Sinking Carbon

With samples taken from the crust of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, researchers have discovered where some of the oceans’ dissolved organic carbon winds up.

Written byJim Daley

| 2 min read

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EDITOR'S CHOICE IN ECOLOGY

S.R. Shah Walter et al., “Microbial decomposition of marine dissolved organic matter in cool oceanic crust,” Nat Geosci, 11:334–39, 2018.

There’s as much carbon circulating in the deep ocean in a form called marine dissolved organic carbon (DOC) as there is CO₂ in the atmosphere, says Sunita Shah Walter, a marine chemist at the University of Delaware. “It’s one of the largest active organic carbon reservoirs that we have,” she says. But not much is known about how this carbon is sequestered in the deep ocean.

Shah Walter and a team of geochemists and evolutionary biologists set out to determine what’s happening to marine DOC in a tectonically active area of the Atlantic Ocean called North Pond, which sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge about halfway between Cuba and Western Sahara. They drilled through sediment to the crust and sampled organic molecules and microbes from circulating seawater ...

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