From The Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric and Earth Science
At
5.3.24 [Just today from the institution]
By Diana Udel
d.udel@miami.edu
Findings could change how carbon isotopes are used to study the global ocean.
Ph.D. candidate Lillian Henderson (right) deploys in-situ pumps with members of the BIOS-SCOPE team and crew of the R/V Atlantic Explorer in the subtropical North Atlantic Ocean. Image: Jess Godfrey, BIOS.
A new study led by scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science provides a more complete picture of the carbon isotope signature formed by phytoplankton in the ocean.
This new discovery could change how scientists trace food sources in animal food webs to how carbon moves through the atmosphere and ocean to predict past, present, and future climate.
The research team identified a special isotopic imprint left by photosynthetic communities living under dimly lit conditions, which may help scientists trace the importance of these communities in the broader ocean carbon cycle – something that has been largely overlooked until now.
“Our findings revealed that our basic understanding of these signatures in the ocean was incomplete,” said the study’s senior author Hilary Close, an associate professor of ocean sciences at the Rosenstiel School. “We found a new signature that may now need to be considered in a range of oceanic studies.”
Phytoplankton — microscopic marine plants at the base of the aquatic food chain — convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and energy from the sun into food through photosynthesis, playing a fundamental role in the oceanic carbon cycle.
During photosynthesis, phytoplankton “fix” atmospheric carbon dioxide into their cells by incorporating two stable isotopes of carbon known as 13C and 12C, in varying amounts. By measuring the ratio of 13C to 12C in seawater, or the carbon isotope ratio, scientists can study a variety of processes taking place in the ocean including modeling the global carbon cycle to understand past and future global climate.
To investigate the carbon isotope signature of phytoplankton specifically, the researchers isolated a piece of the chlorophyll molecule, a pigment used by all phytoplankton to harvest energy from sunlight. Collecting this pigment from seawater from several depths in the North Atlantic Ocean in summertime, they measured its natural carbon isotope ratios as a biomarker, or indicator, for the photosynthetic communities.
They found that phytoplankton, which can live as deep of 150 meters (492 feet) below the ocean surface, and the carbon isotope ratios in their cells vary between the top layer of the ocean, where sunlight reaches and the deeper, low-light areas of the ocean. The observed variations in carbon isotope ratios were as large as those in the geologic record attributed to major global carbon cycle events, but here represent vertical variation in the carbon isotope ratios of modern photosynthetic communities.
“These results have the potential to change how carbon isotopic signatures are interpreted more broadly in the modern ocean and should be considered in biogeochemical models, food web studies, and reconstructions of past carbon dioxide concentrations in the ocean,” said the study’s lead author Lillian Henderson, a Ph.D. student at the Rosenstiel School.
The study was published in the journal PNAS.
The work was supported as part of the BIOS-SCOPE program, a five-year multi-institutional research program for the study of microbial oceanography in the North Atlantic Ocean.
See the full article here.
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The Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric and Earth Science is an academic and research institution for the study of oceanography and the atmospheric sciences within the University of Miami. It is located on a 16-acre (65,000 m^2) campus on Virginia Key in Miami, Florida. It is the only subtropical applied and basic marine and atmospheric research institute in the continental United States.
The Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science receives over $50 million in annual external research funding. Their laboratories include a salt-water wave tank, a five-tank Conditioning and Spawning System, multi-tank Aplysia Culture Laboratory, Controlled Corals Climate Tanks, and DNA analysis equipment. The campus also houses an invertebrate museum with 400,000 specimens and operates the Bimini Biological Field Station, an array of oceanographic high-frequency radar along the US east coast, and the Bermuda aerosol observatory. The University of Miami also owns the Little Salt Spring, a site on the National Register of Historic Places, in North Port, Florida, where RSMAS performs archaeological and paleontological research.
Up until 2008, RSMAS was solely a graduate school within the University of Miami, while it jointly administrated an undergraduate program with UM’s College of Arts and Sciences. In 2008, the Rosenstiel School has taken over administrative responsibilities for the undergraduate program, granting Bachelor of Science in Marine and Atmospheric Science (BSMAS) and Bachelor of Arts in Marine Affairs (BAMA) baccalaureate degree. Master’s, including a Master of Professional Science degree, and doctorates are also awarded to RSMAS students by the UM Graduate School.
