When cod and haddock lay their eggs, they drift with the current. When pollution spills into the ocean, where does it end up? When a person goes overboard, where should the search pattern be focused?
Those are just a few reasons why people need to understand how ocean currents work.
For Jim Manning, a physical oceanographer and Jaffrey native, he’s spent decades studying the matter and helping students learn about its importance.
“Having grown up on the base of Mt. Monadnock, I didn’t see the ocean too much,” Manning said. “Not until one summer, we spent a few weeks camping on Cape Cod.”
Manning said that few weeks was his first real exposure to the ocean. After spending multiple summers on the Cape, he spent a lot of time in the water, surfing or on his Sunfish sailboat.
“That hooked me,” Manning said. “At the time, I was going to college for mathematics, and I started looking at some catalogs and found the University of Rhode Island was offering courses in waves and tides.”
He attended the University of Rhode Island for his master’s degree and got his first job at the Acadia Institute of Oceanography, which provides hands-on biological, physical and chemical oceanography education for students ages 10 to 19, where he got his first experiences working with students. He began working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1987.
Manning said there have been two major projects that he’s spent his career on. The first, which he started more than 30 years ago, was collecting ocean data using commercial fishermen.
Manning said in the early parts of his career, he would go out on research vessels for a few weeks at a time to collect data about ocean temperature, salinity and currents. But, he said, it wasn’t always the most consistent approach. Weather or ship troubles could interrupt what was already a limited time frame for collecting data.
“But as I was out there, I would see the lights of several vessels, fishing,” Manning said. “I realized, they go out there all the time, and cast nets or drop traps. They could be collecting data for us.”
Manning started approaching fishermen on the docks, asking if they would be willing to help collect one of the simplest forms of data that is important to physical oceanography — temperature.
They agreed, and Environmental Monitors on Lobster Traps, or eMOLT, was born.
It’s grown over the years, as sensors have become more advanced, said Manning. Sensors can now transmit data automatically, and better measures for things like ocean salinity and pressure and oxygen saturation have been added.
In a separate project, Manning has also been studying ocean currents and helping to teach high school students about the importance of learning about them by going into schools and having students help build ocean drifters. The drifters are tracked by satellites to understand the direction of currents.
Students have helped build more than 100 drifters over the years, said Manning. They build the aluminum frame and decorate the cotton sails that act as underwater drag, and then hand over the drifter to a local fisherman to set adrift offshore.
Manning said since his retirement as an oceanographer at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, his focus has been on the drifter project. He said that, and the eMOLT project has helped to collect important data over the years.
“You can think of these things, the gear and the drifters, similar to how the National Weather Service collects data. They collect from schools, hospitals, airports, and they gather this data to feed their models,” Manning explained. “There’s models for oceans similar to the models we have for the atmosphere. But they need data to get it right. That’s the real purpose of all this data.”
There are several reasons why understanding these factors is important, Manning said. Fish eggs and lobster larvae drift with the current, plankton flows in and causes a red tide, effluent from power plants gets dumped into the ocean and swept out onto the tide.
It’s important to know how the current functions to manage these things, said Manning, but it takes data to understand.
“We’re not very good at predicting things like current,” Manning said. “We’re far from being able to predict that.”
Manning said he hopes that inspiring students can help them become the next generation to take up the task and continue the work of studying the ocean.