Skidaway Institute scientist presents coastal hazard program

Clark Alexander

The Skidaway Institute of Oceanography scientist Clark Alexander will present an informative and visual program on threats to the Georgia Coast in an “Evening @ Skidaway” reception and lecture on Tuesday, May 21, on the campus of Skidaway Institute.

The program will begin at 6:15 p.m. with a reception at the University of Georgia MAREX Aquarium to be followed by the science talk at 7:15 p.m. in the McGowan Library Auditorium.

The program is open to the public and admission is free.

Alexander’s talk is titled, “Coastal Crystal Ball: A Look at the Future of Georgia’s Changing Coastline.” Drawing on two decades of work in the area, Alexander will discuss coastal hazards relevant to Georgia, such as storms, beach erosion and sea level rise. He will introduce the Georgia Coastal Hazards Portal, a web-based tool that anyone can use to assess their specific exposure to coastal hazards, and present up-to-the-minute results of ongoing research to better quantify coastal Georgia’s hazard vulnerability.

The reception will include a demonstration of the Georgia Coastal Hazards Portal display located at the Aquarium.

Seating is limited. Please reserve seats by calling (912) 598-2325 or email to mike.sullivan@skio.usg.edu.

An “Evening @ Skidaway” is sponsored by the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography and the Skidaway Marine Science Foundation.

Study shows rivers a major transport of black carbon to the ocean

Black carbon, formed from the burning of biomass and fossil fuels, may account for as much as ten percent of the carbon transported by rivers into the ocean and play a significant role in controlling the balance of two of the most important carbon pools on earth – the soil and the ocean.

This is the finding of a group of scientists, including Aron Stubbins of the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography. This research will appear in the April 19, 2013 issue of the journal Science, published by the AAAS, the science society, the world’s largest general scientific organization. See
http://www.sciencemag.org
, and also
http://www.aaas.org
.

Black carbon is organic material that has been altered by heat or combustion, such as the remnants of forest fires or burning fossil fuels. The burning of biomass generates between 40 million and 250 million tons of black carbon every year. Part of that is preserved for thousands of years in soils and sediments where it makes up approximately ten percent of the total carbon there.

Another portion is picked up by drainage and carried by rivers to the ocean. According to Stubbins and his colleagues, as much as ten percent of the carbon dumped by rivers into the ocean may be this black carbon.

This movement of black carbon involves two of the Earth’s three main stores of reactive carbon — in the soil and in the dissolved phase in the ocean. Both are approximately the same size as the third store – the carbon in the atmosphere, in the form of carbon dioxide.

“The balance between those three carbon pools is very important,” said Stubbins. “It controls the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which in turn influences local and global climate.”

Black carbon is fairly stable in the marine environment, especially in the deep ocean. However, near the surface black carbon is very photo-sensitive. So when it is exposed to sunlight, it will degrade rapidly.

“In the deep ocean, the degradation is so slow that it would take up to 40 thousand years for the black carbon to be removed,” said Stubbins, “However, stick it in sunlight and 95 percent will disappear in two weeks.”

When exposed to sunlight, the relatively complex black carbon molecules break down into smaller molecules, including carbon dioxide. The CO₂ is dissolved in the ocean water where it can be utilized in photosynthesis by microscopic plants called phytoplankton. It can also be released into the atmosphere as part of the constant exchange of gasses between the atmosphere and the water at the ocean surface.

This degradation of black carbon in the surface ocean is apparently happening at a fairly rapid rate. The data in this project suggests that the Earth’s rivers are dumping much more black carbon into the ocean than can be found there.

“So where is it going?” asked Stubbins. “The rivers are dumping ten to 100 times more carbon into the ocean than we are finding there. That means we are losing ten to 99 percent of it.”

Stubbins continued, if that black carbon had remained in the soil, it would have remained stable for thousands of years.

“If you are losing it in the oceans, it is likely being converted into carbon dioxide. This freeing of black carbon from the soils, followed by its conversion to CO₂ is analogous to the production of CO₂ that occurs when we dig up and burn fossil fuels.”

The Science article is titled “Global Charcoal Mobilization from Soils via Dissolution and Riverine Transport to the Oceans.” The lead author is Rudolf Jaffé from Florida International University. In addition to Stubbins, the co-authors include Yan Ding, also from Florida International University; Jutta Niggemann and Thorsten Dittmar from the Max Planck Research Group for Marine Geochemistry; Anssi V. Vähätalo from the University of Helsinki; Robert G.M. Spencer from the Woods Hole Research Center; and John Campbell from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Northern Research Station.

