Dr. Anya Waite — Frank McKenna Awards 2024 honouree

“The ocean has been missing in the climate dialogue. The ocean holds global carbon, and it’s the ocean’s action of taking up and outgassing carbon dioxide that essentially mediates our progress towards our climate goals.”

During her childhood in Halifax, the ocean was a fearsome presence, a place of stories about loss and struggle. Storms pummeled the shoreline. Fog blinded seafarers. The Atlantic was unforgiving in its ability to kill and wreck ships.

She had yet to fall in love with it.

In fact, Dr. Anya Waite started out at Dalhousie University as a music student, studying violin, then switched to a double major in English Literature and biology, finishing up with honours in Forestry. “My career has been an interesting meander,” she concedes. It was as an undergraduate that she had an opportunity to do oceanographic research and fell under the spell of the sea.

“Suddenly it’s almost like the frequencies change” she says of her infatuation. “You’re seeing multiple frequencies of energy moving across the ocean. It’s so vast. I think there’s a music to it. It’s music in liquid form.”

Prepare yourself for the polymathic mind of Dr. Waite.

The award-winning teacher will talk about complex scientific processes in simple images. Carbon sinks in the North Atlantic are “like chimneys in the ocean, cool on top and sinking quickly into the deep.” The effect of melting Arctic ice “is putting a sort of Zamboni of fresh water on top of the North Atlantic and changing the balance of heat and salt and how those chimneys sink the big carbon repositories into the depths.”

At the start of her fascination with the ocean, “climate change was on the radar but only just,” she says. After completing a PhD in Oceanography at University of British Columbia, she received a prestigious postdoctoral scholarship with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts but found it was less about ideas than it was about sourcing research funds. “I wasn’t having as much science fun as I wanted.”

Next came a position in New Zealand, where she devised innovative ways to study plankton. “You collect this stuff, and you see, oh my goodness, this is the biological carbon pump!”

Her heart – and mind – returned to oceanography. She took a position with the University of Western Australia’s Ocean Institute where she was an environmental engineering professor. When she was a new mother – she has two children – she helmed a three-week “ground-breaking research cruise that changed my career” as one of the first female chief scientists. (She is also the first woman to co-chair the Global Ocean Observing System.) For 17 years, she worked at UWA, becoming the Winthrop Professor, a prestigious research position.

In 2014, recruitment officers called from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. “We want your head,” they reportedly said. Luckily, she was fluent in German so off she went to become head of the Institute’s Polar Biological Oceanography section. Four years later, she received “a phone call from Halifax,” asking her to apply as Scientific Director of the Dalhousie-led Ocean Frontier Institute (OFI).

Founded in 2015, the OFI, a partnership between Dalhousie, Memorial University in Newfoundland and the University of Prince Edward Island, was led by scientist Marlon Lewis, one of the first ocean entrepreneurs in Atlantic Canada. With an investment of $94 million from the federal government together with other provincial partners and governments and a gift of $25 million from John Risley, a well-known philanthropist and entrepreneur, the total funding amounted to $220 million, positioning Canada as a global leader in an ocean-first approach to climate change.

“The ocean has been missing in the climate dialogue,” says Waite, adding that she and her family were keen to return to Halifax. “The ocean holds global carbon, and it’s the ocean’s action of taking up and outgassing carbon dioxide that essentially mediates our progress towards our climate goals.”

Observation is critical, especially in the North Atlantic, where ocean changes are happening first and fastest. The global ocean removes more CO2 from the atmosphere than all of Earth’s rainforests combined — 30 percent of it in the North Atlantic. “The water cools and it’s saturated with carbon dioxide that’s taken up from the atmosphere. It cools and sinks 2,000 to 3,000 meters, sometimes even deeper in to the North Atlantic, and then crawls backwards towards the south. This huge sink of carbon is called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The AMOC is one of the critical pieces of climate circulation globally. If it fails, it could shut down ocean carbon absorption,” she explains.

Last year, the OFI launched the Transforming Climate Action program to boost data collection and analysis of the North Atlantic carbon sink in order to reduce uncertainty about the ocean’s role in climate change and deliver data science to policy-makers, scientists and industry. With a new $154-million investment from the Canadian government, the largest research grant ever received by Dalhousie, the program will enable improved climate change forecasting and climate adaptation strategies as well as develop new technology for measuring changes.

In recent years, the blue economy and ocean technology have ramped up in Atlantic Canada. In 2018, Jim Hanlon founded the Centre for Ocean Ventures & Entrepreneurship (COVE), a hub for ocean-related companies to conduct research and development. That same year, Canada’s Ocean Supercluster in Newfoundland, a catalyst for the growth of the country’s ocean economy, was created.

Why did it take so long for interest in the ocean to develop?

“We’re land mammals,” Waite offers. “The ocean is out of sight, out of mind. For many, it’s unknown and in some ways, unknowable. But technological advances have made it possible to observe it to make sure we’re not damaging the life support system that the ocean provides.”

Read about the other Frank McKenna Awards 2024 honourees, Chief Mi’sel Joe and Laura Lee Langley.

PPF’s Frank McKenna Awards 2024 celebrate leaders whose ingenuity and initiative are helping to drive change in Atlantic Canada. This year’s event will take place on Oct. 10 at Pier 21 in Halifax. Register now.