Speaker
Description
Oxygen (O2) plays a critical role for life on Earth, but over the last 50 years, O2concentrations in the Ocean have decreased massively as a consequence of human activity. These activities include greenhouse gas emissions and nutrient discharge to coastal waters, with major impacts on Ocean biogeochemistry and ecology. This effect is particularly intense in O2depleted tropical Ocean areas, also referred to as oxygen minimum zones (OMZ). These are sensitive areas as OMZs are connected to nutrient-rich coastal upwelling systems and support some of the world’s most prolific fisheries. While continuous OMZ expansion would lead to a decreasing habitat for fish and other organisms, feedback mechanisms which counteract O2depletion and stabilize the system’s ecological functionality may however explain and sustain high productivity.
Microbes are essential to regulating ocean biogeochemistry, oxygen and nutrient turnover and may those hold the key to stabilizing the oxygen budget to a certain extent. In this talk, I will discuss the potential of microbes involved in the nitrogen cycle to mitigate against Ocean oxygen depletion via feedback cycling from an integrated molecular, biogeochemical, and modeling perspective.