The entire article can be viewed online at: www.sciencemag.org

Stubbins has a website detailing this and other work on black carbon at:
http://www.skio.usg.edu/?p=research/chem/biogeochem/blkcarbon

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Skidaway Institute presents ‘Chasing Ice’ at ocean film festival

Skidaway Institute of Oceanography will present the award-winning documentary, “Chasing Ice,” as the feature film at the 11th Annual Gray’s Reef Ocean Film Festival on Saturday, September 14, at 7 p.m. at the Lucas Theater for the Arts in downtown Savannah.

“Chasing Ice” is the story of James Balog, a photographer who directed The Extreme Ice Survey, an ambitious project to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog deployed revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to produce a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers.

James Balog with of his cameras at an Alaska glacier.

Balog and his team battled untested technology in subzero conditions to capture images that compress years into seconds and depict ancient mountains of ice as they disappear at a breathtaking rate.

“Chasing Ice” has won 23 awards at film festivals around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival Award for Excellence in Cinematography and the Environmental Media Association’s 22nd Annual Best Documentary Award.

The screening will be followed by a short panel discussion on climate change including several Skidaway Institute scientists and other environmental experts.

The screening will be sponsored in part by the Skidaway Marine Science Foundation.

More information on “Chasing Ice” can be found at
http://www.chasingice.com/
.

The 11th Annual Gray’s Reef Ocean Film Festival will be presented Thursday, September 12 through Saturday, September 14, at the Jepson Center and the Lucas Theater for the Arts. An encore presentation of selected festival films will be screened at the Jewish Education Alliance on Sunday, September 15. Admission to all films will be free.

More information on the film festival is available at www.graysreef.noaa.gov.

Berger’s co-authors paper in Marine Biology

Stella Berger is one of the co-authors of a paper published recently in the journal, Marine Biology. The project studied the effect climate change has on the timing and magnitude of spring plankton blooms in both fresh- and saltwater ecosystems.

The entire paper can be accessed at:
http://www.skio.usg.edu/aboutus/people/nejstgaard/downloads/Winder-Berger.pdf

 

A Day in the Life of a Citizen Scientist

Skidaway Institute volunteer scientist Nancy Tenenbaum recently travelled to Norway, to work with fellow Skidaway scientist Dr. Stella Berger. She described her experience in the form of a letter to her mentor, retired Savannah business leader and Skidaway Institute supporter,  Howard Morrison.       

Dear Howard,

Having had a few days to settle in here and wishing I could have packed you in my suitcase as well.  I am going to let you share the day with me through this letter.  I am in Espegrend, Norway, with a phytoplankton research project called Phytostress.  The word “stress” takes on a new meaning with this project. There are only a hand full of students and professors here to manage twelve mesocosms and three experiments.  In the course of the next two weeks I know I will need your encouragement and advise.

Rule #1 is “NEVER give up”. Howard Morrison

So, let the day begin.

7:00 AM

Taped to the window in my dorm room is a thick, black garbage bag to keep out the midnight sun.  Light at any hour after 10 pm is your worst enemy! Block it out at all costs. You might find it a bit challenging to navigate in my tiny dorm room. Most certainly it is not the spacious Civil War home, Lebanon Plantation, that you reside in. Through an open window in the kitchen field station birds sing incessantly. Fresh coffee waits patiently for the early riser made by Maria Segovia, the principal investigator of Phytostress. Norway has no version of half and half cream. Flotte,, heavy cream., is it. Putting a small amount in my coffee cup I think about the potential threat for artery clogging. Will I survive the day? On the wooden counter top a Norwegian breakfast of various cheese, lox, fruit muesli and a hardy multi-seed rye bread await.

View from the field station kitchen window.

 

Another view from the kitchen window

7:30 AM

You will need a jacket this morning as it is cool, about 11 degrees C (52 degrees F).  The fiord water sparkles in the sunlight.  On the hillside edelweiss, purple clover and yellow buttercups dance with the morning breeze. Compared to the weather when I was here in March, this is heaven.