The Rosenstiel School’s research includes the study of marine life, particularly Aplysia and coral; climate change; air-sea interactions; coastal ecology; and admiralty law. The school operates a marine research laboratory ship, and has a research site at an inland sinkhole. Research also includes the use of data from weather satellites and the school operates its own satellite downlink facility. The school is home to the world’s largest hurricane simulation tank.
The University of Miami is a private research university in Coral Gables, Florida. The university enrolls over 18,000 students in 12 separate colleges and schools, including the Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine in Miami’s Health District, a law school on the main campus, and the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science focused on the study of oceanography and atmospheric sciences on Virginia Key, with research facilities at the Richmond Facility in southern Miami-Dade County.
The University of Miami is now a member of The Association of American Universities
The university offers 132 undergraduate, 148 master’s, and 67 doctoral degree programs, of which 63 are research/scholarship and 4 are professional areas of study. Over the years, the university’s students have represented all 50 states and close to 150 foreign countries. With more than 16,000 full- and part-time faculty and staff, The University of Miami is a top 10 employer in Miami-Dade County. The University of Miami’s main campus in Coral Gables has 239 acres and over 5.7 million square feet of buildings.
The University of Miami is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. The University of Miami offers a large library system with over 3.9 million volumes and exceptional holdings in Cuban heritage and music.
The University of Miami also offers a wide range of student activities, including fraternities and sororities, and hundreds of student organizations. The Miami Hurricane, the student newspaper, and WVUM, the student-run radio station, have won multiple collegiate awards. The University of Miami’s intercollegiate athletic teams, collectively known as the Miami Hurricanes, compete in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The University of Miami’s football team has won five national championships since 1983 and its baseball team has won four national championships since 1982.
Research
The University of Miami is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. The University of Miami has received over $195 million in federal research funding, including $131.3 million from the Department of Health and Human Services and $14.1 million from the National Science Foundation. Of the $8.2 billion appropriated by Congress in 2009 as a part of the stimulus bill for research priorities of The National Institutes of Health, the Miller School received $40.5 million. In addition to research conducted in the individual academic schools and departments, Miami has the following university-wide research centers:
The Center for Computational Science
The Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies (ICCAS)
Leonard and Jayne Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy
The Miami European Union Center: This group is a consortium with Florida International University (FIU) established in fall 2001 with a grant from the European Commission through its delegation in Washington, D.C., intended to research economic, social, and political issues of interest to the European Union.
The Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies
John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics – studies possible causes of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and macular degeneration.
Center on Research and Education for Aging and Technology Enhancement (CREATE)
Wallace H. Coulter Center for Translational Research
The Miller School of Medicine receives more than $200 million per year in external grants and contracts to fund 1,500 ongoing projects. The medical campus includes more than 500,000 sq ft (46,000 m^2) of research space and the The University of Miami Life Science Park, which has an additional 2,000,000 sq ft (190,000 m^2) of space adjacent to the medical campus. The University of Miami’s Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute seeks to understand the biology of stem cells and translate basic research into new regenerative therapies.
The Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science receives over $50 million in annual external research funding. Their laboratories include a salt-water wave tank, a five-tank Conditioning and Spawning System, multi-tank Aplysia Culture Laboratory, Controlled Corals Climate Tanks, and DNA analysis equipment. The campus also houses an invertebrate museum with over 400,000 specimens and operates the Bimini Biological Field Station, an array of oceanographic high-frequency radar along the US east coast, and the Bermuda aerosol observatory. The University of Miami also owns the Little Salt Spring, a site on the National Register of Historic Places, in North Port, Florida, where RSMAS performs archaeological and paleontological research.
The University of Miami built a brain imaging annex to the James M. Cox Jr. Science Center within the College of Arts and Sciences. The building includes a human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) laboratory, where scientists, clinicians, and engineers can study fundamental aspects of brain function. Construction of the lab was funded in part by a $14.8 million in stimulus money grant from the National Institutes of Health.
The university receives over $161 million in science and engineering funding from the U.S. federal government, the largest Hispanic-serving recipient. $117 million of the funding was through the Department of Health and Human Services and was used largely for the medical campus.
The University of Miami maintains one of the largest centralized academic cyber infrastructures in the country with numerous assets. The Center for Computational Science High Performance Computing group has been in continuous operation since 2007. Over that time the core has grown from a zero HPC cyberinfrastructure to a regional high-performance computing environment that currently supports more than 1,200 users, 220 TFlops of computational power, and more than 3 Petabytes of disk storage.
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