Welcome to 100 Climate Conversations. My name is Benjamin Law. Really grateful to be here with you all today, having this conversation on the unceded lands of the Gadigal. First Nations people on this continent have been sharing knowledge here for tens of thousands of years, and together they constitute the oldest continuing civilisation this planet has ever known. They’re our first scientists, engineers, agriculturalists, mathematicians. They mastered how to live sustainably on this fragile continent, which is a feat that we’re struggling with now. So, we’re really grateful to Elders, past and present that we can continue sharing knowledge here on what is and what will always be Aboriginal Land. And I’d like to extend that acknowledgement and my respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us here or online or via the podcast.

Today is number 94 of 100 conversations that happen here every Friday at the Powerhouse Museum and online, which presents 100 visionary Australians taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time – climate change. We’re recording this live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum. Some of you may know that before it was home to the museum, this place was the Ultimo Power Station. It was built in 1899, it supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s extensive tram system into the 1960s. And it’s in the context of this fossil fuel artefact that we shift our focus towards the innovations of the net zero revolution.

Now our guest today is an expert on blue carbon in Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic. She received her PhD in 2015 from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania, and since then she’s worked with the Antarctic Seabed Carbon Capture Change Project, investigating how polar and subpolar sea beds contribute to the carbon cycle in the context of climate change. We are so thrilled to have her join us today. Could you please join me in welcoming Narissa Bax, everyone. Now, I’d love a little bit of your story because, as I understand it, you developed a love for and completed your early studies in marine biology. You were researching, initially, tropical corals in Hawaii. So, I need to know the connection between that and how you ended up working in Antarctica, because these are two very different kind of ecosystems, right?

Yeah. The big draw in, I guess, was to work on coral reefs originally. I was lucky enough to study in Hawaii and work in Panama. And you know, we have this beautiful Great Barrier Reef ecosystem here. This is what I thought I was going to focus my attention on too. But I got this wonderful opportunity at the end of my undergraduate [degree] to go to a deep sea coral symposium and was offered a project working on deep sea corals in Antarctica. And it completely changed my life. That’s where I’ve continued to focus my energy and effort.

Okay, deep sea corals in Antarctica. Now when we think of coral generally, we think of the Great Barrier Reef. We think of tropical environments. We think of Finding Nemo, but we don’t necessarily think of coral and Antarctica. So you said deep sea coral in Antarctica. What is deep sea coral and what does it look like?

In the in the deep sea you remove that influence of light. On the Great Barrier Reef, for example, you have the algal cells that will photosynthesise and this is how the animal and the algae live together to create this beautiful ecosystem. In the deep sea, the coral is just the animal component. They feed on all the particulate matter that falls down from the sea floor, the marine snow. It’s much easier to envision something that you know is there or that you can go and see. These environments we’ve only recently, in the last decade or so, had the opportunity to explore. And it’s changed the way that we look at biodiversity in the world because it’s actually very beautiful and biodiverse and colourful and all of these things down there. In East Antarctica in particular, where my research started, the images that we have are of the same scale [as] what you could imagine for the Great Barrier Reef, but it’s so very different –different types of animals living in extreme environments but you’ll still find the octopus or the squid or the crab or the sea spider. All of those animals are down there as well amongst the corals and the sponges.

So, let’s go back. It’s over a half decade ago. It’s 2017 and you’re part of an expedition that circumnavigates three quarters of the Antarctic continent to survey marine life, which is an incredible experience that very few people will be able to access. You’ve got this front row seat to what that continent and what that marine life is like. You’ve already been painting us a picture, but can we go even deeper? What are the sights and sounds that you absorbed there?

I mean, it is a location that changes the way that you see the world, I think, and particularly to have those opportunities when I was still in my phase of figuring out the world and science, and what’s important to focus on. To be amongst an environment where you’re so small in comparison to what you see and everything is so beautiful and amazing and incredible, but also [having] the opportunity to explore new ground in these environments. Something that kind of stayed with me – if we go back before 2017, [that] was a sub-Antarctic voyage that we went on – but my first experience was going to East Antarctica. We were going to a particular area that we thought would be based on – because you only get the surface level when you look at that topography – [thought] it would be a really biodiverse, productive area. And when we sent the cameras down there was this really stark contrast. There were lines in the sea floor and there was a bottle. My first image from Antarctica was to expect one thing, but we actually saw another because these places are not necessarily unimpacted. But then as a consequence of that being our first image, we went further. Based on old charts, we went to a place called the Shackleton Ice Shelf and there you found these masses of undescribed coral and sponge fields.

