On the July day when forecasters at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that El Niño has returned, a graduate student at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station did what his predecessors have been doing since 1920. He dipped a bucket in the ocean and took the water temperature with a mercury thermometer.
From his nearby lab, which overlooks the tidepool in Monterey, Calif., station director George Somero watched the timeless ritual, as he often does. As the acclaimed father of the field of biochemical adaptation, Somero, ’64, PhD ’67, keeps his merry blue eyes on the daily temperatures and on the global horizon.
Stanford: So ocean temperatures are up in Monterey and worldwide?
You have to tease apart the effects of El Niño, which is a one-year phenomenon, from longer-term global warming trends. But, yes, there’s been a significant [long-term] increase in the water temperature.
If 99 percent of scientists agree that there will be additional increases in temperature, what do they disagree about?
How much increase will occur. It’s very difficult to predict global warming, but the range of change on the centigrade scale runs from about 1 to 6 degrees.
If the temperature in the Monterey tidepools has risen by about 0.7 degrees Celsius in the past 80 years, what does that mean for creatures living there?
There have been large changes in the relative [population] levels of cold-loving and warm-loving organisms, with an increase in more southern, warm-loving species. If you’re an organism that lives in a highly fluctuating, variable environment like that, the question is: what kinds of genes do you need? And what kinds of controlling switches have to be on those genes to allow you to cope with environmental change?
And the increase in temperatures has affected the metabolic functions of crabs, snails and mussels?
Crabs that are currently living highest up on the rocks, right at the edge of the envelope, are the most threatened species. They’re within a degree or two of heat death on hot days.
You also study Antarctic fish that have lived for 15 million years in a constant-temperature ice bath, where salinity and oxygen are very stable. Why?
Because they have lost hundreds of thousands of genes—and the ability to respond to environmental challenges. We’re now trying to map those genetic changes.
Although the scenario for global warming seems pretty grim, you look like a man who enjoys his work.
Well, quite often a study at the marine station begins with someone saying, “Holy smokes! What is that?” It’s very different from working with what are called model systems—yeast, fruit flies and humans.
