The application is open for the new OCB Workshop: Synthesis and intercomparison of ocean carbon uptake in CMIP6 models. The workshop will take place December 8-9, 2018 in Washington, DC. PIs include John Dunne (NOAA/GFDL), Scott Doney (Univ. Virginia), Matthew Long (NCAR), Anastasia Romanou (NASA/GISS), Galen McKinley (Columbia/LDEO).
Apply here by July 13.
Frontiers in Marine Science research topic: We Shed Light: Optical Insights into the Biological Carbon Pump
From an OSM18 session led by the TOMCAT (Translation of Optical Measurements into particle Content, Aggregation & Transfer) SCOR working group. Abstract deadline June 29, 2018 and manuscript deadline March 29, 2019.
Frontiers in Marine Science research topic: Spatial and temporal variability of seawater chemistry in coastal ecosystems in the context of global change. The manuscript submission deadline is July 1, 2018.
A Special Issue in Oceanography "Celebrating 30 years of Ocean Science and Technology at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute"
Chavez, F.P., P.G. Brewer, and C.A. Scholin. 2017. Celebrating 30 years of ocean science and technology at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Oceanography 30(4):18–25, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.420
Robison, B.H., K.R. Reisenbichler, and R.E. Sherlock. 2017. The coevolution of midwater research and ROV technology at MBARI. Oceanography 30(4):26–37, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.421.
Haddock, S.H.D., L.M. Christianson, W.R. Francis, S. Martini, C.W. Dunn, P.R. Pugh, C.E. Mills, K.J. Osborn, B.A. Seibel, C.A. Choy, C.E. Schnitzler, G.I. Matsumoto, M. Messié, D.T. Schultz, J.R. Winnikoff, M.L. Powers, R. Gasca, W.E. Browne, S. Johnsen, K.L. Schlining, S. von Thun, B.E. Erwin, J.F. Ryan, and E.V. Thuesen. 2017. Insights into the biodiversity, behavior, and bioluminescence of deep-sea organisms using molecular and maritime technology. Oceanography 30(4):38–47, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.422.
Brewer, P.G., E.T. Peltzer, P.M. Walz, and W.J. Kirkwood. 2017. Creating the art of deep-sea experimental chemistry with MBARI ROVs. Oceanography 30(4):48–59, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.423.
Barry, J.P., D. Graves, C. Kecy, C. Lovera, C. Okuda, C.A. Boch, and J.P. Lord. 2017. Chasing the future: How will ocean change affect marine life? Oceanography 30(4):60–71, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.424.
Smith, K.L., Jr., A.D. Sherman, P.R. McGill, R.G. Henthorn, J. Ferreira, and C.L. Huffard. 2017. Evolution of monitoring an abyssal time-series station in the northeast Pacific over 28 years. Oceanography 30(4):72–81, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.425.
Clague, D.A., J.B. Paduan, D.W. Caress, W.W. Chadwick Jr., M. Le Saout, B.M. Dreyer, and R.A. Portner. 2017. High-resolution AUV mapping and targeted ROV observations of three historic lava flows at Axial Seamount. Oceanography 30(4):82–99, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.426.
Scholin, C.A., J. Birch, S. Jensen, R. Marin III, E. Massion, D. Pargett, C. Preston, B. Roman, and W. Ussler III. 2017. The quest to develop ecogenomic sensors: A 25-Year history of the Environmental Sample Processor (ESP) as a case study. Oceanography 30(4):100–113, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.427.
Sakamoto, C.M., K.S. Johnson, L.J. Coletti, T.L. Maurer, G. Massion, J.T. Pennington, J.N. Plant, H.W. Jannasch, and F.P. Chavez. 2017. Hourly in situ nitrate on a coastal mooring: A 15-year record and insights into new production. Oceanography 30(4):114–127, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.428.
Chavez, F.P., J.T. Pennington, R.P. Michisaki, M. Blum, G.M. Chavez, J. Friederich, B. Jones, R. Herlien, B. Kieft, B. Hobson, A.S. Ren, J. Ryan, J.C. Sevadjian, C. Wahl, K.R. Walz, K. Yamahara, G.E. Friederich, and M. Messié. 2017. Climate variability and change: Response of a coastal ocean ecosystem. Oceanography 30(4):128–145, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.429.
Find jobs, read news from the OCB Project Office and OCB Community, view upcoming meeting and deadlines in the Ocean Carbon Exchange eNewsletter, sent every other Thursday. Click to read the latest issue or sign up here. Note, this eNewsletter replaces the ocb-all email listserv. The Ocean Carbon Exchange archive is available here. Please send announcements to ocb_news@whoi.edu.