So, in that first instance, what you’re describing there is a place that we would consider completely remote, untouched by humanity, and yet is not.

Exactly. And I think this is the thing that I have to reconcile in my own lifetime as well, is that I am seeing the places that are the most remote, most biodiverse, most intact, but they are not pristine anymore. This time has shifted from us. But we still have so much to protect at the same time.

What accounts for that? Is that rubbish and our impact moving across? Or is it the impact on Antarctica itself, like local impacts? What does that say about our own impact on its reach?

The deep sea is probably a really good example of this idea of what you can see [as opposed to] what is actually happening. We have had, in recent times, those images of trash on the sea floor, for example. These are quite emotive things but if you think in terms of the chemistry and how the ocean is changing in that regard. In terms of oxygen, the ocean accounts for about 50 per cent of what we need to survive. In terms of the CO2 that the ocean absorbs for us, that’s about 25 per cent of our carbon emissions. And then beyond that, you know, we live in a warming world and the ocean is absorbing about 90 per cent of the heat. So, all of these processes and keeping them intact is particularly pertinent and also very hard to visualise and study and understand.

Okay, that’s a really good segueway. I really want to ask a bit of a basic, possibly embarrassing, question because when I say the Antarctic, the sub-Antarctic, the places you’re studying and you’re talking about going deep, deep into the ocean, deep into the sea to study corals, but it’s deep and it’s cold. So, how do you access it? What does studying that environment actually look like?

So, especially when I first started, it was quite rudimentary. Traditionally you would send a trawl down and you would collect the biomass and you would sort through it and find all the animals and all of the specimens. And if you were lucky, you would have a camera mounted on the trawl so you could get some images and video. But things are changing at such a rapid pace that there’s now opportunities to send more robots down and get high resolution imagery and – not necessarily in Antarctica to my knowledge yet but it may come – we’ve actually got deep sea researchers that are now livestreaming so that people can really engage in what they see in real time.

Now, we’ve spoken about blue carbon in this series of 100 Climate Conversations, blue carbon being carbon that’s captured by ocean and coastal ecosystems. That term is most commonly associated with mangroves, seagrass and salt marshes. But what are the different forms of blue carbon in the area we’re talking about here in the Antarctic?

Like you say, they’ve been predominantly to date understood in the context of coastal, largely tropical, ecosystems that you can access. And I often talk about the mangroves in that regard because it’s like a tree but in the marine environment. So, you can get an understanding of what your carbon stock is, you can measure how much it’s growing, all of those sorts of things. But it gets much more complicated when you’re measuring the growth of the coral on the deep sea floor, for example. If we put these animals into that same context, you can also put it into a framework [that] people recognise. People recognise what a carbon stock is, they recognise what carbon credits are, and you can put a value on these ecosystems, but this does not mean that they become money, it means that they become understandable and quantifiable. For the deep sea in particular, this is such a vast area that you could protect, then it has a huge consequence.

There’s your kelp forest ecosystems as well. There’s a big difference between the latency, the time, the kelp forest will store carbon, whereas in the sea floor it is sequestered and once it is sequestered, it is taken out of the carbon cycle and locked away for hundreds to thousands of years. This is where we have that genuine potential to buffer against climate change in that regard. In the context of Antarctica in particular, what we’re seeing is that it is a negative feedback on climate change. If you visualise Antarctica through the summer and the winter, the sea ice is expanding and contracting. But as the ocean is warming, this is getting smaller and smaller, like this cold beating heart that’s buffering us against the change of the heat.

Right. So, traditionally we would expect that there are natural contractions and expansions. But what you’re saying is that will continue but it’s only getting smaller over time, is that right?

Well, again, it’s not necessarily homogenous. For the longest time, we actually had this vision that we were losing ice on the peninsula, and we were potentially gaining ice in East Antarctica. Things have really ramped up, particularly this year, where they lost the size of the Greenland ice sheet in Antarctica. And so, as this process is occurring, what we are seeing in response on the sea floor [is that] you have increases in algal blooms, more food is going into these ecosystems. As a consequence they are reproducing more, growing faster and then they take in more carbon into their skeletons. When they die, it is sequestered. In this way it is a negative feedback, slowing the rate of change. It’s a positive story in the scheme of it all if we can understand this aspect of it and preserve this. This is a frame for protected area management, for getting on board with conservation on a vast scale. So, if you are protecting your marine environment in Antarctica, in the deep sea, in the northern hemisphere, at the poles as well, this is a large contribution to keeping our planet alive.

