In a first, researchers from the University of California, Irvine – as well as Switzerland’s University of Zurich, IBM Research-Zurich and UC Santa Cruz – have obtained direct images of dissolved organic carbon molecules from the ocean, allowing better analysis and characterization of compounds that play an important role in the Earth’s changing climate.
In a first, researchers from the University of California, Irvine – as well as Switzerland’s University of Zurich, IBM Research-Zurich and UC Santa Cruz – have obtained direct images of dissolved organic carbon molecules from the ocean, allowing better analysis and characterization of compounds that play an important role in the Earth’s changing climate.
Using an atomic force microscopy technique developed by IBM, the team was able to visualize individual atoms and bonds, yielding clues about their persistence in the marine environment. Findings were published today in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“To understand processes happening on the scale of ocean basins, it is sometimes necessary to view objects that are orders of magnitude smaller,” said study co-author Ellen Druffel, professor and Fred Kavli Chair of Earth System Science at UCI. “By seeing with our own eyes the double bonds and rings of dissolved organic carbon molecules, we are better equipped to explain how they remain in the ocean for tens of thousands of years.”
The molecules that were imaged were collected by UC Santa Cruz researchers from waters in the northern central Pacific Ocean.
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Image: This image of a small marine dissolved organic carbon molecule was obtained by UCI, IBM Research-Zurich, University of Zurich and UC Santa Cruz researchers using atomic force microscopy, a technique developed by IBM in 2009. CREDIT: IBM Research-Zurich