Let me explain this project to you using an abstract provided by Maria Segovia, the principal investigator, for Phytostress:

Under the global change scenario around 40-50% of the CO2 emitted by anthropogenic activities is accumulated in the oceans causing acidification and increasing the availability of dissolved CO2 to primary producers (phytoplankton, algae, etc.). To understand the regulation of the carbon cycle it is basic to determine the interaction of the main factors controlling primary production in the ocean. The increase of UV radiation due to ozone loss can reduce the oceanic phytoplankton CO2 sinking capacity up to 2%. Concomitantly, the scarcity of micronutrients, such as iron, can affect the composition, functioning and growth of phytoplankton. However, although up to date there are several studies about the effect of UV on iron ocean speciation, there is none about the interaction between CO2, Fe (iron) and UV in phytoplankton, and the underlying mechanisms has not been elucidated yet. Equally, there is evidence of massive cell death phenomena in phytoplankton communities that can account for a great loss of biomass amount, altering diversity and hence affecting the carbon cycle. The proposed experiments, will lead us to a better understanding about the functions of marine phytoplankton as well as to determine how changes in CO2, UV and Fe availability control the fate of primary production in the ocean, regarding biomass and diversity loss.

In an introductory email before the research in May, Maria wrote that this mesocosm project is a dream come true for her.

8:45 AM

Howard, we are now at the dock.  I know how much you love to ride in boats.  Even though the ride to the raft will be quick it could be chilly. The swans that graced the fjord in March are gone.  Truthfully they were noisy, mean and not very white, like their counterparts in fairy tales.

Scientists and Ph.D. students, who are scheduled to sample water today, gather at the dock with sixteen, 25-liter carboys. Clothed in Healy Hansen immersion suits or only a life jacket they board small motorboats for the mesocosms.

You are now at the mesocosm raft.  Be careful on exiting the boat as the concrete raft moves with the current making its surface slippery. There are twelve covered mesocosms that are tethered to this raft.  A decoy hawk is mounted on a pole to scare off birds. It does absolutely no good! Birds actually seem attracted to it. Water is sampled by pumping H2O though a plastic meticulously washed tube into carboys. Full carboys of 25 liters are then loaded onto the boats, delivered to land and hauled up a hill using a flat wagon and human strength.

The mesocosm raft

THE MESOCOSMS

We are about to enter the lab when I spy a single wild yellow rose in full bloom. Immediately I am reminded of Antoine de Saint-Euprey’s story, The Little Prince. In this children’s book the rose is essential to the novel’s drama. Carefully tended by the prince, she is his motivation for leaving and returning to his planet. The rose in this book represents love, an invisible but essential emotion. If no passion exists to nourish life then the question presented is: can life survive? My passion extends to the invisible life of phytoplankton. They are in fact the unseen art forms. Simple, yet complex their balance in the food web is essential for life.

Howard, you often sign your emails with the quote: “Only those who can see the INVISIBLE can accomplish the IMPOSSIBLE!” Patrick Snow, Author, Creating Your Own Destiny

Armed with those words, I will take you into the lab hoping to have a productive day.

Actually the lab rooms are right out of Dr. Seuss!  Wacky and wonderful the equipment is dormant waiting for creative direction.  Machines hum and filtering systems wait expectantly. Life in the lab is a clandestine life unto itself.

We will need to double glove for this next task.  An elaborate washing protocol is the first order of duty.  Each sampling bottle must be washed with Deacon water, then immersed and soaked in HCl and finally rinsed five times with Milliq. H2O. As this involves a Fe (Iron) limitation experiment it becomes imperative to remove all possible traces of containment iron. This is a very time consuming process.

 

Ph.D students Charo, Armandoand and Candlera

The Espegrend Lab

10:30 AM

Dr. Stella Berger and I are on the microzooplankton team.  Microzooplankton can be defined as greater that 0.2-20 micrometers in size, which includes ciliates, dinoflagellates and diatoms. She is also working on a dilution experiment that she designed.

Dr. Stella Berger in command of the motorboat

Stella Berger with her dilution experiment

We return to the boat with Dr. Jose Fernandez from Malaga, to sample mesocosms numbers 1-6 and the fjord. Our samples are brought to our cold room. Part of every sample is then labeled and stored in covered boxes. Some are viewed as live slides in the inverted microscope. This is my favorite part of the day. Seeing the phytoplankton move and interact is just amazing. When I was here in March, I had the rare opportunity to meet and work with Andrei Sazchin. Dr. Sazchin is a Russian phytoplankton taxonomist.

Stella begins running her samples through a Flow Cam. Every cell is photographed and organized into libraries for later study. Each mesocosm sample involves a thirty-minute run process.