Okay, so are there other instances where negative feedback loops are happening in nature as a result of climate change?

Yeah. So, there’s four of them. Three of them are marine: you’ve got Antarctica, in the fjords, in the deep sea, and then you also have the Arctic tundra. But there’s also that aspect of: things don’t happen in isolation. So, in terms of Arctic tundra, for example, they’re quite concerned about the methane as well. And so, this is where understanding and protecting, whilst we still have these services in place, becomes particularly important. Because the real fear would be that if these sinks, which we currently have, became emitters. A source and a sink [are] very different and [this] has a potentially devastating impact.

What changes have you observed in these regions over the course of your own research? Because I imagine that from when you started to even now, there are observable kind of changes going on. Can you expand on those for us?

One of the most pertinent ones that I often talk about for my PhD, that I found quite a traction point, was in fjord ecosystems in Patagonia. You end up having these kind of satellite deep sea populations. Based on refuges and these animals being able to colonise in these areas, it’ll end up being [a] similar ecosystem to what you find in Antarctica, in the deep sea. The corals that I’ve first talked about were around 500 metres. In the fjord I had the wonderful opportunity to dive. Because of deep water emergence, which is where you have a darker environment in the fjords, the same corals are at 10 to 105 metres. They’ll let you dive to about 20 metres – for health and safety. There was this particular population in the fjords that was described as an extraordinary abundance of these beautiful red corals. The stylasterid lace corals that I specialise in. They’re kind of like the Victorian paintings, they’re very delicate and fragile and beautiful and they occur in these field-like aggregations. For them to be described in that regard in the fjords, and then our project dived with them and recorded them with a remote operated vehicle as well. Then a couple of years later – in that very short space of time – they were recorded as being gone in their entirety. It’s a very stark example of [how], because these environments are so difficult to access and monitor and understand, we get these potentially really brief windows of documenting them, and then we don’t keep going. Then they’re lost and we can’t pinpoint why and how. So, that was particularly eye opening, from a personal perspective to this ecosystem, to see something lost like that in your research life.

When we talk about corals and their decline, I think some people think – because, you know, so much of our daily life doesn’t involve coral – we might want to do a trip to the Great Barrier Reef and see the coral. But if it’s gone: ‘Oh, what a shame, and what a shame for tourism industries.’ I think sometimes our thinking doesn’t go beyond that. Can you give us an idea of what’s actually at stake for all of us if those corals continue to decline there, here and elsewhere?

Yeah, I think that’s the real beauty of thinking about our polar areas, and the deep sea as well. We can feel so disconnected from them, but we actually have it written into treaties that they are for all of us. Antarctica in particular is a place for peace and science. The deep sea is a place for humankind. Because we can feel so disconnected from them, we’re not necessarily engaging in the conversation that is our right, but also is what’s keeping us alive. It’s been very interesting as well to not only work in these locations, but also work in places like Myanmar where they are on the coal face of climate change impacts. And there’s no argument from people who are so impacted that climate change is a thing. It absolutely is. Thinking about what I can do as a scientist and where I can focus my efforts, the poles and the deep sea are the places that will have the most impact across the board globally.

It’s so interesting hearing about how climate so far away or ecosystems so far away [are] so interconnected with our capacity to just live. You mentioned Myanmar, I’d love to hear more about what you were doing there and what you were looking at.

After my PhD, I took some time and went to work on a project in Myanmar. It was a small mangrove reserve in the Irrawaddy Delta. It was quite eye opening in the context of how people would talk about what was important to them. People were much more concerned, in a climate change context, about storm protection, keeping themselves alive, fisheries, sustainability, all of those aspects. Blue carbon would be part of the conversation but it didn’t necessarily seem to be the highlighted aspect of it. One of the things that I find interesting in this field, as well, is that our conversation about blue carbon is quite new in the scheme of science so it’s constantly shifting and changing. That was when I was invited to the blue carbon project in the sub-Antarctic and I had to weigh up where and how will I put my efforts. I felt [that] the level of biodiversity that you are in some regards fighting for in either case, was stronger and higher in the polar environments. I went back to that.

