It's getting hot, sour and breathless - impacts of climate change on carbon(ate) fixation by foraminifera

Foraminifera produce around 30% of all calcium carbonate in the ocean, much

of which is buried in marine sediments, locking carbon out of the ocean-atmosphere system. Conversely, calcification is an instantaneous source of protons, contributing to acidification. However, we do not know how foraminifera will respond on aggregate to ocean acidification, such that the extent to which the combination of these two processes will represent a

positive or negative feedback on human-driven climate change is poorly constrained. This project will tackle this problem by combining cutting-edge techniques in experimental laboratory culturing and isotope geochemistry, and combine these new results with comparative data collected from unique historical museum collections.