Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry

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.

OCB2025 – Dates, new location, and plenary sessions!

OCB2025 – Plenary sessions Thank you for submitting your fantastic plenary session ideas. The OCB SSC has announced the lineup for next year: OCB2025 plenary topics (final session titles TBD) Constraining the dark ocean carbon cycle (Co-chairs: Anne Dekas, Anela Choy, Jeff Bowman, Randie Bundy) Land-ocean connectivity (joint with North American Carbon Program) (Co-chairs: Jessica Luo, […]

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

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 […]

OA could boost carbon export by appendicularia

Gelatinous zooplankton comprise a widespread group of animals that are increasingly recognized as important components of pelagic ecosystems. Historically understudied, we have little knowledge of how much key taxa contribute to carbon fluxes. Likewise, there’s a critical knowledge gap of the impact of ocean change on these taxa. Appendicularia are the most abundant gelatinous zooplankton […]

Quantifying uncertainties in future projections of Chesapeake Bay Hypoxia

Climate change is expected to especially impact coastal zones, worsening deoxygenation in the Chesapeake Bay by reducing oxygen solubility and increasing remineralization rates of organic matter. However, simulated responses of this often fail to account for uncertainties embedded within the application of future climate scenarios. Recent research published in Biogeosciences and in Scientific Reports sought […]

Swirling Currents: How Ocean Mesoscale Affects Air-Sea CO2 Exchange

Due to a sparsity of in‐situ observations and the computational burden of eddy‐resolving global simulations, there has been little analysis on how mesoscale processes (e.g., eddies, meanders—lateral scales of 10s to 100s km) influence air‐sea CO2 fluxes from a global perspective. Recently, it became computationally feasible to implement global eddy‐resolving [O (10) km] ocean biogeochemical […]

How tiny teeth and their prey shape ocean ecosystems

It has long been suggested that diatoms, microscopic algae enclosed in silica-shells, developed these structures to defend against predators like copepods, small crustaceans that graze diatoms. Copepods evolved silica-lined teeth presumably to counteract this. But actual evidence for how this predator-prey relationship may drive natural selection and evolutionary change has been lacking. A recent publication […]