This work has taken you so many places and you’ve just returned from two years – is that right? – from working on conservation efforts in the Falkland Islands. Can you tell us about the Falkland Islands and what makes it a really special place to study marine ecosystems?

When I was thinking about where I could go and concentrate my efforts and what would be most meaningful to bring all of those topics together, there was definitely a theme of island conservation. I didn’t necessarily want to shift out of polar research because to be part of that community and that science is so important. The Falklands brings together all of those aspects because what you have is an isolated island community in the sub-Antarctic with similar animals and ecosystems to what you find in Antarctica, but without the influence of ice.

It also really changed the way that I started to think about blue carbon as well. We talked about the negative feedback aspect that we have in Antarctica, an ice-driven feedback mechanism. If you think about that in the context of the Falklands, you have the biodiversity – which is actually potentially higher because this was a refuge location. So, in the past when we had our glacial cycles, the last glacial maximum, for example, animals would shift into refuges that were more accessible to them and Falklands was potentially ice free back then. It’s a much higher, older, biodiverse ecosystem than some of its neighbouring populations as a consequence. As would be expected, potentially, we find a higher concentration of carbon storage and potential sequestration associated with higher biodiversity. So, if you think back to some of the conversations you might have had on the nearshore ecosystems, this is often about restoration and showing an increase in your capacity. Whereas if we think about it in the context of preserving the service and the biodiversity, you don’t necessarily have to restore some of these ecosystems right now, which is very expensive.

You mentioned that it doesn’t have the ice like the Antarctic regions does. What about the kelp forests?

Yeah, the kelp forests are really beautiful in the Falklands. That was one of the most beautiful aspects of it. In Tasmania, when I first moved there and when I was studying there, the kelp forests were incredibly beautiful and we didn’t – I think again, we didn’t necessarily recognise how quickly we could lose some of them. The research in Tasmania, for example, has shifted a lot more into restoration, regeneration, looking at the types of kelp that will be more resistant to warming because a lot of the kelp forests have shifted to [something] more like a remnant kelp forest. So, going somewhere like the Falkland Islands was like going to the past in that regard. You’re seeing these beautiful, extensive, amazing kelp forests in their entirety and intact. So that led us to start the first eDNA project from the giant kelp forests in the Falkland Islands.

What is that? What is an eDNA project?

So, eDNA is environmental DNA. In places that are remote and difficult to sample, expensive to sample as well, you’re time and resource limited. With the environmental DNA, you can take a water sample and then as a consequence through the algal cells, the animal cells, those sorts of things, you get an idea of what lives in that area without having to extensively sample and also take. It’s a non-invasive technique.

So, once you get those results and you get a better picture of what the eDNA is, the resilience or lack thereof of certain kelp varieties, kelp forests, what’s next after that? So, say this kelp is really resilient, really great, and it exists here. What’s the practical next step or application of that knowledge?

What we’re doing at the moment is forming a baseline understanding. That’s based on having a very extensive species list and environmental DNA library to map to. The really interesting thing about the Falklands in particular is that it’s like a scientific reference area. This is our example of what is good in the world that we can measure against. I got the opportunity to extend this project so it’s no longer solely a Falkland Islands project. It’s a sub-Antarctic toolkit for biodiversity monitoring. So, the next step after this conversation is to go to the sub-Antarctic with the French program and I’m going to Crozet, Amsterdam and Kerguelen Islands. Kerguelen in particular has probably the most remote intact kelp forests that we have on the planet, and it’s also impacted between polar and temperate variations throughout the year. Getting an understanding of these environments is particularly important. Once we’ve created this resource, the hope is that others can use it for conservation management and monitoring. It will be there for anyone. It will be globally accessible.

How long does something like that take?

Well, I’m trying to do it in two months before I move to Greenland.

Greenland! And what’s going to happen in Greenland?

[In] Greenland, I’ve been offered a project working on blue carbon as well. This means that I’m hopefully going to have an understanding across both of the poles from this perspective.

So is it fair to say that the research is really about mapping the kind of information that’s missing there, getting a better sense of what’s working where?

Yeah, exactly.

And how long will it take? I mean, not just for your work, but what constitutes success? How long does that take? To get that much more robust picture of what’s going on.

