| Summary: | Davidson's work in Antarctic waters is part of a much broader study that seeks to know how whole communities of plants, animals and microbes living on the Antarctic sea floor respond to higher acid levels in the seawater around them.Donna Roberts is a senior scientist at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, Hobart, whose quest for knowledge about the problem of ocean acidification has led her to an innovative engineer based at Monterey, California, named Bill Kirkwood.Kirkwood's employer is the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), founded and funded by the late David Packard, of Hewlett-Packard fame.There, he and a team of marine scientists and engineers produced the unique research tool that caught Roberts's attention.FOCE, for Free Ocean Carbon dioxide Experiment, is the name of a system to enable scientists to study benthic (sea-floor) communities where they occur naturally, without removing specimens to a laboratory.In effect it makes a laboratory within the coastal sea floor environment.Clever design enables users of the FOCE system to study the response of living communities to different chemical properties of sea water, such as lower pH levels (or higher acidity).So far the system has been deployed in US waters, in the Mediterranean Sea and on the Great Barrier Reef.
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