Biological Carbon Pump

The OceanICU expedition aims to enhance our understanding of the key processes of the biological carbon pump as well as the impact of climate stressors on surface plankton communities in the tropical and sub-tropical Atlantic Ocean, contributing to WP3 & WP4.

The expedition will take us across different regions of the Atlantic Ocean varying in nutrients, oxygen levels, organic matter content and temperature, with the aim of helping constrain biogeochemical and ecological models, and to help refine model parameterisations.

We will achieve this through:

• Investigating regional differences in the contributions of various carbon pump processes, including gravitational (organic and carbonate), migrant, and mixing fluxes;

• Assessing how vertical carbon fluxes (sources) and respiration (sinks) vary across different regions in the water column;

• Assessing the impact of aerosol deposition (terrestrial dust) on microbial communities—including viruses, bacteria, and phytoplankton—with a focus on its influence on iron availability.

As the expedition goes on, we will give some insights from the scientists and students themselves on what they will being doing on the expedition, and how each of their experiments contribute to the goal of OceanICU.

José Luis from IIM-CSIC sampling for particulate organic carbon and nitrogen.