The Life Scientific: Lucy Carpenter
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What challenges does Lucy Carpenter face while conducting research on a tropical island?
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Keitetääs kahvit. Mikä ihana lause. Saa hengähtää ja unohtaa hetkeksi huolet ja hommat. Siinä mieli virkistyy ja sydän kevenee. Ja kuulee maukkaimmat jutut. Tai saa vain hetken olla ja nauttia. Arkea ikä kaikki. Ja se on hyvä niin. Eloveena. Täyttä eloa. Hello. We begin today in the mid-Atlantic, on the island of Sao Vicente in Cape Verde, a place of trade winds and lava fields where the air blowing inland has spent days travelling over open ocean. Clean air, the kind that atmospheric chemists dream of. Atmospheric chemists such as Lucy Carpenter, professor at the University of York, who studies how chemical interactions impact our climate. Lucy? Lucy was one of the founding scientists behind the Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory, established on Salvatente in 2006.
It was measurements at this site that paved the way for a significant revelation that ozone loss is not only a human-made problem. The chemistry of the sea has an impact as well. She discovered that, for various reasons, the ocean actively changes the chemistry of the air above it, and in doing so can influence ozone, methane, aerosols, clouds, and ultimately the climate itself. Today, the Cape Verde Observatory has become one of the world's most important atmospheric study sites, while Lucy's career has taken her from that remote island to co-chairing the scientific panel for the Montreal Protocol, the ongoing international agreement to protect our planet's ozone layer. from measuring the chemistry of ocean air to helping turn the tide of global environmental policy.
Lucy Carpenter, welcome to The Life Scientific. Thank you, Jim. Now, you're an experimental atmospheric chemist, so rather than computer modelling from afar, you go out and measure what's actually there.
That's right. So often we have to develop or build atmospheric equipment, scientific equipment, because... It's not available out there. You can't go and buy something off the shelf to measure tiny radicals at concentrations of less than one parts per trillion. So we often get involved in instrument development as well. And yes, go out into the field and measure it there and then.
I suspect most of us think of the ocean as something that's affected by the atmosphere, warming, acidification, pollution and so on. But your work flips that on its head, doesn't it? It shows that the oceans are actively shaping the chemistry of the air above them. So what's going on?
You're absolutely right. We think of the ocean as this vast sink of things like CO2, carbon dioxide, but it does emit gases as well. And maybe that's been somewhat overlooked. It's quite hard to get out there into the open ocean. We all know the ocean's full of salt and there's a whole bunch of marine biology that's quite active. So they can act to produce aerosol particles that can influence clouds and influence the oxidising capacity of our atmosphere as well.
We mentioned ozone. We're going to be talking about it quite a lot today. So it's worth getting a reminder of exactly what it is, because this molecule is both a protector and a pollutant, isn't it?
That's right. So 90% of ozone in the atmosphere resides in the stratosphere.
The stratosphere is the upper.
Is the upper. So that's around 10 to 50 kilometres above our heads. That's not a fixed zone, but depends on temperature and latitude. So that's where the ozone layer is, the protective layer that protects us from harmful solar UV radiation. The troposphere is completely different. The way the ozone is formed in the troposphere is different. In the stratosphere, it's formed naturally from oxygen photolysis. In the troposphere, it's from anthropogenic pollution mixing together.
So the troposphere is sort of from what, from sea level upwards?
From the sea level to the stratosphere. Right. And then you get straight into the stratosphere. It's an air pollutant in the troposphere, but also a greenhouse gas, quite a strong greenhouse gas. So a very simple term is ozone is bad at the surface and good in the stratosphere.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What challenges does Lucy Carpenter face while conducting research on a tropical island?
0:00–6:23
2
How did the Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory change our understanding of ozone loss?
6:23–12:49
3
What role do oceans play in shaping atmospheric chemistry?
12:49–20:33
4
What was the significance of Lucy's research on halogens and ozone destruction?
20:33–28:10