‘Something big was coming’
A team of marine scientists knew ‘‘something big was coming’’ as early as Sunday as strong winds buffeted their ship ahead of excyclone Gita.
Project leader and professor of marine science Professor Steve Wing said they decided to make a ‘‘run for it’’ when it became clear the weather wasn’t going to clear before hitting New Zealand.
‘‘The initial model had it going north a bit, but as soon as they started tracking it south we started thinking about making a run for it. Well, I say making a run for it, but it’s quite a slow boat.’’
The Sustainable Seas Challenge ecosystem connectivity project was collecting samples from the Marlborough Sounds on the University of Otago research ship Polaris II.
The six marine scientists and two crew members were diving in the Queen Charlotte Sound and were supposed to visit Tasman Bay, Golden Bay and the Cook Strait.
But they saw the cyclone hit Tonga on the news last week and decided to pull the plug on Sunday.
The trip from Marlborough down to Lyttleton was ‘‘pretty choppy’’, but nobody vomited as they were a ‘‘pretty seaworthy’’ group, Wing said.
‘‘We were getting about 60 knots coming down the coast, and we were just hugging the shore on the way down but we were getting a lot of chop coming off the shore.’’
The Polaris II was unable to leave Lyttleton until Friday, Wing said, so on Tuesday the crew drove home to Dunedin.
‘‘I think the biggest concern was getting down to Dunedin to catch the surf.’’
Wing had some experience with hurricanes and cyclones as an expat from Florida, he said.
‘‘The nice thing about hurricanes versus earthquakes is you can see them coming. But by the time Gita got to New Zealand, it was just a tropical depression. You look at the damage and that’s very real, but a real hurricane, you can tell where the foundations of the buildings were and that’s it. I think Gita was a category five before it hit Tonga. The power of that is just unreal. You can’t stand up. People get killed by cyclones.
‘‘And they’re observing more and more cyclones, with our changing climate. One of the things about climate change, and the reason they call it climate change instead of global warming now, is they are predicting the climate is going to get more unpredictable.’’
Wing was leading a project for the Sustainable Seas Challenge, researching how to better support ecosystem connectivity, he said.
‘‘What we’re trying to understand is how things are connected across the environment. For example ... bivalves - that’s clams, cockles and scallops, things like that - they filter the water so they record information about the environment they’re in.
‘‘We can pull information from their tissue and the shell. We can tell if there’s stuff coming into the water from the land, and what sort of nutrients are in their environment.’’
Another study looked at how blue cod supported or depended upon other species - for example, how blue cod larvae interacted with plankton, its food source.
‘‘We can use some chemistry tools to work out where [the larvae] come from, and what populations are important for supporting other populations.
‘‘It all contributes to an understanding of ecosystem connectivity. And we can do a better job of managing uses of the marine environment, so hopefully this will inform that.’’
The team would return to the top of the South to finish their research next week, Wing said.