Encompassing more than 4,000 square miles, the Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the continental U.S., providing an excellent testbed for scientists aiming to better understand long-term changes occurring in coastal waters by using supercomputers to create detailed model simulations.
Encompassing more than 4,000 square miles, the Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the continental U.S., providing an excellent testbed for scientists aiming to better understand long-term changes occurring in coastal waters by using supercomputers to create detailed model simulations.
Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) Research Scientist Pierre St-Laurent and colleagues recently used Comet at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego to examine impacts of both regional and global changes affecting the Chesapeake Bay. They discovered that historical increases in fertilizers and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have forced the bay to behave increasingly like a small sea on a continental shelf rather than a traditional estuary.
“Upon studying what happened during the last 100 years, we determined that the bay now absorbs slightly more carbon dioxide than it releases into the atmosphere,” said St-Laurent. “This result exemplifies the particularity of the continental U.S.’s largest estuary, but also may be indicative of the magnitude of the changes that are ongoing in coastal waters throughout the world.”
St-Laurent and his colleagues published their detailed findings in Volume 17 (issue 14) of the Biogeosciences journal.
Read more at University of California - San Diego
Photo Credit: BruceEmmerling via Pixabay
