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Carbon fluxes in the coastal ocean and across its boundaries with the atmosphere, land, and the open ocean are an important but poorly constrained component of the global carbon budget. By synthesizing available observations and model simulations, a recent study aims to answer 1) whether the coastal ocean of North America takes up atmospheric CO2 […]
Read MoreHow do atmospheric and oceanic nutrients impact oxygen concentrations in the Chesapeake Bay? Generally, researchers focus on how terrestrial nutrients impact hypoxia. The relative importance of river, atmosphere, and ocean inputs have not been quantified, largely because estimates of nitrogen fluxes from the atmosphere and ocean are limited. A recent study in Journal of Geophysical […]
Read MoreTemporal fluctuations in the oceanic carbon budget play an important role in the cycling of organic matter from production in surface waters to consumption and sequestration in the deep ocean. A 29-year time-series (1989-2017) of particulate organic carbon (POC) fluxes and seafloor measurements of oxygen consumption in the abyssal northeast Pacific (Sta. M, 4,000 m […]
Read MoreMarine phytoplankton form the foundation of the marine food web and play a crucial role in the earth’s carbon cycle. Typically, satellite-derived Chlorophyll a (Chl a) is used to evaluate trends in phytoplankton. However, it may be many decades (or longer) before we see a statistically significant signature of climate change in Chl a due […]
Read MoreMany scientists have long hypothesized that the ocean around Antarctica was responsible for changing CO2 levels during ice ages, but lacked definitive evidence. A new study in Nature provides the most direct evidence of this process to date and provides crucial evidence of the mechanisms—including changing sea ice cover and bipolar seesaw (warming in the […]
Read MoreStudies of cruise observations in the Ross Sea are typically biased to a single or a few year(s), and long-term trends have predominantly come from satellites. Consequently, the in situ climatological patterns of nutrients and particulate matter have remained vague and unclear. What are the typical patterns of nutrients and particulate matter concentrations in the […]
Read MoreShelled pteropods (pelagic snails) are abundant planktonic predators and prey, linking grazers and higher trophic levels and contributing to the carbon cycle via consumption and excretion. Pteropods have been heralded as bioindicators of ocean acidification, given their aragonitic shell’s susceptibility to dissolution, which could ultimately lead to declining abundance. However, pteropod population dynamics are understudied, […]
Read MoreHuge numbers of tiny marine animals, known as zooplankton, migrate between the surface ocean and the twilight zone (200 – 1,000 m below the surface) everyday; it is the largest migration event anywhere on the planet. How much carbon do these animals transport with them and how much do they leave behind sequestered in the […]
Read MoreTo detect potential effects of acidification on marine organisms, experimenters most commonly use within-experiment replication, but repeating the experiments themselves is rarely done. While the first approach suffices to detect major CO2 effects, other potentially important responses may get detected and robustly quantified only via serial experimentation. A study by Baumann et al. in Biology Letters comprises a meta-analysis of […]
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