Grant Deane’s name has been in the news before. He’s leading the team bringing an ocean-atmosphere simulator to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and he directs its Hydraulics Laboratory, which is adding a maker space. But Deane’s bread and butter is bubbles—or more specifically, their underwater acoustics. Bubbles are everywhere, he says. They’re the reason running water seems to have a musical quality; they make up the whitecaps on breaking waves; they’re packed into glacier ice. “A surprising number of processes are either caused by bubbles, modified by bubbles, or related to bubbles in some way.”
The New Zealand native and his team study glaciers off the coast of Greenland. They’re building on the work of scientists who discovered that the bubbles trapped in these massive chunks of ice make sound. But Deane wants to figure out exactly why, and whether those pops can be used to measure how quickly those glaciers are melting. “It may be the bubbles are the key,” he says, adding that if all the ice in Greenland were to melt, the ocean would rise by about 20 feet, so it’d be nice to know whether that’s coming in 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years, assuming things continue as they are.
Deane’s research can be perilous at times. He has navigated frigid waters, weathered storms, and had a close call with a polar bear. But it’s worth it. “We owe it to the future; we owe it to the planet. I’m not just thinking about our children, I’m thinking of all the other species, the plants and animals that inhabit this wonderful place with us, and they’re all impacted by our choices.”
Tags: Bubbles, Environment, Glaciers, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Tip Sheet