Flow Cam display of samples cell by cell

1:20 PM

I have a brief SKYPE conversation with my mentor and close friend, Sandra Nierzwicki-Bauer, Director of the Darrin Fresh Water Institute at Bolton Landing, Lake George, New York.

It does fact take a village of mentors to maintain the privilege of representing Skidaway Institute as a citizen scientist. Dr. Marc Frischer and Dr. Stella Berger are also instrumental in guiding me on scientific path.

2:30 PM

Lunch.  I am the only American here.  The Spanish lunch have a late, protracted lunch experience.  This long, heavy lunch is followed by lengthy scientific discussions in Spanish.

3:00 PM

Hope you are ready for a quick refreshing walk. The path by the fjord is a perfect place to reflect and regenerate. Bergen is a dichotomy. Look beneath the perfect postcard landscape and you will discover an ugly history of Nazi infiltration, which happened during WWII.

On the hillside adjoining the field station is the “castle.”  A Nazi once owned and lived in this forbidding residence. Inside, according to the locals, are memorabilia including swastikas that cover the walls.  Just looking upon it reminds me that six million Jews died as a result of Hitler.

Turning back to the water we are accosted by the smell of wild roses and rhododendron.  Seagulls cry. The sound of the water is soothing as it covers rocks and sand on a small beach.  Tiny islands with houses dot the fjord.  You can feel the ancient pulse of the land.  It emanates from the soil. Life despite its brief encounter with chaos and death has moved forward in a beautiful, peaceful way.

3:45 PM

Back in the lab we are ready to take the sample water for chlorophyll a (Chl a) is filtering in duplicate.  The lights are turned off and sunlight blocked by a makeshift shade as it excites the chlorophyll. A reading skewed by light will not be accurate. Once the water is filtered, the filter is put in a falcon tube, extracted with 90% acetone and then put in a covered box in a refrigerator where they stored for 6-24 hours.  The next day samples are measured by a fluorometer. This device measures parameters of fluorescence determining the amount of Chl a in the sample.

Filtering for chlorophyll a

 

Fluorometer

5:00 PM

We are back at a hood with an exhaust fan. After we have double gloved, each bottle will be immersed in hydrochloric acid for two hours.

6:00 PM

At some point every day it is good protocol update a lab notebook with general thoughts and data for the day.

7:00 PM

Stella has just finished running the last sample in the Flow Cam.  Slides from the inverted microscope used during the day are carefully washed.

7:30 PM

Dr. Jose’ Fernandez, Armando Olmo and I are on cooking duty tonight for 16 hungry people. You can pour the wine Howard to keep us happy while we cook. Tonight we will prepare paella. a traditional Spanish dish. This is a secret recipe of Jose’s grandmother.  I am chopping vegetables and hoping to learn the recipe for this famous meal. What I did manage to get from Jose’ is that the rice must absorb the flavors of the meat and vegetables. Timing apparently is everything.  So thanks to Jose the paella was delicious and a great success.

10:00 PM

The scientist and students sit down for dinner at a long narrow wooden table which seats at least 25. Most of the conversation is in Spanish.  Some students go back to the lab after dinner to finish up.

11:30 PM

Howard, there is something about the Norwegian blue hour that is pure magic.

The blue hour, not quite at sunset, floods the landscape with a purplish blue hue.  Maria’s two children are still running around with abundant energy. Laughing, and singing they are so undeterred by the hour.  I on the other hand am jet lagged and exhausted.  From my room I hear Maria’s husband calling his son Rodrigo to come inside.

Midnight sun

 

Sunset at the mesocosm raft. Photo by Maria Segovia.

Thanks for sharing the day with me!

Good night from the land of the midnight sun.

With love,

Nancy Tenenbaum –Citizen Scientist, Skidaway Institute of Oceanography

Stubbins joins Arctic cruise

Skidaway Institute scientist Aron Stubbins has spent the last couple of months working in Germany. He reports in on a cruise he is about to join.

I’m off to the Arctic on Germany research vessel Polarstern.

I will be collecting samples to determine the export of dissolved black carbon from the Arctic to the Atlantic Ocean. The cruise will transect Fram Strait, the major gateway for the exchange of water and dissolved material between the two ocean basins. Today we will leave Bremerhaven in Germany, site of the Alfred Wegener Institute which houses the R/V Polarstern.

In a few days we will reach Svalbard and begin a transect from there towards Greenland following 78.5 degrees north. During this transect we will first cross the West Spitsbergen Current (WSC) which carries warm Atlantic waters north into the Arctic Ocean. This is the northernmost extent of the Gulf Stream that originates in the Gulf of Mexico and travels past Georgia and Savannah at the edge of the Georgia shelf.

