From Taking the Sea Seriously from the Stony Brook Review V. 10 N. 01, September 1976
IT MAY BE SUMMER FUN TO US, BUT IT’S YEAR-ROUND WORK IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST TO THE SCIENTISTS OF THE MARINE SCIENCES RESEARCH CENTER
For most of us, the sea means fishing, sailing, swimming — in other words,summer fun.
But for the scientists of the University’s Marine Sciences Research Center (MSRC), the sea, especially the water around Long Island, is their life’s work. They are concerned with the public service issues of pollution, erosion, sewage, aquaculture, shellfish management, wetlands, the marine food chain, public health and environmental effects of power plants.
Although most Stony Brook faculty have left the beaches to concentrate on winning intellectual beach heads from classroom podiums, MSRC faculty find the fall just another cycle in their year-round field work at South Shore beaches, along the continental shelf off the beaches, in Great South Bay, in many parts of Long Island Sound, in various other bays and harbors around the United States, even in the comparatively restricted space of Flax Pond in Old Field near the campus.
Wading in hip boots, using sophisticated sampling equipment aboard their 55-foot research vessel Onrust, sometimes scuba diving, marine scientists, bolstered by new and returning students in marine sciences graduate studies, will be carrying out dozens of projects during the fall, winter and spring months.
Their work represents a special illustration of the way in which hundreds of Stony Brook faculty members will be carrying out public service projects on Long Island this year.
“We see public service as a logical outlet for teaching and research, the two other components of the University’s basic mission,” says Marine Sciences Center Director Dr. Jerry R. Schubel.
Dr. Schubel, in his second year at MSRC’s helm, is articulating an increasingly effective research program aimed at, in his words, “making this, quite simply, the best coastal oceanographic research center.”
The research activities, he notes, are instrumental in teaching, giving students invaluable field experiences. In turn, the results of the Center’s marine research are conscientiously being translated into forms readily usable by planners and managers in dealing with societal problems of the coastal zone.
“We’ll go anywhere to get answers,” says Dr. Schubel, and this year his associates will go to a variety of places including the North Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay, Caribbean Sea, and San Francisco Harbor.
But most of the Center’s work and its major commitments are focused right on New York’s coastal waters and on local marine resources and problems of ultimate significance to everyone living here.
To some extent the Center is involved with current marine crises. Its faculty are continuing to work, for example, on the problems of floating sewage-related debris which struck South Shore beaches this summer, and the effects of Hurricane Belle on the sludge deposits in the New York Bight. But, says Dr. Schubel, a University center, if it’s to play an effective public service role, must have much more than the capability of responding to crises. “Somebody, somewhere,” he says, “must anticipate the problems and find answers that help avoid them. The one place where you have the comparative luxury of such long-range thinking is the University. We must guard this privilege, this responsibility, jealously.”
This fall, the Center’s faculty will be aboard the R/V Onrust accompanying the sludge barges from New York City and monitoring what happens when actual dumping occurs. They’ll be trying to determine how much material remains at dumping sites, and how much moves off and in what direction, and what effect sludge has upon phytoplankton, the simple, single-celled plants at the bottom of the food chain.
The Center will also offer, along with members of the Marine Eco-Systems Analysis (MESA) division of the U.S. Commerce Department’s National and Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, a graduate workshop course this fall to assess the relative importance of the several sources of floatable sewage in the Bight, and the mechanisms that concentrate it on Long Island’s South Shore beaches.
With their commitment to assuring regional planners and managers fullest usefulness of the Center’s research findings. Dr. Schubel and his colleagues work closely with numerous local, regional, state and federal agencies, including Brookhaven and Islip Towns, Suffolk County, the Bi-County Planning Board, Marine Resources Council, New York Department of Environmental Conservation, New York State Energy Research and Development Administration, New York Sea Grant Institute, MESA — an office headquartered on the Stony Brook campus which coordinated all investigations of the summer’s beach pollution, and with other federal agencies including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Army Corps of Engineers, National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and Environmental Protection Agency.
MSRC scientists are working on a variety of projects dealing with both the living and non-living resources of New York’s coastal environment. Professor J.L. McHugh and his students are working with the Department of Environmental Conservation to produce a shellfish management plan for the hard clam industry — the State’s most important commercial fishing. Professors H.H. Carter, E.J. Carpenter, Schubel, P.K. Weyl, and M.J. Bowman are developing a conceptual framework which should help decision makers make the “right” choices with regard to regulations on costly backfitting of power plants with cooling towers designed for environmental protection. Professors Schubel and Weyl and Ms. Anne Williams are preparing a dredged spoil management plan for Long Island Sound to ensure availability of sites for the disposal of dredged materials without sacrificing environmental quality unintentionally. Professors R.E. Wilson and Schubel and their students are assessing the environmental effects of different strategies of mining the valuable sand and gravel resources of New York Harbor, resources that are not now being fully exploited because of undocumented environmental concerns. Professors I.W. Duedall, R. Dayal, and H.B. O’Connors are attempting to find constructive uses for the large volumes of sulphur “scrubber waste” deposits produced by coal burning power plants. Professors E.R. Baylor and M. Baylor are assessing the role of the surf in transferring viruses from the sea to the atmosphere, and perhaps to man. Professors Duedall, O’Connors, and Dayal are conducting investigations to delineate the zone of dispersal of sludge released by barges in the New York Bight. Professor C.F. Wurster and his co-workers are investigating the effects of PCB’s and other persistent pollutants on phytoplankton communities. Professors W.E. Esaias, O’Connors, and Wilson are conducting basic studies of the factors, both natural and man-induced, that control the plankton communities in Long Island Sound and on the continental shelf. Professors Schubel and Bowman are assessing the sources of floatables to the Bight, and the processes that control their dispersion. Dr. B. Brinkhuis, a postdoctoral fellow, is initiating a study to determine whether or not rooted marine plants that are used to stabilize dredged spoil deposits release contaminants to the waters thus making them available for uptake by organisms such as clams or crabs and possible transfer by nature’s food chain to man.
Such examples illustrate the types of studies initiated by MSRC’s scientists in trying to under stand the processes that characterize the marine environment and man’s impact on it.
The framework for all of this work is an approach which Dr. Schubel summarizes in this way:
“Scientists must work more closely with decision makers if we are to be effective in dealing with our environmental problems, and if we are to properly utilize our marine resources, both living and non-living. We need to work together first to formulate the ‘right’ questions and then to seek the ‘right’ answers.
“Sound environmental management must be based on an understanding of the prevailing biological, chemical, geological and physical processes, and this understanding must ultimately come from research. It is clear that there are many important, unanswered questions, but it is equally clear that scientific information has developed at a greater rate than we have utilized it in environmental management. This is in large part because of a failure of the scientific community to translate the results of their investigations into forms readily usable by decision makers.
“We intend to see that the Marine Sciences Center takes an active partnership role with decision makers in applying the results of our research and that of others to the management, and when possible the solution, of important societal problems of the coastal environment.”
