My scientific summer

My scientific summer

My summer was quite scientific, first I went diving and saw many different species of fish and other sea creatures and later I went to the oenology museum in Monaco. The diving part wasn’t that scientific by itself, but when you think of how fish can breathe under water and cant outside of it you wonder how does that work.
When you mix chemicals in a certain way they form a so called compounds, that are nothing like the original elements. For example you can mix carbon hydrogen and oxygen and get, vinegar, glucose or ethanol. If you mix Hydrogen and oxygen gas you get water, The reason why we cant breath water is because the oxygen is bound to two hydrogen atoms.
Fish do not breath the oxygen in H2o, instead the fish breathe O2 (oxygen gas) which is dissolved in the water. Several gasses can dissolve in liquids. Fish breathe, the dissolved form of oxygen out of the water using their gills. I found out that extracting the oxygen is not easy, because air sometimes has 20 times more oxygen then water does in the same volume. Adding to that water is heavier and thicker than air, so it takes the lungs much more work. The reason why gills work for fish is infract that they are cold blooded, this reduces their demand for oxygen. Warm blooded animals like whales have to breathe air like people do because it would be hard to extract enough oxygen using gills. We humans cannot breathe underwater because our lungs do not have enough surface area to absorb enough oxygen from water.

The second part of my scientific summer was visiting the oenology museum in Monaco.
Among the many species of fish and other sea creatures that I saw there, I learnt that the oceans act as a giant CO2 sink, actually the largest on earth. They absorb more than a quarter of the CO2 that we put into the air. If we were to expand the time period that we look at, oceans would be both sources and sinks. Because during the ice age CO2 declined by 180 ppmv and much of it was stored in the oceans during that period. As the ice ages ended, the CO2 is released from the oceans and the CO2 levels rise. The CO2 in the oceans is believed to limit the plankton production. Some of the CO2 is also being stored inside the shells which cause mutations. Some species of fish are also affected by this amount of carbon while others are almost led to extinction.


Overall this summer was really fun and educative. Not only did I get to see many different species of fish, both in an aquarium and in the sea, but I also learnt about how they breathe and the dangers that they are facing. During the time in the museum I also listened to a speech by Prince Albert of Monaco. Which taught me a lot about the way that different people can help protect the oceans and the sea creatures within them