science, have partnered with Environmental Proteomics - a Sackville-based biotech company co-founded by Mount A professors Doug Campbell and Amanda Cockshutt, both of whom teach biochemistry at the university.
Finkel says her focus of the project has been to look at how increasing levels of carbon dioxide are affecting the oceans.
"In particular this increase in carbon dioxide concentration is something we've seen since the industrial revolution," she said. "And the reason we're concerned about this is because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in our atmosphere and it causes changes in the climate."
Finkel adds that about half of the carbon dioxide produced heads up into the atmosphere, while half of it heads back down towards earth, particularly into the oceans.
Oceans are considered a natural CO2 "sink," where CO2 is removed from the atmosphere. Plants and other organisms also use photosynthesis to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but Finkel and her team are focusing on how the CO2 sink is changing.
"The major scientific question is how is this sink going to change in response to changing climactic conditions and accumulating carbon in the atmosphere," she said. "And that's what we've come together to try and work on."
Finkel's research is particularly aimed at the study of phytoplankton in oceans, and how it responds physically to climate changes.
"Much (of our) research recently has been looking at what's happened to phytoplankton communities in response to the climate, in order to give us an idea as to what to expect in the future because there's been really rapid changes in climate in the past."
Campbell's focus is also on phytoplankton, but says he uses the laboratory at Mount Allison to simulate how phytoplankton will respond to changes in climate. This is done by imposing changes of light and temperature on phytoplankton samples in the lab.
"We look at how they respond to environmental variation and then think about how they might respond to future climate changes," he said.
And since phytoplankton is an important factor in the CO2 sink, how they respond to the changes in climate can reveal much to the researchers about the environment.
"We compare relative responses, and compare with other researchers regarding which ones might be winners or losers under the new climate conditions."
Cockshutt said her role is to then use biological information analyzed on a computer to measure how many organisms will respond to changes in the environment.
"We measure certain complexes of the photosynthetic apparatus that are present in all these organisms to get quantitative information on how these organisms respond to changes in the environment," she said.
Finally, Irwin uses complex computer simulations to bring together the findings of all three researchers.
"I'm taking Dr. Cockshutt's molecular data, the biophysics Dr. Campbell puts together, and the environmental data from Dr. Finkel's lab, and extract that into mathematics," he explained. "I derive equations and proper representations of complex biological data, which we then feed into a physiological model of the ocean."
Ultimately, Irwin's goal is the same as everyone on the team - to examine the effects of climate change and "try and see how phytoplankton will respond and, in particular, how the carbon sink will eventually respond."