BIOCAL research cruise
R/V Sarmiento de Gamboa, North Atlantic Sea, August-September 2024
Marine biodiversity loss is one of the greatest threats today to the world largest ecosystem, the surface ocean, especially in terms of the great variety of services that provides to humankind. This is because of unprecedentedly fast rates of climate change under anthropogenic pressure, including among others, ocean warming, stratification, deoxygenation and ocean acidification. With largely unknown consequences from plankton to fisheries despite the strong dependence for basic protein food supply for human societies. Fish over-harvesting alone, is implicated in the reduction of the ecosystem’s complexity, change in size spectrums of plankton that determine trophic organization, metabolic activities, organic matter export, and more. However, most observations on marine biodiversity loss come from large species with far less knowledge from microorganisms at the base of marine food webs.
The BIOCAL project focuses on planktonic calcifying microorganisms of coccolithophores (phytoplankton), foraminifera, and pteropods (zooplankton), that routinely become fossilized in deep-sea sediment due to their calcium carbonate shell mineral structure, with modern assessments of climate change impacts to biodiversity patterns. In this new oceanographic expedition, from the temperate to the polar regions of the North Atlantic, we will assess their biodiversity change rates over key time periods and their contribution to the carbonate cycle to better understand biodiversity change of modern times.
But there will be even more because the opportunity to work on the open sea has persuaded other scientists to develop their work at the same time, potentially creating new synergies on research. The scientific crew is comprised of oceanographers, biologist, geologists and environmental scientists. Follow us in this blog!