Donal Manahan (left)
Professor of Biological Sciences, USC

Meeting the ‘Cost of Living’ in a Changing Ocean: Strategies of Resilience

Summary of MEB Seminar Themes:

• “The ocean is hotter than ever: what happens next?” [Nicola Jones, 2023, Nature, 617: 450].
• New records for global temperatures are being set almost on a monthly basis.
• Given the vast diversity of species, habitat niches, and ecosystem links, a major challenge is how to understand and predict the impact of such rapid change on Life on Earth.
• In this presentation, the “Cost of Living” in a warming ocean will be analyzed as an integrating framework to assess the resilience potential of organisms to adapt (or not) to environmental change.

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Seth John (right)
Associate Professor of Earth Sciences, USC

Redfield 17.2: How flexible are global ocean nutrient ratios and what are the implications of stoichiometric flexibility for ocean carbon storage?

The discovery that dissolved nutrient ratios are globally uniform around an N/P of 16 was a fundamental early discovery of oceanography. Yet much recent evidence has shown large spatial and ecological variability in phytoplankton nutrient uptake stoichiometry, and has shown that carbon storage in the deep ocean depends mostly on N rather than P. Within this context, global nitrogen fixation and ecological circulation models are used to explore the potential implications on ocean carbon storage, both in the context of natural variability and in the context of possible new geoengineering solutions to the climate crisis.

Tuesday, September 19, 2023
12 PM
AHF Torrey Webb Room (AHF-153)