Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry

PAUSE on all bulk travel requests

Until further notice, OCB will not be able to consider bulk travel support requests. We will post an announcement if this changes.

OCB2025 online only

The OCB2025 Summer Science Workshop will take place VIRTUALLY June 2 – 6, 2025. Constraining the dark ocean carbon cycle: Implications for ocean carbon budgets? (Co-chairs: Anne Dekas, Anela Choy, Jeff Bowman, Randie Bundy) Rivers to coasts: Biogeochemical linkages and environmental resilience (joint with North American Carbon Program) (Co-chairs: Fei Da, Kanchan Maiti, Shaily Rahman, Libby […]

Leaky Deltas workshop summary

The Leaky Deltas OCB workshop was held 17-20 March 2025 at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, USA, which is situated within the Mississippi River delta. We brought together 57 members of the research community who study river deltas in the context of the global carbon cycle. The goal of the workshop was to create […]

New: Connecting Observations to Models

Ombres, E., H. Benway, K. Bisson, A. Larkin, L. Perotti, L. Wright-Fairbanks (eds.) (2024). Connecting Observations to Models: Biogeochemical Observing and Modeling Workshop, 2024 Summary Report and Suggested Steps Forward. Published Date: 2024 Series: NOAA technical memorandum OAR-OAP ; 6, DOI: https://doi.org/10.25923/wpdj-ja69

Welcoming new SSC members!

Welcome to the four new and one continuing SSC members! Jason Graff (Oregon State Univ.) (2027) Biooptics, satellite remote sensing Bror Jönsson (Univ. New Hampshire) (2027) – biological production across land-open ocean continuum, coastal ocean acidification, interactions between physical dynamics in the upper ocean and biological production, phytoplankton dynamics, and air-sea exchange, connectivity combining observations, […]

New workshop report: Ecological Forecasting

New workshop report from the joint OCB-US CLIVAR 2022 workshop Daily to Decadal Ecological Forecasting along North American Coastlines Capotondi, A., Coles, V. J., Clayton, S., Friedrichs, M., Gierach, M., Miller, A. J., and Stock, C. 2024. Daily to Decadal Ecological Forecasting Along North American Coastlines Workshop Report. 54pp. doi: 10.1575/1912/70991 Citable URI https://hdl.handle.net/1912/70991 Download here.

New Ocean Metaproteomics paper

New Ocean Metaproteomics paper published (web link and pdf link) to help promote proteomics in environmental settings. The study is open access. This paper is a product of OCB’s Intercomparison of Ocean Metaproteomic Analyses.

Recent Science Highlights

Microbial Iron limitation in the ocean’s twilight zone

How deep in the ocean do microbes feel the effects of nutrient limitation? Microbial production in one third of the surface ocean is limited by the essential micronutrient iron (Fe). This limitation extends to at least the bottom of the euphotic zone, but what happens below that? In a study that recently published in Nature […]

How do ocean microbes share the job of denitrification?

Denitrification is a crucial multi-step process for ecosystem productivity and sustainability because some of its steps can result in the loss of the essential nutrient nitrogen or the production of greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. We do not understand why microbial functional groups conducting different steps of denitrification can coexist in the ocean and why certain […]

The ocean is shifting toward phosphorus limitation

Biogeochemical models predict that ocean warming is weakening the vertical transport of nutrients to the upper ocean, with severe implications for marine productivity. However, nutrient concentrations across the ocean surface often fall below detection limits, making it difficult to observe long-term changes. In a recent study in PNAS, we analyzed over 30,000 nitrate and phosphate […]

Persistent bottom trawling impairs seafloor carbon sequestration

Bottom trawling, a fishing method that uses heavy nets to catch animals that live on and in the seafloor, could release a large amount of organic carbon from seafloor into the water, that metabolizes to CO2 then outgasses to the atmosphere. The magnitude of this indirect emission has been heavily debated, with estimates spanning from […]

Rain increases the global carbon sink

The global ocean dampens the anthropic CO2 increase in the atmosphere by absorbing around 25% of the carbon emitted each year. Of the processes involved in exchanges of energy and mass between ocean and atmosphere that may impact this carbon sink, rainfall has never been systematically and comprehensively quantified. A study recently published in Nature […]

Deep dive into carbon transport: How bacteria feast and compete on lipids in sinking particles

What drives carbon from the atmosphere to the deep ocean? The journey of phytoplankton-derived carbon is critical in the global carbon cycle, yet the influence of interacting bacteria in degrading lipid-rich particles during their descent has remained a mystery—until now. Using an innovative combination of nano-scale lipidomics and microscopy, researchers investigated how bacteria target and […]