Andrew Watson, Ute Schuster, Marie-José Messias, Agatha de Boer, Dorothee Bakker, Gareth Lee, Nina Bednarsek (at the British Antarctic Survey), Richard Boyle, Pete Brown, James Clark, Colin Goldblatt, Andrew Hind, Libby Jones, Elena Kozlova, Christos Mitsis, Nuno Nunes, Michael Patecki, Maciej Telszewski

Research interests

Many of the complex interactions between the cycles of carbon, nutrients, iron, oceanic circulation and global climate are not well understood. Dramatic changes of global temperature, the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) content and ocean circulation between glacial and interglacial periods demonstrate the presence of such interactions. The diverse projects carried out by our research group address questions related to the biogeochemical role of the oceans in the Earth's System and the interactions of ocean biogeochemistry and physics, using observations and modelling.

Quantifying anthropogenic carbon in the North Atlantic Ocean on board the RRS Charles Darwin (Pete Brown, Ute Schuster, Gareth Lee)

Dedicated tracers are applied to study oceanic circulation, frequently in the context of the marine cycles of carbon and nutrients. Past and present work using tracers concentrates on mixing across the thermocline, thermohaline circulation in the Greenland Sea and the effect of iron supply on the carbon cycle in the Southern Ocean.

Accurate and autonomous measurements are essential to our work. The uptake of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide by individual oceanic regions and its year-to-year variation remain poorly quantified. The EU-funded project CARBOOCEAN has the objective to better quantify CO2 uptake by the Atlantic and Southern Oceans. The use of autonomous intrumentation for the detection of CO2 in surface water and marine air on voluntary observing ships (VOS) is an important part of the project. Ute Schuster has installed an autonomous CO2 instrument on the M.V. Santa Maria. Since 2002 this instrument has made continuous CO2 measurements on the round trips between Portsmouth (U.K.) and the Windward Islands (Carribean). Deep CTD sections with measurements of inorganic carbon parameters are another tool which we use for quantifying the oceanic uptake of anthropogenic carbon.

                                                         Fluxes in Model Sue

Modelling studies may provide insight into the regulation of biogeochemical cycles and into the interaction of ocean biogeochemistry and ocean physics. Several group members are developing a description of ocean biogeochemistry and ocean physics in GENIE, a 3D Earth climate model, which can be used to to study glacial to interglacial perturbations. Other work focusses on the interaction between geological, geochemical and evolutionary processes and on how these interactions affect atmospheric levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide, as well as ocean nutrient levels.

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