We will then transit west towards Greenland, breaking ice as we go. In this part of the cruise we will collect water samples from the East Greenland Current (EGC). This carries cold, polar water south into the Atlantic Ocean. A figure of the currents is shown at
http://www.whoi.edu/science/PO/people/pwinsor/project_ao02.html
.

My work will look at the amount and type of dissolved organic carbon that these two massive currents carry north (WSC) and south (EGC). Our progress can be followed in real time at
http://www.awi.de/en/infrastructure/ships/polarstern/where_is_polarstern/
. This site will also post weekly updates about life and science aboard R/V Polarstern.

The cruise will end in Longyearbyen on Svalbard where I will collect some samples to continue ongoing investigations into the sources and nature of glacier carbon (
http://www.skio.usg.edu/?p=research/chem/biogeochem/glaciers
).

Skidaway Institute researchers published in international journal

Skidaway Institute of Oceanography scientists Jens Nejstgaard and Stella Berger are part of a 21-member, international team of researchers whose paper was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology.

The object of the research was to observe the effects of different light levels on the behavior of microscopic marine organisms. The team focused their efforts at a group of organisms called mixotrophs. Those are single-cell plankton that exhibit the characteristics of both animals (heterotrophs) and plants (autotrophs). They feed on other organisms, but they also can grow through photosynthesis, just like algae and other plants.

“Most higher organisms are either plants or animals, and we have therefore traditionally sorted most organisms in to these two groups, or fields of science: botany or zoology,” said Nejstgaard. “However, as our understanding of the smallest sized life on earth, single celled organisms is rapidly growing it appears that a large part of the life on Earth may be mixotrophs. This opens new focus of seeing, and investigating our ecosystems.”

The international team with Stella Berger (back row, center, with sunglasses) and Jens Nejstgaard (far right) conducting experiment with specially designed mesocosms, using neural (grey) optical films to simulate light levels on different depth’s down to 50 m in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Nejstgaard, Berger and their colleagues, collected natural water containing plankton and other organisms from the Eastern Mediterranean Sea near Crete and transported it to a into specially-designed tanks on land, called mesocosms, at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research.  In the 30-cubic-feet mesocosms they adjusted light levels to simulate differences in ocean depths down to approximately 150 feet.

The researchers found the mixotrophs do react to different levels of light. In general, the organisms tended towards plant behavior in brighter light and animal behavior at lower light levels. However, they also found that response is very complex, and the entire team of  scientists that worked on the mesocosms are presently analyzing a large amount of data to clarify many of the ecosystem interactions in this complex system.

Skidaway scientist working on international research team

Skidaway Institute scientist Stella Berger is spending time in Norway, as part of an interesting project involving an international team of researchers. They are looking at the relationship among carbon dioxide, iron and ultra violet radiation as they relate to the production of phytoplankton in the ocean.  You can read more about it at the team’s blog
http://phytostress.wordpress.com
/.

Coastal threats focus of upcoming workshop

A Georgia Coastal Hazards Portal Training Workshop will introduce a new Web-based tool to study threats to the Georgia coast. It will be held at the Sapelo Island Visitor Center in Meridian, Ga., on Friday, April 13, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The workshop will focus on the Georgia Coastal Hazards Portal (GCHP) — a Web-based interactive tool designed to provide a better understanding of coastal resources, coastal hazards and the effects of rapid population growth and development. It was created through a partnership between the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography and the Savannah Area GIS program with funding provided by the Georgia Coastal Zone Management Program.

“This online tool can be utilized in many ways, such as, identifying vulnerability to coastal hazards and identifying connections between hazards and natural resources,” said Skidaway Institute’s Clark Alexander, the lead scientist on the GCHP project.

The workshop is targeted towards community planners, resource managers, research scientists, outreach specialists and elected officials. They will have the opportunity to discuss current coastal hazard research, network with others from the coastal hazards community and learn how to use the new interactive GCHP website as a resource and tool for communicating the facts and risks of coastal hazards.

The workshop is sponsored by the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, the University of Georgia Marine Extension Service, the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve and the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Coastal Resources Division.

Registration is available on-line at
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CGHPRegistrationForm
.

Workshop participants will receive lunch and a flash drive containing presentations and GCHP reference material.

The American Planning Association has approved the GCHP Training Workshop for six credits.

