Interdisciplinary Seminar: Meredith Meyer

The UNC-CH Department of Marine Sciences presents the interdisciplinary seminar of graduate student, Meredith Meyer. This event will be held on Monday, March 15th, at 12:20 pm. This event will be held ONLINE ONLY and it will be available online via Zoom (Meeting ID: 910 3393 5080).

Seminar Title: Relationship between deoxygenation and ocean productivity

Abstract: Ocean deoxygenation is a recently identified trend of global dissolved oxygen loss due to rising atmospheric temperatures associated with anthropogenic climate change. Since the 1960s, the world’s oceans have lost approximately 2% (96 Tmol yr^-1) of their oxygen content, and this trend is projected to continue under future global warming scenarios. While the physical oceanographic mechanisms associated with deoxygenation are well constrained, the biological ones are not and remain ambiguous variables in future projection models. This analysis seeks to explore important biological processes and feedbacks that are hypothesized to change in a lower oxygen ocean. Following a similar grading scale as the IPCC, biological processes and feedbacks were evaluated and assigned a confidence grade and forcing directionality (i.e., positive vs. negative change) regarding their relationships with projected deoxygenation. This analysis finds that ocean deoxygenation’s largest direct impact on biological systems will be through physiological stress, food web disruptions, and subsequent impacts to the carbon cycling. However, dissolved oxygen concentrations and biological systems are projected to experience concurrent biophysical changes (positive and negative) due to increased temperature that will lead to large-scale ecosystem disruptions in the future.