OCB Science Highlights

OCB Science Highlights

If you would like to have your recent publications featured on the OCB website and eNewsletter please contact ocb_news@whoi.edu. View our guidelines for writing a OCB Science Highlight.

RPiAlk: Balancing Measurement Uncertainty and Accessibility

August 31, 2023

High-accuracy measurement of total alkalinity (TA) is crucial for our understanding of ocean acidification and the inorganic carbon complex. It is also particularly expensive in terms of labor and resources. These barriers limit its application in understudied settings such as inland waters and developing coastal regions. To address this problem, the authors constructed an instrument […]

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Unveiling the Hidden Secrets of Ancient Carbon Burial

August 31, 2023

How much carbon has been buried in the depths of our ancient oceans, and how did it shape our planet’s climate? Unraveling this enigma has long eluded researchers, but a recent groundbreaking “bottom-up” study unveils the surprising history of organic carbon burial in marine sediments during the Neogene period. Departing from conventional methods, this study […]

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Unveiling the Past and Future of Ocean Acidification: A Novel Data Product covering 10 Global Surface OA Indicators

August 23, 2023

Accurately predicting future ocean acidification (OA) conditions is crucial for advancing research at regional and global scales, and guiding society’s mitigation and adaptation efforts. As an update to Jiang et al. 2019, this new model-data fusion product: 1. Utilizes an ensemble of 14 distinct Earth System Models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 […]

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Are you interested in a primer on ocean biogeochemical modeling with hands-on examples?

May 11, 2023

Look no further. This primer article explains what an ocean biogeochemical model is, how such a model is designed and applied, and includes easily accessible code examples. Refresh your memory on commonly used metrics for model evaluation through model-data comparison. Get introduced to the underlying rationale, mechanics, applications, and pitfalls of data assimilation for parameter […]

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Adaptive emission pathways to stabilize global temperatures

May 11, 2023

Around the world, countries have agreed in the Paris Agreement to limit global warming well below 2°C and to pursue efforts to reduce global warming to 1.5°C. However, large uncertainties remain about which emission pathways will allow us to reach this goal. A recent paper presents a new adaptive approach to create emission pathways and […]

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Hydrostatic pressure substantially reduces deep-sea microbial activity

May 11, 2023

Deep sea microbial communities are experiencing increasing hydrostatic pressure with depth. It is known that some deep sea microbes require high hydrostatic pressure for growth, but most measurements of deep-sea microbial activity have been performed under atmospheric pressure conditions. In a recent paper published in Nature Geoscience, the authors used a new device coined ‘In […]

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Does dark carbon fixation supply labile DOC to the deep ocean?

March 30, 2023

Nitrifying microbes are the most abundant chemoautotrophs in the dark ocean. Though better known for their role in the nitrogen cycle, they also fix dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) into biomass and thus play an important role in the global carbon cycle. The release of organic compounds by these microbes may represent an as-yet unaccounted for […]

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Enhanced-warming Kuroshio Current experiences rapid seawater acidification and CO2 increase

March 30, 2023

In order to project the future states of the climate and the marine ecosystem it is vital to understand the long-term changes in ocean carbon chemistry driven by anthropogenic influence. A paucity of data make the rates of seawater acidification and partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) rise on ocean margins highly uncertain. A recent study in Marine Pollution […]

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Severe warming = 15% increase in bacterial respiration: Southern Ocean most impacted

March 30, 2023

The utilization, respiration, and remineralization of organic matter exported from the ocean surface to its depths are key processes in the ocean carbon cycle. Marine heterotrophic Bacteria play a critical role in these activities. However, most three-dimensional (3-D) coupled physical-biogeochemical models do not explicitly include Bacteria as a state variable. Instead, they rely on parameterization […]

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Small particles contribute significantly to the biological carbon pump in the subpolar North Atlantic

February 13, 2023

The ocean’s biological carbon pump (BCP) is a collection of processes that transport organic carbon from the surface to the deep ocean where the carbon is sequestered for decades to millennia. Variations in the strength of the BCP can substantially change atmospheric CO2 levels and affect the global climate. It is important to accurately estimate […]

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