For additional information, contact Angela Bliss at abliss@uga.edu.

Fossil fuels fire glacier carbon cycle according to Skidaway Institute scientist

New clues as to how the Earth’s remote ecosystems have been influenced by the industrial revolution are locked, frozen in the ice of glaciers. That is the finding of a group of scientists, including Aron Stubbins of the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography.

The research is published in the March 2012 issue of Nature Geoscience.

The key to the process is carbon-containing dissolved organic matter (DOM) in the glacial ice. Glaciers provide a great deal of carbon to downstream ecosystems. Many scientists believe the source of this carbon is the ancient forests and peatlands overrun by the glaciers. However, Stubbins and his colleagues believe the carbon comes mainly from contemporary biomass and fossil fuel burning that gets deposited on the glacier surfaces. Once deposited on the glacier surface by snow and rain, the DOM moves with the glacier and is eventually delivered downstream where it provides food for microorganisms at the base of the marine food web.

Aron Stubbins

“In vibrant ecosystems like in the temperate or tropical zones, once this atmospheric organic material makes landfall it is quickly consumed by the plants, animals and microbial populations,” said Stubbins. “However in frigid glacier environments, these carbon signals are preserved and standout.”

“Remote regions are often perceived as being pristine and devoid of human influence”, Stubbins continued. “Glaciers show us that nowhere goes untouched by industry. Instead, burning fuels has an impact upon the natural functioning of ecosystems far removed from industrial activity.”

Glaciers and ice sheets together represent the second largest reservoir of water on earth, and glacier ecosystems cover ten percent of the Earth, yet the carbon dynamics underpinning those ecosystems remain poorly understood.

“Increased understanding of glacier biogeochemistry is a priority, as glacier environments are among the most sensitive to climate warming and the effects of industrial emissions” said Stubbins.

Globally, glacier ice loss is accelerating, driven in part by the deposition of carbon in the form of soot or “black carbon”, which darkens glacier surfaces and increases their absorption of light and heat. Biomass and fossil fuel burning by people around the globe are the major sources of that black carbon.

Stubbins and his fellow scientists have conducted much of their research at the Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau, Alaska. Mendenhall and other glaciers that end their journey in the Gulf of Alaska receive a high rate of precipitation. High levels of rain and snow acts to strip the atmosphere clean of organics, dumping it on the glacier. Consequently, these glaciers are among the most sensitive to global emissions of soot.

The researchers’ findings also reveal how the ocean may have changed over past centuries. The microbes that form the very bottom of the food web are particularly sensitive to changes in the quantity and quality of the carbon entering the marine system. Since the study found that the organic matter in glacier outflows stems largely from human activities, it means that the supply of glacier carbon to the coastal waters of the Gulf of Alaska is a modern, post-industrial phenomenon. “When we look at the marine food webs today, we may be seeing a picture that is significantly different from what existed before the late-18th century,” said Stubbins. “It is unknown how this manmade carbon has influenced the coastal food webs of Alaska and the fisheries they support.”

A warming climate will increase the outflow of the glaciers and the accompanying input of dissolved organic material into the coastal ocean. This will be most keenly felt in glacially dominated coastal regions, such as those off of the Gulf of Alaska, Greenland and Patagonia. These are the areas that are experiencing the highest levels of glacier ice loss.

“Although it is not known to what extent organic material deposition has changed and will continue to alter glacially-dominated coastal ecosystems or the open ocean, it is clear that glaciers will continue to provide a valuable and unique window into the role that the deposition of organic material plays in our changing environment,” Stubbins said.

Stubbins collaborators on the project included Eran Hood and Andrew Vermilyea from the University of Alaska Southeast; Peter Raymond and David Butman from Yale University; George Aiken, Robert Striegl and Paul Schuster from the U.S. Geological Survey; Patrick Hatcher, Rachel Sleighter  and Hussain Abdulla from Old Dominion University; Peter Hernes from the University of California-Davis; Durelle Scott from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; and Robert Spencer from Woods Hole Research Center.

The paper can be viewed on-line at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/NGEO1403

Further details are available at
http://www.skio.usg.edu/?p=research/chem/biogeochem/glaciers
. This work is being continued with support from the National Science Foundation:
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1146161

The Skidaway Institute of Oceanography is an autonomous research unit of the University System of Georgia located on Skidaway Island in Savannah, Ga. The mission of the Institute is to provide the State of Georgia with a nationally and internationally recognized center of excellence in marine science through research and education.