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Dr Martina Doblin, from the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, outlines her research into algae, in particular the microscopic plankton that float around on the world’s ocean currents. For every litre of seawater there are around 10,000 to 100,000 micro algae cell, which, because they are plants, sequester carbon from surface water into the ocean sediments. When the plankton die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and the carbon becomes locked into those sediments, as they have done for millennia.
Dr Doblin is specifically looking at how plankton is responding to changes in climate and is working on the Continental Shelf, some 200 metres deep. As a first step in the process, she will measure how much carbon dioxide is taken from the surface water. Monitoring of coastal waters has shown that the East Coast Current has sped up over the last 70 years, making it warmer. The plankton that live in that current are smaller and don’t sediment as easily as other plankton. As a result, their carbon content becomes part of the bacterial and microbial food web, and is eventually circulated back into the atmosphere from that process, rather than being sequestered to the ocean depths and essentially locked out of further use.
The research will tap into comparative investigations in the California up welling zone, the Gulf Stream on the USA’s east coast as well as the Mediterranean and the North Sea. This will allow results to be compared and contrasted for different regions with a focus on carbon sequestration.
Oceanographic studies are also being done to look at the food web and how the distribution of other organisms is affected by changes in plankton. The Integrated Marine Observing System, federally funded to 2013, is using acoustic curtains to track sharks and fish and its data will link in with the plankton data, eventually providing information on what marine changes are occurring.
It is sobering to think that plankton are such small organisms yet they play such a large role in marine ecosystems.
They are truly are punching above their weight.
Text: V.B. October 2010
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