The choice was worms or submarines

How does a boy from Saskatchewan develop an interest in ocean sciences? For Dr. Kim Juniper it was easy. “I watched the early Jacques Cousteau documentaries on television. I was inspired by his films!” Dr. Juniper is the newly-appointed BC Leadership Chair in Marine Ecosystems and Global Change at the University of Victoria.

He has a B.Sc. in zoology from the University of Alberta and a Ph.D. in marine microbiology from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. A subsequent post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Ocean Sciences at Sidney, BC, north of Victoria, got him interested in deep-sea ecology. “When I arrived at the Institute in 1983, my post-doc supervisor gave me a choice of two projects,” he recalls. “One was to study worms in drainage ditches around Victoria International Airport. The other was to take the Institute’s Pisces submarine and work in the depths of Saanich Inlet, a nearby fjord. I told him I’d like to start with the sub. Perhaps I could visit the worms later!”

And so began the scientific career that (after a stint with a deep-sea research group in France, visiting professorships at UVic and the University of Quebec at Rimouski and a 15-year faculty appointment in the University of Quebec at Montreal’s GEOTOP Research Centre) led in 2006 to his return to the west coast and the BC Leadership Chair. The Chair is supported by $2.25 million from the BC Leading Edge Endowment Fund plus matching financial support from a private donor and a contribution from Fisheries and Oceans Canada. He has joint appointments in the University’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences and Department of Biology.

One could be forgiven for assuming that Dr. Juniper and his colleagues are astronomers instead of ocean scientists. Indeed, they collect information from cable-linked seafloor “observatories” that use astronomical names – - VENUS and NEPTUNE (the latter funded, in part, by a US program called ORION.). And both have links to an undersea network in California called MARS.

VENUS stands for Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea (www.venus.uvic.ca). There are two VENUS observatories, one operating in Saanich Inlet, the other to be installed in the Strait of Georgia in mid-2007. NEPTUNE is North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Network Experiments (http://web.uvic.ca/~neptune/index.html). It’s a joint Canada-USA initiative, and its Canadian observatories will extend from a base in Port Alberni to the famous hydro-thermal vents on the ocean floor west of Vancouver Island. Headquarters for VENUS and NEPTUNE Canada are at the University of Victoria, and both have received major capital support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the BC Knowledge Development Fund.

“I’ll be using VENUS and NEPTUNE as primary tools for collecting data for the Chair program,” says Dr. Juniper. “We need to find out how different components of the ocean react to cycles and change brought on by climate and other aspects of global change, including an increasing human presence in the deep sea. For example, Saanich Inlet goes through an annual cycle of anoxia (lack of oxygen). It begins with a plankton bloom every spring, after which all the organic material from the bloom drops to the bottom. As the material decomposes it consumes oxygen, leaving the stagnant deeper waters of the Inlet depleted in oxygen all summer. The oxygen doesn’t get renewed by currents because there’s an undersea dike (“sill”) at the mouth of the inlet. In the fall, however, as the temperature cools the oxygen-rich surface water becomes denser, sinks downward and replenishes the oxygen below. The duration and severity of the anoxia are obviously related to the cycle of productivity at the surface which, in turn, is affected by climate. Saanich Inlet will be my pilot site for studying how the seafloor responds to events in the upper ocean.”

Dr. Juniper hopes his research will help increase both public and scientific awareness of how climate and human activity affect the ocean. In 2008, he plans to use the NEPTUNE observatory located in Barkley Canyon off Vancouver Island. “A key component of my research on the deep ocean is to gather information about the natural cycles there. We need to know what those cycles are. Some are sure to be climate-related. We need to distinguish them from the cycles caused by human activities.”

For more information on Dr. Juniper, and the University of Victoria’s undersea exploration programs and research, visit http://web.uvic.ca:80/seos/people/juniper.htm.