Non-profit Schmidt Sciences has granted US$9.5m to a multinational research team – led by UC Santa Barbara’s Tim DeVries and Ralph Keeling from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego – to fund research investigating the ocean’s carbon, oxygen and heat cycles over the next five years.
The project, which spans 11 institutions, was one of five selected by Schmidt Science and the Schmidt Ocean Institute to join the philanthropy’s Ocean Biogeochemistry Virtual Institute (OBVI).
“I’m thrilled to be part of this exciting project,” Keeling said. “As an atmospheric scientist, I’m especially excited to be working with oceanographers to build tools that allow atmospheric measurements to be integrated with ocean measurements for studying changes in the oceans.”
Project goals
Over the next few years, the team hopes to: quantify how much carbon dioxide enters and exits the ocean; whether this rate is changing over time; and if so why. They also want to characterize trends in dissolved oxygen and the processes that govern them. They have similar questions about heat transfer and ocean temperature. The researchers will also be looking into how climate change affects all these processes.
“Many processes affect all three of these cycles: carbon, heat and oxygen,” said DeVries, an earth scientist in UC Santa Barbara’s geography department. “Studying them together will help us to understand all these processes better.”
“We started out with about four of five of us, and the group gradually grew as our project got more ambitious,” DeVries said. “We tried to target the best senior researchers in the world for each facet of our project, which made our team quite international.”
The scope naturally clusters into four main areas, each with its own group and team leader. DeVries will lead the large-scale modeling, while Laure Resplandy (at Princeton University) spearheads multi-scale modeling and machine learning. The group working with ocean observational data will rally around Seth Bushinsky at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Keeling will lead the group in analyzing atmospheric observations.
Rounding out the team are Pedram Hassanzadeh at University of Chicago, former Scripps student Heather Graven at Imperial College London, Casper Labuschagne at the South African Weather Service, Peter Landschuetzer at Flanders Marine Institute, Francois Primeau at University of California Irvine, Christian Roedenbeck at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and Laure Zanna at New York University.
The project is about two-thirds modeling and one-third observation. The modeling teams will try to integrate insights from simulations at different scales using new machine-learning (ML) techniques. The observational teams will measure atmospheric carbon and oxygen in the southern hemisphere and scour existing data sets of ocean carbon, oxygen and heat to develop compilations to train the models.
Quantifying the ocean
Although climate change is often framed in terms of the atmosphere, the ocean takes up more than 95% of the excess heat due to greenhouse gas emissions. It also absorbs about 30% of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity. “Without the ocean, global warming would have caused the atmosphere to heat up by much more than it already has,” DeVries explained.
The researchers highlighted that changing seawater temperature and chemistry cut broadly across many aspects of the marine environment: ocean acidification hinders animals’ ability to form carbonate shells and skeletons; lower oxygen levels can impact marine life across the board; and heat can kill certain organisms outright, and cause others to change their behaviors and shift their ranges.
These cycles also influence each other in complex ways. For instance, a warmer ocean cannot hold as much oxygen or CO2. Also, if ocean circulation slows down, it is expected to reduce how much heat the ocean takes up. Both of these factors could diminish how much oxygen makes it to the ocean’s depths.
According to the researchers, working out the interplay among the ocean’s carbon, oxygen and heat cycles is crucial for predicting how our world will change in the coming years.
“This project will produce an unprecedented level of understanding of the physical and biogeochemical processes affecting these interlinked cycles,” DeVries said.
For more top insights into ocean monitoring, read Meteorological Technology International’s exclusive feature, ‘What do new international regulations mean for automated ocean monitoring?’, here.