How can we forecast climate tipping points? By capturing the pulse of our ocean

How can we forecast climate tipping points? By capturing the pulse of our ocean - Marine Biological Association

Eight people standing on a cliff next to the ocean with a setting sun in the background — CANARY project ARIA Creators Left to Right: Lance Gregory, Robert Camp, Clare Ostle, Lilian Lieber, Alex Nimmo Smith, Rob Ayrton, Peter Ganderton, Dan Lear (missing in photo are Kai Cursons, David Johns and Pierre Hélaouët). © Marine Biological Association

Backed by a £3.75M award from the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA), the UK Government’s new high-risk, high-reward funding agency, the CANARY project, led by researchers at the Marine Biological Association (MBA) and the University of Plymouth (UoP), will revolutionise how we forecast climate tipping points. CANARY’s transformative approach focuses on plankton as the “canaries in the coalmine” of ocean health.

Plankton are the ocean’s pulse—microscopic organisms that fuel entire ocean ecosystems, drive global carbon cycles, and respond rapidly to environmental shifts, making them powerful early warning indicators of impending tipping points.

At the heart of CANARY is an ambitious vision that merges cutting-edge plankton imaging technologies with AI-powered data pipelines. CANARY aims to create an innovative, scalable, and sustainable observation system to track plankton dynamics across climate-sensitive regions, such as around Greenland and Iceland.

Advanced, AI-integrated holographic plankton imaging will be deployed across multiple platforms in so-called constellation deployments, creating an unprecedented observation network. Platforms include commercial vessels (such as ferries and container ships operating as ‘ships of opportunity’), newly developed autonomous underwater robots, and biologging tags attached to filter-feeding whales, the natural sentinels of plankton shifts.

Posted On: 18/02/2025

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