Seagrasses are more efficient at storing carbon in the soil or sediment, acre for acre, than a tropical rainforest. That could make them a powerful tool for slowing the rapid rise of atmospheric CO2. The ability to quantify how much carbon a specific seagrass bed stores over time could help governments, businesses and environmental groups better manage these natural carbon sinks. Ken Dunton, a marine biology professor and Preston Wilson, an engineering professor may have found one weird trick to measuring carbon storage in seagrass beds: listening to the sound of tiny bubbles.

With current technologies, being able to accurately measure how much carbon a seagrass bed stores from year to year takes a lot of time, people and money. It requires going out and physically digging up plants and sediments and bringing them back to the lab and spending days analyzing them—and doing this repeatedly over time.

The new method Dunton and Wilson are developing relies on a simple idea: As seagrasses turn sunlight into energy, they absorb carbon dioxide from the water, store the carbon in their roots and other tissues and release the oxygen back into the water, some in the form of bubbles. The more bubbles a seagrass plant emits during the day, the more carbon it stores. By continuously measuring the sound intensity, they can infer how much carbon is stored over time.

Episode credits

Our theme music was composed by Charlie Harper

Other music for today’s show was produced by: Podington Bear

Cover image: Concept for a new way to infer carbon storage in seagrass beds using sound intensity recorded with hydrophones (black). Illustration credit: 5W Infographics.

About Point of Discovery

Point of Discovery is a production of the University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and is a part of the Texas Podcast Network. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, Amazon Podcasts, and more. Questions or comments about this episode or our series in general? Email Marc Airhart.

We’re celebrating the launch of “AI for the Rest of Us”, a podcast to help get you up to speed on the essentials of artificial intelligence. Every two weeks, we’ll sit down with UT faculty experts and get them talking, in simple terms, about how AI might transform healthcare, work, the ways we learn and how we make big decisions.

Co-hosts are Marc Airhart, science writer and podcaster in the College of Natural Sciences and Casey Boyle, associate professor of rhetoric and director of UT’s Digital Writing & Research Lab.

Listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, RSS, or anywhere you get your podcasts. You can also listen on the web at aifortherest.net.

About Point of Discovery

Point of Discovery is a production of the University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and is a part of the Texas Podcast Network. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, Amazon Podcasts, and more. Questions or comments about this episode or our series in general? Email Marc Airhart.

Over the past year and a half, data and images from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, have been flooding in. And floating around in that sea of data (and from other instruments over the past 20 years) are at least three big problems: There appear to be too many big, bright galaxies, too soon after the Big Bang. No one can agree on how fast the universe is (or was) expanding. And we don’t know what most of the universe is made of.

The University of Texas at Austin brought together a panel of astronomy and physics faculty members to debate and discuss the meaning of these emerging problems in the data. The panelists were Kim Boddy, Mike Boylan-Kolchin, Karl Gebhardt, Can Kilic and Julian Muñoz. Have a listen and then decide: is cosmology really in crisis?

For a deeper dive into some of the issues raised in this episode, head over to this recently released video from the American Museum of Natural History’s Isaac Asimov Panel Debate, titled: “JWST’s Cosmic Revolution.” It features Mike Boylan-Kolchin, UT alum Neil DeGrasse Tyson and others.

Research related to today’s debate:

James Webb Space Telescope Images Challenge Theories of How Universe Evolved

Cosmic Dawn: The JWST is Changing our Calculus of the Cosmos

Hobby-Eberly Telescope Reveals Galaxy Gold Mine in First Large Survey

Did the James Webb telescope ‘break the universe’? Maybe not

Episode credits

Our theme music was composed by Charlie Harper

Other music for today’s show was produced by: Podington Bear

Cover image: JWST’s image of spiral galaxy NGC 628, which is 32 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. The spiraling filamentary structure looks somewhat like a cross section of a nautilus shell. Read more. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), and the PHANGS team.

About Point of Discovery

Point of Discovery is a production of the University of Texas at Austin's College of Natural Sciences and is a part of the Texas Podcast Network. The opinions expressed in this podcast represent the views of the hosts and guests, and not of The University of Texas at Austin. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, Amazon Podcasts, and more. Questions or comments about this episode or our series in general? Email Marc Airhart.