By Kathleen M. Wong
Think your garden is green? The blue waters of the oceans are actually much greener. Every year, microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton convert roughly 50 petagrams—50 trillion kilograms—of carbon dissolved in ocean surface waters into living tissue. That’s half of all the photosynthesis that occurs on the planet, and it happens at an astoundingly rapid pace.
"If I look out my window, I can see the same trees standing mostly unchanged year in and year out. The photosynthetic biomass on land is there for decades before being replaced. In the ocean, the extreme opposite occurs; the plants that are here one week have been eaten by the end of the week," says Jim Bishop, a Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science.
Bishop studies how plankton turnover contributes to the global carbon cycle. The amount of carbon these marine organisms take up, and how much gets entombed in the deep sea when they die, are key indicators of how earth is coping with global climate change. The process is critical to understanding and predicting present and future levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Yet the transitory nature of plankton, the size of the oceans, and often treacherous seas mean that plankton measurements from ships is spotty at best. "If I go to sea to study phytoplankton every three months, sixteen generations will have elapsed between the population I saw the first time and the one I saw later, and I have no idea how it evolved," Bishop says.
|
- UI: The Ultimate Muscle
I guess you could call the iPhone the beginning of...
10-6-2011UI: The Ultimate Muscle
We're still very much in the Web 2.0 era and you'r...
10-6-2011Security In the Golden Age Of The Internet
George is an amazing man with some deep understand...
9-13-2011Security In the Golden Age Of The Internet
Sometimes what you learn in high school is not onl...
9-13-2011Looking Forward: The Great American Red Herring
I would say that at least half of those who regist...
9-13-2011




















