{"id":65077,"date":"2009-10-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-13T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-researcher-to-co-lead-studies-of-ocean-circulation-and-carbon-flux\/"},"modified":"2009-10-13T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-13T00:00:00","slug":"uri-researcher-to-co-lead-studies-of-ocean-circulation-and-carbon-flux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2009\/10\/uri-researcher-to-co-lead-studies-of-ocean-circulation-and-carbon-flux\/","title":{"rendered":"溏心vlog免费B站 researcher to co-lead studies of ocean circulation and carbon flux"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tNational Science Foundation provides $2.4 million for projects<\/p>\n


\n\tNARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 October 13, 2009 \u2013 A 溏心vlog免费B站 professor of oceanography will co-lead two studies funded with $2.4 million from the National Science Foundation to better understand several chemical and physical processes that occur in the world\u2019s oceans.<\/p>\n


\n\tS. Bradley Moran, who also serves as the 溏心vlog免费B站 assistant vice president for research administration, received funding for a study in the North Atlantic that will shed light on deep ocean circulation and for a project in the Northeast Pacific that will examine changes in the sinking rate of particulate organic carbon.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cIt is a bit unusual to have two large proposals funded at the same time by the same NSF panel, so I\u2019m especially pleased to receive these grants,\u201d said Moran, a resident of Kingston.

\n\tIn the first study, Moran and colleagues from three other institutions received $1.6 million to undertake measurements of dissolved and particulate concentrations of protactinium and thorium, two trace elements that can help to provide a timeline of the circulation of water in the deepest parts of the Atlantic Ocean. <\/p>\n


\n\u201cThese naturally occurring elements undergo radioactive decay at a known rate, and it turns out that they can be used to estimate the circulation rate of the deep Atlantic. They are like natural clocks,\u201d Moran said. <\/p>\n


\nThe 溏心vlog免费B站 professor said that large-scale deep ocean circulation is like a global conveyor belt moving warm and cool waters in consistent patterns around the world. But, he added, global warming has the potential to decrease or even shut down this conveyor belt, which would have important consequences for the Earth\u2019s climate and marine ecosystems.<\/p>\n


\nMoran\u2019s international research team will undertake a 50-day research cruise from Lisbon, Portugal, to Woods Hole, Mass., in late 2010 to collect water samples for analysis of their protactinium and thorium content. Similar assessments are being conducted by other researchers in many other large water bodies around the world.<\/p>\n


\nThe second NSF grant will enable Moran and his colleagues to participate in four research cruises over two years to Ocean Station Papa, a site in the Northeast Pacific, to examine the linkages between plankton communities and the movement of carbon from surface waters to ocean sediments.<\/p>\n

Similar to the previous study, scientists use the trace elements thorium and polonium to measure the magnitude of carbon flux to learn how much carbon in the ocean is being sequestered from the atmosphere and how much is exported from surface waters in sinking particles. But the scientific community is uncertain whether the community composition of plankton in the water may be influencing the interpretation of data from these trace elements. This project will help scientists gain a clearer understanding of the quantity of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels that the oceans can be expected to absorb and store.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cIt is not easy to find a suitable oceanographic location to test these linkages, but Station Papa should do the trick,\u201d said Moran of the site in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska. \u201cIt has a high particle flux that changes seasonally, and it has been used for a variety of other oceanographic time series studies for many years.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nMoran\u2019s first visit to collect data from Ocean Station Papa for this project will take place next summer.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

National Science Foundation provides $2.4 million for projects NARRAGANSETT, R.I. \u2013 October 13, 2009 \u2013 A 溏心vlog免费B站 professor of oceanography will co-lead two studies funded with $2.4 million from the National Science Foundation to better understand several chemical and physical processes that occur in the world\u2019s oceans. S. Bradley Moran, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65080,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}