The Niwa marine chemist and University of Otago chemistry department fellow has won the New Zealand Marine Sciences Society Award for her work of more than two decades.
Since 1998, Dr Currie has gathered data for the Munida Time Series, the southern hemisphere’s oldest acidification-monitoring programme.
Every two months, she journeys 65 km out to sea from Taiaroa Head to measure the chemical make-up of the water.
The trend numbers were variable, but pointed to a slowly acidifying ocean.
Surface waters around the Otago coast had increased in acidity by 8.6% over 23 years, she said.
This corresponded to a decrease in pH levels from 8.092 in 1998, to 8.057 in 2020.
Starting out as a PhD student keen to do work that made a difference and took her outdoors, climate change had not been part of the equation.
It was about shedding light on how much carbon was in the ocean around New Zealand, and how it was linked with the atmosphere and the land in the carbon cycle.
"We weren’t looking at ocean acidification, but after a few years it became an issue — internationally it was realised that as the oceans took up the carbon dioxide, they were becoming more acidic," Dr Currie said.
This caused monitoring projects in other southern hemisphere locations to follow in the wake of the Munida Time Series.
She was awarded the hefty bronze-cast shell trophy at a ceremony in Auckland last month.
It was "amazing" to receive it, and a lot of people had contributed to make it possible, from the boat’s skipper in her ocean voyages to her fellow scientists.
Although her work focused on one location, the interconnectedness of the ocean meant it was a global problem, requiring people to work together internationally.
What surprised her most about her work was that ocean acidification continued to go unaddressed, with the same rate of change continuing globally despite the known impact of humans.
While she hoped this would change in years to come, she found it hard to imagine the world today’s children would live in later in life.
"The potential consequences of what’s happening I find a bit scary really."
These included harm to life forms and unknown climate feedback loops.
It was too late to control the climate simply by decreasing carbon emissions, and removal processes were needed, she said.
While solutions were not her line of work, they were adjacent to it.
Growing seaweed, mangroves and other marine plants sequestered carbon in the same way as forests did on land, while other possibilities ranged from putting lime in the ocean to boost alkalinity to trapping and storing carbon under the ocean.
It was hard to know how oceans would respond, and government responses had to be based on scientific knowledge.
"That’s where these measurements come in — you have to have some basis for making those decisions."