How do phytoplankton respond to atmospheric nitrogen deposition in the western North Atlantic, an area downwind of large agricultural and industrial centers? The biogeochemical impacts of this ‘fertilization’ remain unclear, as direct oceanic observations of atmospheric deposition are limited and models often cannot resolve the important processes.
In a recent study, St-Laurent et al. (2017) simulated the biogeochemical impacts of nitrogen deposition on surface waters of the western North Atlantic by combining year-specific deposition rates from the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model and a realistic 3-D biogeochemical model of the waters off the US east coast. Westerly winds from the continent and large fluxes of heat and moisture over the Gulf Stream produce a ‘hotspot’ of wet nitrogen deposition along the path of the current. This nitrogen input increases the local surface primary productivity by up to 30% during the summer. However, the study also identified important processes that mitigate the impact of atmospheric nitrogen deposition in other seasons and regions. Deposition weakens vertical nitrogen gradients in the upper 20 m and thus decreases the upward transport of nitrogen to the surface layer (a negative feedback). Increases in surface phytoplankton concentrations also negatively impact light availability below the surface through shelf-shading.
Atmospheric nitrogen deposition along the US east coast. (Left) Wet deposition of oxidized nitrogen over the Gulf Stream as simulated by the Community Multiscale Air Quality model (average 2004-2008). (Right) Increase in summer surface primary productivity in response to the deposition (average 2004-2008).
These results indicate that atmospheric nitrogen deposition has important impacts on the surface biogeochemistry of the western North Atlantic but that the response is not simply proportional to the deposition. Additional research is necessary to clarify the role played by atmospheric deposition in this region in past and future centuries. While inputs of atmospheric nitrogen associated with power plants and industries have decreased since the passage of the Clean Air Act, recent studies have revealed increasing atmospheric concentrations of reduced nitrogen. Continued coordination between modeling and observing efforts (both on land and over the ocean) are needed to improve our understanding of the impacts of deposition on the biological pump in this region of the Atlantic ocean.
Authors:
Pierre St-Laurent (VIMS, College of William and Mary)
Marjorie A.M. Friedrichs (VIMS, College of William and Mary)
Raymond G. Najjar (Pennsylvania State University)
Doug Martins (FLIR Systems Inc.)
Maria Herrmann (Pennsylvania State University)
Sonya K. Miller (Pennsylvania State University)
John Wilkin (Rutgers University)
Registration is open!
Please visit the workshop website for registration, and details about plenary sessions and logistics. The 2018 OCB Summer Workshop will be held June 25-28, 2018 in Woods Hole, MA.
2018 Plenary Sessions:
We are currently seeking nominations for members of a newly established Ocean-Atmosphere Interaction Subcommittee. The scientific focus of this subcommittee is on ocean-atmosphere interactions and their role in marine biogeochemical cycles. There is substantial overlap between the scientific goals of the OCB and SOLAS (Surface Ocean and Lower Atmosphere) communities, and this subcommittee seeks to strengthen communication and collaboration between ocean and atmospheric scientists to create a thriving, collaborative air-sea interaction research community in the US.
Please submit your nominations to the OCB Project Office by April 13, 2018 with the following information about your nominee (self-nominations are welcome and encouraged!):
OCB subcommittee membership terms are typically ~3 years, but a detailed charge and terms of reference for this new subcommittee will be established by its inaugural members. The inaugural chair of this subcommittee will be Rachel Stanley (Wellesley College).
A study recently published in Nature suggests that an extreme global warming event 56 million years ago known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was driven by massive CO2 emissions from volcanoes during the formation of the North Atlantic Ocean. Using a combination of new geochemical measurements and novel global climate modelling, the study revealed that atmospheric CO2 more than doubled in less than 25,000 years during the PETM.
The PETM lasted ~150,000 years and is the most rapid and extreme natural global warming event of the last 66 million years. During the PETM, global temperatures increased by at least 5°C, comparable to temperatures projected in the next century and beyond. While it has long been suggested that the PETM event was caused by the injection of carbon into the ocean and atmosphere, the source and total amount of carbon, as well as the underlying mechanism have thus far remained elusive. The PETM roughly coincided with the formation of massive flood basalts resulting from of a series of eruptions that occurred as Greenland and North America started separating from Europe, thereby creating the North Atlantic Ocean. What was missing is evidence linking the volcanic activity to the carbon release and warming that marks the PETM.
To identify the source of carbon, the authors measured changes in the balance of isotopes of the element boron in ancient sediment-bound marine fossils called foraminifera to generate a new record of ocean pH throughout the PETM. Ocean pH tells us about the amount of carbon absorbed by ancient seawater, but we can get even more information by also considering changes in the isotopes of carbon, which provide information about the carbon source. When forced with these ocean pH and carbon isotope data, a numerical global climate model implicates large-scale volcanism associated with the opening of the North Atlantic as the primary driver of the PETM.
