Grant Deane This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. La Jolla Light News !

   www.lajollanews.com/News/2002/ - [Cached]

   Published on: 10/6/2002   Last Visited: 10/6/2002

   The ocean inspires scientist-poet Grant Deane. "For anybody walking along the beach wondering about the sound of the surf," said the Scripps research oceanographer, "it turns out the sound has something to do with bubbles - which have something to do with global climate change." You'll never look at ocean bubbles the same way if you ever talk to Deane on the subject. Bubbles, and the role they play in the dissolution of gasses in the ocean, is Deane's field of study at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. He recently published an article in the scientific journal Nature detailing the number and sizes of bubbles formed in whitecaps, the froth on the crest of ocean waves. The best time to study bubbles formed in whitecaps is during storms, which is when you'll find Deane and his associates collecting data. They brave the waves in a special storm-safe scientific craft known as a flip. As you might expect, securing bubble samples in storms with 20- to 30-foot waves can be a daunting task. But to Deane, it's routine. "It's a challenging measure to make," he admitted. "But the flip, the only one in the world, provides a stable platform in storms for making these kinds of measurements." Though Deane's field of study might seem a little microcosmic to most, what he's doing is actually making a contribution to the "big picture" in the study of ocean dynamics and ultimately, the role the ocean plays in global climate change. "At Scripps, we study how waves affect the way gases are dissolved in the ocean, particularly carbon dioxide," Deane said. "We consider the atmosphere and the ocean, how they couple, which is very important to climate change. Hopefully, with the research we're doing, it will help us understand what's going on in whitecaps. Those are the questions I'm interested in, the basic physics questions." According to Deane, when waves break out in the open ocean, bubbles form and are forced into the water causing carbon dioxide to dissolve. This takes carbon dioxide, essential to plant life, out of the atmosphere and puts it in the ocean, a process known as bubble-mediated gas transport. A native New Zealander and a University City resident, Deane has also been a member of La Jolla Sunshine Rotary Club since 1992. Deane, 40, calls San Diego his home now. "I found my family here," he said. "I love living here. It's a great community here - the people I work with, the people in the community I live in." Research like Deane's is used by scientists in computer modeling in an attempt to understand - and predict - global climate change, especially as it relates to manmade impacts on the Earth's environment, such as the burning of fossil fuels, which may cause global warming. Deane's work helps set the parameters used by scientists doing computer simulations on climate change. All of Deane's scientific work is not done in the ocean, however. A lot of what he does involves research done in a laboratory wave tank at Scripps. "We study breaking waves in the laboratory," he said.
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   Deane left New Zealand in 1986 to get his Ph.D. at Oxford, England, studying thermonuclear fusion. He applied for a job at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla and began working there in 1990. "I just love studying the sea," he said. "I do research right here off Scripps pier with the breaking surf." The oceans play a key role in understanding climate change, believes Deane. "The kind of questions we're asking now will determine our understanding of climate change in the future," he said. "If we can do that, maybe we can understand ourselves as a society, understand how to live without changing the planet. "The more we understand about the planet, the more we can work with it, and live with it."