Lab under Water

Now let's take a deep dive. Where? Off the floor to Keys in tonight's Eye on Earth, Mark Phillips takes us to an underwater research lab where scientists are studying the effect of climate change. About 5 miles off Isle Maurada in the Floridian Keys, some groundbreaking climate science work is being done on the ground that lies beneath the ocean. There's only one way to get to the undersea lab: straight down about 50 feet. The aquarius reef base run by Florida International University has only recently been brought back into service after being badly damaged by hurricane Irma two years ago. Entry is via the aptly named "Wetboard.""Welcome to ..." An office with all the comforts of home and jammed full of electronic equipment that can distort TV pictures, but which allows scientists like Jim Forequinn to work down here, sometimes for weeks at a time. "A lot of attention is paid to make sure that oxygen concentrations are correct. And the CO2 is at the right level." "You can forget your 50 odd feet below the surface." "You really can..." "--if you don't look at the window." The point of being down here is that actually living on the sea floor means scientists can do more than just take the relatively short dives that are possible from the surface. "They become," says marinemycologist Mike Heighthouse, "sea creatures themselves.""You can be the ocean down here, you really can be the ocean. So you get a sense of change that you don't with just instruments in the water or just little tiny dimes, so you need these observatories like aquarius to keep an eye on what the reefs are doing and figure out the solutions."Solutions to a new problem they've discovered. Hurricane Irma also did major damage to the sea grass beds that grow along the coast. And sea grass underwater does what forests do on land. It absorbs carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases causing the world to heat up. We're losing sea grasses faster than we're losing crop." "Why? Why are we losing it." "Sea grass is like a little more people there and people are not in good for clear water." More and more the world's oceans and what they mean for greenhouse gases and so for global warming is becoming a crucial part of climate science. And that study is made a whole lot easier, if they can live down here. The scientists have discovered that the sea grass isn't growing back as it should, because there are too many turtles eating it, and there are too many turtles because there are too few sharks. "Turtles are watching what's going on around them. And if their body gets eaten, they're not going to do what their buddy was doing." So just having sharks in the area, what you say?Controls the number of turtles that are eating the sea grass. Absolutely. And that's the kind of thing you only learn being part of the undersea world, not just visiting it from above. Mark Phillips, CBS news on the aquarius reef base.