Mapping the biological pump: ocean storage from space to seafloor

Thanks to the action of plankton-based ocean ecosystems, each year several gigatons of carbon are transported from the surface ocean into the ocean interior, where this carbon is stored for decades to millenia.

The storage of this carbon is a critical control on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and therefore on Earth's climate.

This process of carbon transport is poorly understood and highly variable, but recent studies suggest it can be predicted accurately from remote sensing data from Earth-observing satellites.

The student will use these published relationships and combine them with satellite data, along with other published relationships between ocean carbon transport and factors in the environment.

Through this effort the student will generate the first data-constrained estimate of how much carbon is transported into the ocean interior by plankton ecosystems, the variability of this process, and map these over space, depth, and time.