'Marine snow' catcher is helping fight against climate change on Labrador Sea

Using her hands to mimic the falling of carbon below the ocean’s surface, biological oceanographer Uta Passow is so entrenched in the work she does that she pauses her interview to ask if she’s being too technical.

She is. But she has to be.

What the award winning researcher is doing is helping fight one of the top contributors to climate change — carbon dioxide.

Looking out her window at Memorial University’s Ocean Science building, nestled between picturesque cliffs and the wild Atlantic, Passow says people underestimate the ocean and what’s happening beneath the surface.

“We can’t see those things in the ocean,” she told CBC News. “This mystery of it has always really fascinated me.”

The race to cool down the planet and get rid of carbon emissions is top of mind for many people. It can include efforts like making dietary changes to the electrification of vehicles.

But nature is already doing some of that work through a biological process that takes carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere and sequesters them into carbon sinks.

Passow is eyeing one of the most promising sinks of all: the Labrador Sea.

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The body of water between Greenland and Canada is unforgiving, with icy-cold temperatures and winds that can cause waves to climb as high as houses.

But it’s what’s happening underneath the surface that makes this sea so interesting to scientists like Passow.

“Most of us, when we think about the ocean, it’s a very shallow ocean, which is near shore,” Passow said.

“But most of the ocean is very, very deep and so it is really important to understand that the surface ocean and the deep ocean, in a simplified way, are quite separate.”

The water is so cold and salty, it sinks to the bottom of the sea. That type of deep water convection that helps the Labrador Sea’s biological carbon pump work better.

It’s a process that removes carbon from the atmosphere and stores it at the bottom of the ocean. Before it’s sequestered in sediment, it floats on the subsurface.

“It looks like there is a snowflake coming, like a snowstorm,” Passow said.

She’s using marine snow catchers as part of her work, which are large modular water samplers that collect sinking particles. It allows researchers to study oceanic carbon and nutrient cycles.

Through the food chain, and sinking, this organic matter eventually makes its way to the bottom of the sea floor where it gets trapped in the subfloor.

By deploying marine snow catchers into the Labrador Sea, Passow and her team are able to quantify the carbon falling deep below, where it is turned into sediment and can be stored for millennia.

“It’ll come up eventually,” said Passow.

“For the moment that carbon is removed, so that’s how the ocean really contributes to the climate change issue. Without this process, the CO2 in the atmosphere would be a lot higher now,” said Passow.

Come spring, Passow will head out on to the Labrador Sea to collect her catchers to see how the carbon cycle is doing, with a close eye on changes influenced by carbon change.

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