Seminar: Dr. Yajuan Lin, Duke University

Mapping the “invisible forest” and its role in carbon cycling in the Southern Ocean (Host: Adrian Marchetti)

A key mechanism by which oceans absorb CO₂ is the biological carbon pump, driven by plankton communities living in the sunlit layer of the oceans. Despite our current realization of the tremendous diversity that exists in these communities, we have little understanding of how this biodiversity influences the biological carbon pump. In this talk, I will present our current work in the Western Antarctica Peninsula (WAP). We combined high-resolution underway O₂/Ar, which provides an estimate of carbon export under steady-state, with high-throughput ribosomal DNA amplicon sequencing to elucidate the relationship between microbial community structure and carbon export in the WAP.