Carbon Export in the Southern Ocean
Profile
Carbon Export in the Southern Ocean
PI: Andrew F. Thompson
Research Team: Lilian A. (Lily) Dove
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences
Climate Science Initiative
2020 Explorer grant
This project involves participation in a major Southern Ocean field program, SOLACE, to observe the ocean's biological pump in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The ocean's biological pump is a major component of Earth's carbon cycle that allows the ocean to take up anthropogenic carbon emissions from the ocean. The Southern Ocean has made the largest contribution to uptake of anthropogenic carbon, yet studies linking physical and biogeochemical mechanisms of carbon export from the upper ocean have been limited. Our group at Caltech will deploy and pilot multiple sub-surface ocean gliders — autonomous ocean robots — to collect physical and biogeochemical properties in the upper ocean. We anticipate that the project's observations, the first of their kind in the Southern Ocean, will help to improve our mechanistic understanding of carbon cycling in this region and its representation in climate models.