SEMINAR: GEOTOPICS at 3:15 "Considering carbon dynamics of the massive, deep ocean marine dissolved organic matter pool"

[orash sharifi <osharifi@rsmas.miami.edu>]

Monday, November 7, 2011
3:15, SLAB Seminar Room, S/A 103
Refreshments at 3:00 PM

Our upcoming speaker is one of our top professors at MAC:Dennis Hansell
The title of his talk is "Considering carbon dynamics of the massive, deep ocean marine dissolved organic matter pool".

ABSTRACT

Oceanic dissolved organic carbon (RDOC), holding 640 PgC, has long been recognized as highly resistant to removal.  It has a mean lifetime of thousands of years, so our vision is of a recalcitrant pool that is transported mostly conservatively with the ocean circulation.  But unlike RDOC in today’s ocean, this vast reservoir has been implicated by some in the paleoceanography community as a relatively rapid carbon source/sink involved in Earth’s past climate changes.  Accordingly, RDOC in ancient oceans had to be at times a much larger reservoir than it is today, and that large pool had to have been rapidly mobilized to release its carbon to the atmosphere.  These calls for RDOC to play a role in climate requires an understanding of RDOC that is well beyond our knowledge today. We need to understand how RDOC source and sink processes operate in today’s ocean in order to know its role in past or future oceans. This talk will present our current state of knowledge.

We hope to see you all there!

Your GEOTOPICS Coordinators,
 Keri Vinas and Arash Sharifi
        

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