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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 […]
Read MoreDeep 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 […]
Read MoreNitrifying 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 […]
Read MoreIn 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 […]
Read MoreThe 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 […]
Read MoreThe 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 […]
Read MoreBiology in the Southern Ocean is known to help regulate Earth’s climate by capturing and eventually sequestering carbon from its surface. Unfortunately, accurate estimates of the magnitude of the Southern Ocean (SO) biological carbon sink are limited and subject to ongoing debate. However, a recently published study used the expanding Southern Ocean BGC-Argo fleet to […]
Read MoreBiological impacts of ocean acidification have been the subject of intense research for more than a decade. While it is known that more acidic seawater will create difficulties for calcifying organisms (e.g. corals or coccolithophores), diatoms have so far been considered to be resilient against, or even benefit from, ocean acidification. But an overlooked biogeochemical […]
Read MoreDissolved oxygen (O2) is a central observation in oceanography with a long history of relatively high precision measurements and increasing coverage over the 21st century. O2 is a powerful tracer of physical, chemical and biological processes (e.g., photosynthesis and respiration, wave-induced bubbles, mixing, and air-sea diffusion). A commonly used approach to partition the processes controlling […]
Read MoreThe marine carbon and alkalinity cycles are tightly coupled. Seawater stores so much carbon because of its high alkalinity, or buffering capacity, and the main driver of alkalinity cycling is the formation and dissolution of biologically produced calcium carbonate (CaCO3). In a recent publication in GBC, the authors conducted novel carbon-13 tracer experiments to measure […]
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