I think the really interesting thing has been not only looking at it from a scientific perspective, but also trying to feed into areas of policy. Last year I had the unique opportunity to go to COP27, for example. The work that we put forward for Antarctic blue carbon, we tried to link that with the Antarctic Treaty and understanding of protecting areas for biodiversity, but also for climate change. There has been a policy focus to separate the two when in reality we really can’t. And so that’s the key I guess, that I’m aiming for at a higher level, is hopefully to bring these conversations into frameworks that can protect them, more broadly and globally collaborative.

Now you’re going to Greenland and you’ve done work in the Antarctic and the sub-Antarctic. I imagine in people’s imaginations they look the same but they’re in very different parts of the planet. What will be similar? What do you anticipate will be similar and quite different and are they experiencing similar impacts when it comes to climate change?

That’s the really interesting part as well. From an Antarctic perspective, you have a much older ecosystem and as a consequence you have a lot of biodiversity associated with that. And then, what we were thinking, up until recently really, was that Antarctica was more buffered. The models were playing out but this would last for some time, whereas in the Arctic we have been experiencing rapid ice loss for quite some time. The thing that I’m finding really interesting and intrigued to explore more is bringing those ideas of working in places like Myanmar, for example. In the Arctic you have much more diversity of people and aspects of considering Indigenous culture, for example, in Greenland as well.

As I hear you talk about your work, I think one of the threads that I’m hearing is this mission to make sure that people understand that all of these things are connected. You’re in Australia where we are having this conversation right now. Who are the policy makers you’d like to take aside and what would you like to tell them?

I guess from the standpoint of Australia, we still have so much in this regard, right? Australia has a very large territory in East Antarctica too. So focusing on these remote biodiverse locations and investing in the science and the capacity that we have, would be my great hope in that regard. But we also have great potential to take care of our near-shore ecosystems as a consequence. Australia has so much – if it was distributed in the appropriate manner towards conservation and science.

You have a very cool job in that when I think of young people and you ask them what they want to be, you know, marine biologist often comes up, right? So, you’re living that reality. For those people who want to get into this work, what are the most joyous of joys about the work that you’re doing at the moment and what are the most demoralising lows, that come with the work that you do?

I mean, it’s been a process of figuring out what a marine biologist is. I had a friend [who] said something like, ‘To say you want to be a marine biologist is to say you want to be a fairy godmother.’ It’s everybody’s childhood dream. I feel particularly lucky to be part of this generation of scientists where things really shifted in what was possible in Antarctica. So many more women in particular, and no longer being the space that was just for the privileged few. It’s shifting towards so many more collaborative opportunities for science. I’m very thankful to be part of that broader community. I’m very thankful to see these ecosystems and to understand them to some extent, as best we can. So, those are definitely the highs. I guess the lows are just to recognise the emotional strain of working in these places and trying to get across that in the time we have, how important it is to protect them.

Are there also physical stresses as well? Or maybe this is a joy because I understand you’ve spent a lot of time working remotely and it’s only going to get more remote, it sounds like, with particular expeditions. A lot of that sounds like you have to live your life off grid. Is that a joy or is that a hardship?

I wish that I was living off grid because off grid to me conjures up these ideas of not having a carbon footprint and having a sustainable life. To do the research that we’re doing and in the way that we’re doing it and the world that we live in, it’s very carbon intensive. That’s also the aspect to consider – the ethical side of this is [it’s] one thing to protect these ecosystems [but] it does not happen in isolation. It happens in parallel with all of the other solutions and opportunities for change that we have. That’s what I’d really like to see, a way that we could be doing this in a sustainable manner, longer term.

Narissa, before we wrap up, you were mentioning earlier in the chat that in early points in your career especially, you’ve probably had to step back and think about what the future in this role meant and whether it would mean documenting a decline. Where are you at with your own perception of the work that you do? Is it about documenting an inevitable inexorable decline, or is it something else?

Oh, I mean, definitely not. I’m at a point where there’s still so much to hope for if we can get together and work on it as a global community. That’s where I’m focusing my energy and effort. But it’s a very massive collaborative process. You have a lot of people all over the world who are engaging in this conversation now and working on the deep sea and shifting into spaces of discussing ways to protect it. It’s very timely.

Well, Narissa, thanks for giving us reasons to hope and for being a reason to keep hoping. Really appreciate it.

Thank you Benjamin.

Thank you so much. Could you please join me in thanking our wonderful speaker today, Narissa Bax. To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.