North Atlantic microfossil-derived isotope records from extinct planktonic foraminiferal species M. subbotinae relative to the onset of the PETM carbon isotope excursion (CIE). The negative trend in carbon isotope composition (A) during the carbon emission phase is accompanied by decreasing pH (decreasing δ11B, panel B) and increasing temperature (decreasing δ18O, panel C). Panels D and E zoom in on the PETM CIE, showing microfossil δ13C (D) and δ11B-based pH (E) reconstructions. Also included in E are data from Penman et al. (2014) on their original age model, with recalculated (lab-based) pH values.
These new results suggest that the PETM was associated with a total input of >12,000 petagrams of carbon from a predominantly volcanic source. This is a vast amount of carbon—30 times larger than all of the fossil fuels burned to date and equivalent to all current conventional and unconventional fossil fuel reserves. In the following Earth System Model simulations, it resulted in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 increasing from ~850 parts per million to >2000 ppm. The Earth’s mantle contains more than enough carbon to explain this dramatic rise, and it would have been released as magma poured from volcanic rifts at the Earth’s surface.
How the ancient Earth system responded to this carbon injection at the PETM can tell us a great deal about how it might respond in the future to man-made climate change. Earth’s warming at the PETM was about what we would expect given the CO2 emitted and what we know about the sensitivity of the climate system based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. However, the rate of carbon addition during the PETM was about twenty times slower than today’s human-made carbon emissions.
In the model outputs, carbon cycle feedbacks such as methane release from gas hydrates—once the favoured explanation of the PETM—did not play a major role in driving the event. Additionally, one unexpected result was that enhanced organic matter burial was important in ultimately drawing down the released carbon out of the atmosphere and ocean and thereby accelerating the recovery of the Earth system.
Authors:
Marcus Gutjahr (National Oceanography Centre Southamption, GEOMAR)
Andy Ridgwell (Bristol University, University of California Riverside)
Philip F. Sexton (The Open University, UK)
Eleni Anagnostou (National Oceanography Centre Southamption)
Paul N. Pearson (Cardiff University)
Heiko Pälike (University of Bremen)
Richard D. Norris (Scripps Institution of Oceanography)
Ellen Thomas (Yale University, Wesleyan University)
Gavin L. Foster (National Oceanography Centre Southamption)
OCB is providing early career support for the Ocean Optics XXIV Conference, October 7-12, 2018 in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Are you an early career scientist looking for a perfect place to present your latest discoveries (and you need some travel support to do so)? Look no more – Ocean Optics XXIV conference registration is open, and OCB is offering travel support to members of their community to participate. See registration page for details.
Announcing the OCB Oceanic Methane and Nitrous Oxide: The present situation and future scenarios three-day workshop on oceanic methane and nitrous oxide covering chemical analysis, microbial metabolism, and our observational and predictive capabilities.
The workshop will take place October 28-31, 2018 at the UCLA Lake Arrowhead Conference Center (California, USA).
The application form is open, apply by June 1.
Important links:
Workshop Overview
Where in the global oceans should spatial and temporal surveys be conducted to discern climatologically-relevant changes in water-column inventories of methane and nitrous oxide? This is an important question facing oceanographers today. However, attempts to answer this question stimulate many related and relevant queries concerning the production and consumption of methane and nitrous oxide in the ocean. For example, how will their water-column concentrations be influenced by factors such as increasing seawater temperatures, decreasing oxygen concentrations, and changing nutrient loading? Do we have sufficient analytical and observational capacity to conduct robust temporal surveys? Do we sufficiently comprehend the microbial metabolic pathways that produce and consume these two trace gases?
The workshop will address these questions to help determine the future directions of methane and nitrous oxide measurements in the global oceans. The workshop builds off a series of global inter-comparison exercises of nitrous oxide and methane. Participation in the workshop is open to everyone and attendees will be decided based on application. All documents including planning papers, agendas, and presentations will be made available from the workshop website over the forthcoming months. For more information please contact Sam Wilson (stwilson@hawaii.edu) or any of the steering committee. To be added to the workshop email list, please contact us.
The Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry (OCB) program (us-ocb.org) will cover the GRC registration fees of 9 US-based early-career researchers, and other funds will cover their GRS registration fees and airfare. The Ocean Biogeochemistry GRS and GRC will take place in Hong Kong on July 7-13, 2018. Applications for financial support are extended until April 30.
July 7-8, 2018: Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) on Ocean Biochemistry
July 8-13, 2018: Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Ocean Biogeochemistry
To participate in the GRS and GRC, one should apply for both meetings. The application process is easy: (1) go to the website, (2) press the blue button “Apply Now”, and (3) follow the instructions on successive pages. Once your application is accepted by the organizers, you can register.
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Funding for the Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry Project Office is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The OCB Project Office is housed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.