Hana Vasquez studies carbonate chemistry in coastal water, where the signal that dominates the open ocean conversation about acidification is only one of several. Respiration, river input, upwelling and photosynthesis all move coastal pH, and they move it on hourly and seasonal timescales that swamp the long-term trend.
That matters because the organisms most sensitive to acidification live in exactly this water. A shellfish larva does not experience an annual mean. It experiences the hour it happens to be in, and in a coastal inlet that hour can be well outside anything the open ocean will see for decades. Her group runs high-frequency sensors in the Aldwych estuary and at Prentice to characterize that variability.
The applied end of the work is with regional shellfish growers, who have a direct interest in knowing when their hatchery intake water is going to be a problem. Vasquez is careful to describe this as useful rather than solved.
She teaches OCEA 230 Chemical Oceanography and contributes to AQUA 430 Sustainable Aquaculture Systems. She collaborates with Clara Ndungu on estuarine work and with Yuki Nakamura on hatchery applications.