Fleet of robotic probes will monitor global warming’s impact on microscopic ocean life

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https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/fleet-robotic-probes-will-monitor-global-warming-s-impact-microscopic-ocean-life

Source: By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. 

Excerpt: A single drop of seawater holds millions of phytoplankton, a mix of algae, bacteria, and protocellular creatures. Across the world’s oceans these photosynthesizing microbes pump out more than half of the planet’s oxygen, while slowing climate change by capturing an estimated 25% of the carbon dioxide (CO2) released from humanity’s burning of fossil fuels. But the scale of this vital chemistry is mostly a guess, and there’s little sense of how it will change as temperatures rise. ...Soon, 500 drifting ocean floats studded with biogeochemical sensors will deliver answers. Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced it will spend $53 million to fund the new floats, marking the first major expansion of the Argo array, a set of 4000 floats that for 15 years has tracked rising ocean temperatures. ...In addition to standard Argo measurements of temperature and salinity, the new floats will have sensors measuring oxygen, sunlight, particles, chlorophyll (a gauge of phytoplankton abundance), nitrate (a key nutrient), and pH (acidity). Researchers will be watching that last reading closely, because acidity reflects both the ocean’s uptake of CO2 and its pernicious effect. When the gas dissolves in seawater, it forms carbonic acid that eventually splits into bicarbonate and hydrogen ions, the latter increasing the water’s acidity. Ecologists are concerned that acidification, already 30% worse in surface waters than preindustrial times, will make it more difficult for some phytoplankton, corals, bivalves, and many other species to assemble their shells of calcium carbonate.... 

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