Carbon or bust!

I thought you folks might be excited to hear about what I'm doing research on in my grad school research. Ok, considering words like "organic," "particulates," and "degradation rates" are involved, excited might be the wrong word....interested? mildly curious? Ok, fine, maybe you don't care at all, but that's just too bad. I'm going to attempt to make my research topic mildly interesting to all you people who don't think studying ocean mud is the be-all and end-all of coolness.

The first thing to understand is that when fancy phrases like "degradation of phytoplankton-derived organic matter" (title of the paper I'm currently reading) get thrown around, what we're really saying is "CARBON!!! We're studying carbon over here!!" Now, with all the human sources of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the question of where that carbon may or may not be going is a very important one. Scientists think that the oceans serve as a giant carbon sink, absorbing a lot of the carbon being released into the atmosphere. (At the moment they can only account for 50% of the carbon we humans have released. The other half has to be going somewhere....) Understanding if the ocean is in fact a giant carbon sponge, and how it might go about doing that sponging are huge areas of research in oceanography these days.

Now, some definitions:

organic - We're not talking organic food here. Think chemistry. Organic molecules are those which contain carbon and hydrogen (along with all kinds of other things like nitrogen, phosphorous, and other stuff). Organic compounds are often created by living creatures - fats, sugars, proteins, etc.

particulates - anything bigger than .45 micrometers (that's really really small). Anything smaller than that is considered to be dissolved. Now, by anything bigger, I do mean anything. Yes, even whales can be considered particulates. Not typically the type of particle I'll catch in my filtration system, but that's beside the point.

Now, a lot of carbon absorption happens through biology - through photosynthesis, specifically. That good old story about CO2 getting turned into sugars by plants. For that reason, we're generally most interested in organic carbon, because that is the type that is being readily drawn out of the atmosphere and stored in other forms. Now, when our friendly plant cells (algae) or the things that eat them (animals of various types) die, their cells drift down to the bottom of the ocean. And if we're lucky, those cells and all the organic carbon they contain get buried before something wanders along and eats them, effectively removing them from the current carbon cycle. Fast forward several million years, and poof! Those buried cells have become fossil fuels.
Ironic, isn't it?

So, what are scientists trying to understand? Well, since we really know hardly anything, there's lots left to ask: How quickly does the process I just described happen in today's ocean? Are there areas where it happens more quickly? How do different species of algae and animals affect the system? Are there other factors (like the presence of nutrients) that can speed up/slow down the process? How much of the organic carbon formed actually gets buried instead of eaten and re-released to the atmosphere?

Basically, to try and get anything remotely resembling an accurate carbon budget for the planet, we need a much better grasp on all of those questions, and many questions that we haven't even thought to ask yet. Hence why I'm trying to contribute my two cents to the effort.