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.

Fast-sinking salp and fish detritus impacts OMZ size and ocean biogeochemical cycles

September 12, 2024

Marine fishes and filter-feeding gelatinous zooplankton such as salps and pyrosomes generate detritus in the form of poop and dead carcasses, which sink ~10 times faster than other oceanic detritus. This detritus is hypothesized to have a disproportionally large impact on the marine biological pump as it sequesters carbon and nutrients deeper in the water […]

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The fate of the 21st century marine carbon cycle could hinge on zooplankton’s appetite

September 11, 2024

Both climate change and the efforts to abate have the potential to reshape phytoplankton community composition, globally. Shallower mixed layers in a warming ocean and many marine CO2 removal (CDR) technologies will shift the balance of light, nutrients, and carbonate chemistry, benefiting certain species over others. We must understand how such shifts could ripple through […]

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Plankton plummet in one of the world’s longest time series

August 2, 2024

Phytoplankton are the main primary producers in the ocean and fuel marine food webs. Long-term shifts in phytoplankton biomass are useful for understanding the context of short-term changes and for examining the relationships between climate indices and phytoplankton dynamics. However, current monitoring programs often offer too short a time frame to disentangle these relationships. In […]

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A New Insight into Ocean Carbon Sequestration

August 1, 2024

How does the microbial carbon pump (MCP) redefine our understanding of oceanic carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation? A recent study published in Nature Reviews Microbiology reviews the pivotal role of the microbial carbon pump (MCP) a novel concept differing from the known mechanisms for carbon sequestration in the ocean, the Biological Carbon Pump (BCP), […]

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Out of sight, out of mind: extreme signals of ocean acidification hidden in the mesopelagic

July 31, 2024

Ocean Acidification (OA), caused by the air-to-sea transfer of anthropogenic carbon (Cant), is intuitively thought to be a surface-intensified process, which makes sense because the concentration of Cant is greatest near the ocean surface and decreases with depth. But this intuition is not correct for multiple metrics of OA that are less commonly studied below […]

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An unexpected shift to a later phytoplankton bloom in the West Antarctic Peninsula

May 29, 2024

Polar regions are changing: warming, losing sea ice, and experiencing shifts in the phenology of seasonal events. Global models predict that phytoplankton blooms will start earlier in these warming polar environments. What we don’t know is will this be true for all high-latitude regions? Is the timing of phytoplankton growing season moving earlier in the […]

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Inorganic carbon outwelling as important blue carbon sink

May 29, 2024

Blue carbon ecosystems—mangroves, saltmarshes, and seagrass meadows—carbon sequestration powerhouses that can help us mitigate climate change. For many years, our community has focused on studying and quantifying organic carbon storage in the soils of these ecosystems and crediting it as Blue Carbon in carbon markets. A new paper in Nature Communications reveals that much of […]

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New algorithm unclogs major bottleneck in ocean geochemical and biogeochemical modelling

May 16, 2024

Numerical models are some of the principal tools for understanding the cycling of geochemical and biogeochemical tracers in the ocean, with the latter also being important components of the Earth System Models used to project future climate change. However, in order to use these models they must first be integrated to a seasonally-repeating equilibrium with […]

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Looking for easy data access to high quality time-series data? SPOTS is out!

April 18, 2024

Whether we aim to disentangle anthropogenic driven trends from naturally variability or we want to assess and improve our ocean model’s capabilities to correctly display changes in time, all require high-quality observational data from multiple fixed time-series data. Until now access to these data was difficult, time-consuming, and often required solving multiple data challenges before […]

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Mixotrophs in the northern North Atlantic

April 16, 2024

Mixotrophs (or mixoplankton) are now accepted as a third group of plankton alongside phytoplankton and zooplankton. Our knowledge of mixotrophs lags far behind that of the other two groups. We currently have only a limited understanding of mixotrophs’ biogeographical distribution across ocean basins, and what environmental factors are associated with their distribution. The authors of […]

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