This Intrepid Robot is the WALL-E of the Deep Sea

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However, how much carbon is captured can vary from ocean to ocean and season to season. In general, researchers do not handle well the biological and chemical processes that take place there. “The rover helps us understand how much of this carbon can penetrate deep-sea sediments,” says MBISS marine biologist Crissy Huffard, author of the new paper. “The only way we know how much carbon can be stored in sediments is to actually acidify it and probably contribute to acidification in the deep sea.” (When carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater, it produces carbonic acid.)
Here’s a delicate example of one of those background carbon mysteries. In California, the earth is warming much faster than the adjacent ocean, a differential that is exacerbated by seasonal winds. This can lead to more rises: the wind pushes the surface water away and the ground water rises to fill the gap. This would lead to more nutrients that feed the phytoplankton, which bloom in surface water, and then die and turn into sea snow. Between 2015 and 2020, for example, the BR-II fluorescence camera detected a tremendous increase in phytoplankton reaching the seabed in large places. At the same time, its sensors detected a decrease in oxygen, which meant that seabed microbes were busy processing the bonanza of organic material.
This raises some questions for Huffard. “In general, the environment is much more erratic in food supply; in a few weeks, it may be a matter of dropping food in a few years. So how is the whole ecosystem changing? ” he asks. “The response from the animal community is almost immediate. They start consuming right away. There’s not much delay. They’re ready to prepare and start microbes.”
What does this mean for the carbon cycle? In theory, the more organic material it rains, the more it is hijacked from the atmosphere. But at the same time, the bottom organisms are also using oxygen and emitting carbon dioxide, which can acidify deeper waters. And because the ocean is constantly spinning, some of that carbon can return to surface water and the atmosphere. “We’re showing that more carbon is reaching the depths of the sea than would be otherwise announced,” Huffard says. “The rover adds dimension to tell us that most of that carbon is actually eaten when it’s down there, not stored in sediment.”
Are these large pulses of sea snow a permanent feature of California’s deep waters today, or an aberration? With a benthic rover, scientists can gather the long-term data needed to start providing answers. “The deep sea has not been largely researched and underestimated, although it is key to maintaining a healthy planet and tackling climate change,” says Lisa Levin, who studies the seabed at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography but did not participate. this work. “An army of such devices would help us better understand biogeochemical changes, which are key to improving climate models, ecosystem models, fishing models, and so on.” Rover can help scientists study the effects deep mining operations.
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