By Harrison Tasoff

A multinational research team, led by UC Santa Barbara’s Tim DeVries and Ralph Keeling from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, aims to investigate the ocean’s carbon, oxygen and heat cycles. The project, which spans 11 institutions, has received $9.5 million from the nonprofit Schmidt Sciences to fund research over the next five years. It is one of five selected by Schmidt Science and the Schmidt Ocean Institute to join the philanthropy’s Ocean Biogeochemistry Virtual Institute (OBVI).

“Many processes affect all three of these cycles: carbon, heat and oxygen,” said DeVries, a professor in the Geography Department. “Studying them together will help us to understand all these processes better.”

This project has an ambitious scope, and the team hopes to answer a number of questions over the next few years. They aim to quantify how much carbon dioxide enters and exits the ocean, whether this rate is changing over time, and if so why. They also want to characterize trends in dissolved oxygen and the processes that govern them. They have similar questions for heat transfer and ocean temperature. Finally, the $9.5 million question is how climate change affects all these processes.

“We started out with about four of five of us, and the group gradually grew as our project got more ambitious,” DeVries said. “We tried to target the best senior researchers in the world for each facet of our project, which made our team quite international.”

The scope naturally clusters into four main areas, each with its own group and team leader. DeVries will lead the large-scale modeling, while Laure Resplandy (at Princeton University) spearheads multi-scale modeling and machine learning. The group working with ocean observational data will rally around Seth Bushinsky at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Finally, Keeling will lead the group analyzing atmospheric observations.

Rounding out the team are Pedram Hassanzadeh at University of Chicago, Heather Graven at Imperial College London, Casper Labuschagne at the South African Weather Service, Peter Landschuetzer at Flanders Marine Institute, Francois Primeau at University of California Irvine, Christian Roedenbeck at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, and Laure Zanna at New York University.

Continue reading at The Santa Barbara Independent…