🫁 It’s like you can see the oceans breathing. As seasons change, chlorophyll levels from tiny marine plants ripple around the planet. Phytoplankton use chlorophyll to absorb carbon dioxide to make food. This @NASA map gives insights to the oceanic carbon cycle. Read on...🧵
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🔃 Crucial for ocean carbon cycling is the 'biological pump', where carbon is taken from the atmosphere by life and put into storage in the deep. It turns out that tiny phytoplankton in the @_SouthernOcean play an outsized role in stopping the planet from overheating.
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🌊 The Southern Ocean is central to slowing the rate of global heating. It accounts for about 40% of the ocean's annual absorption of human-made carbon! So to understand its role in global climate, we really need to understand the influence of biology on this carbon sink (C).
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💩 But not just any old carbon - there's particulate inorganic C, particulate organic C, & dissolved organic C - each a challenge to assess on an oceanic scale. Now @NOAA researchers have measured these 3 carbon 'pools' using data from robot floats.
➡️pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…
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🦠 As conditions change across the Southern Ocean, so does the influence of the biological pump on CO2 air-sea flow. If C fixed by phytoplankton fell by 30%, the Southern Ocean would be a CO2 source rather than a sink. Which would be bad for us. What may climate change bring?
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🛟 This is a good example of why it would be useful to keep monitoring the biological pump in the Southern Ocean more often, with more observations from robotic biogeochemical profiling floats.
@GO_BGC @SOCCOMProject @bgc_argo
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♻️ Of course, the biological pump depends on animals as well as plants. At @IMASUTAS in Hobart, we're offering a PhD project on how zooplankton shape Southern Ocean productivity in a changing climate, by eating phytoplankton and recycling iron.
Apply: utas.edu.au/research/degre…
Stay in touch with our research on the role of #Antarctica and the Southern Ocean in the global #climate system - please sign up to our mailing list at aappartnership.org.au/contact-us/
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