A University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science research cruise leaves for the deep Atlantic Ocean 50 miles southeast of Bermuda on Monday for a week of science at sea aboard the 171-foot R/V Atlantic Explorer.
A University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science research cruise leaves for the deep Atlantic Ocean 50 miles southeast of Bermuda on Monday for a week of science at sea aboard the 171-foot R/V Atlantic Explorer. Scientists will be sampling the depths of the ocean and analyzing bacterial diversity and function to better understand the marine carbon cycle in the ocean.
“To fully understand the carbon cycle you have to understand what’s happening in the ocean,” said chief scientist Michael Gonsior at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “80% of organics dissolved in the ocean are unknown on the structural level.”
The team of scientists and graduate students will be collecting water samples at different depths from oligotrophic, deep blue water—every 200 meters all the way to nearly 5,000 meters—from a fixed point in the Atlantic Ocean. The incremental sampling will provide a diversity of marine organisms because the community will change depending on the depths. Then they will use next generation sequencing tools to sequence the genomes of bacterial communities. Their goal: to understand how cyanobacteria contribute to the marine carbon cycle.
Read more at University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
Image: Graduate student Menqi Sun and Professor Feng Chen filter bacteria out of sea water. CREDIT: University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
