It Takes a Big Mind to Save a Small Place

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. – The University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography bay campus may be small in stature, but there are a lot of big, respected names that are world renowned due to the work they have done in their respective fields, likeBecky Robinson.

Robinson, a Bio-geochemist, is an associate professor at URI’s GSO campus. She has been a scientist her whole career, but has not focused her work on coastal systems the whole time.

As an undergraduate student she started out as a geology major, “I was really interested in the history of the earth and the oceans,” Robinson said.

Robinson continued on to complete her Bachelors degree at Bryn Mawr College. Two years later she then completed her Masters in Earth Sciences from the University of Southern California, and finally furthered her education by receiving a PhD in Marine Geology and Geochemistry from the university of Michigan.

Following the completion of her education Robinson is now specifically interested in how ocean biology has responded or played a role in driving the climate cycles.

“80 percent of my brain power is dedicated to understanding how the ocean has responded to climate change on long, geologic time scales,” said Robinson as she explained to the class what her work consists of, aside from teaching undergraduate climate, a graduate geological course, and paleoceanography courses at GSO in the spring.

Being a New England native, Robinson explained that she was very happy to return to Rhode Island to work at URI, but the main reason she ended up here is that there simply wasn’t very many academic jobs in the world in her field of study to choose from. Loving the ocean and wanting to study and learn more about it turned Rhode Island into a pretty good opportunity to work in a school of oceanography and continue her career.

Robinson is continuously trying to understand how, or what roll biology plays in regulating atmospheric CO2. Going even more in depth she is interested in seeing if there are any interactions between the ocean and the carbon cycle. For this information she looks to Narragansett Bay.

According to Robinson’s data, as well as other geological records, atmospheric CO2 is higher than it has been in the past.

“I’m worried because we are changing the chemistry of the earth faster than we see in the geologic record,” Robinson said.

Robinson has enough experience and education to know that what is going on in the Bay is not normal and that abnormal changes are occurring, possibly due to humans.

“Geologic record gives us one chance, we can’t go back and change it,” she exclaimed.

Though Robinson’s work is done at a small institution, there is no question that there are large implications to the data and information that she is able to collect in places like Narragansett Bay. It is important to study because it is a system that serves both the human and non-human populations in the area making it a significant part of the local ecosystem, as well as an important environment for the local commercial fishing industry. Without scientists like Robinson to let us know what we are doing wrong we could potentially fail to keep these parts of our earth and oceans from dying out leaving us with major problems to deal with in the future.