Oceanography Ep 8. Our Green Sea: Plankton, CO2, and NASA EXPORTS
Tiny ocean drifters are shaping Earth’s climate. Microzooplankton, some no larger than a grain of sand, are crucial players in the biological carbon pump — the system that moves carbon from the atmosphere into the deep sea for long-term storage. In this episode, PhD candidate Erin Jones explains how these single-celled organisms regulate climate, why their diversity matters, and what NASA’s EXORTS program is uncovering using satellites and DNA sequencing. From the invisible communities floating in seawater to the global carbon cycle, we explore how the ocean’s smallest creatures are connected to the planet’s biggest challenges. Discover why unlocking their secrets could reshape climate predictions — and why the future of carbon sequestration depends on them.
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Episode Guest: Erin Jones
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Learn more about the NASA EXPORTS Program
Episode Transcript and more information on the Pine Forest Media website
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Hosted, produced, and edited by Clark Marchese
Cover art by Jomiro Eming
Theme music by Nela Ruiz
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Transcript:
Clark Marchese (00:11.374)
Hello there, and welcome back to another episode of Oceanography, the podcast that dives deep into the science of our oceans, the latest in marine research, and the scientists working hard to better understand and protect our blue planet. And today we're looking at how green the ocean is from space.
Clark Marchese (00:51.162)
Alright, get your field notebooks out. My name is Clark Marchese. You are listening to the Oceanography Podcast. And today we are learning about microzoplankton and their role in the biological carbon pump. That's a pretty complex word, so maybe we can start with a warm up. Hapodic game of never have I ever. Never have I ever spent my whole life floating out in the sea, letting the currents take me wherever they please.
Never have I ever been able to fit inside one millimeter of seawater. Never have I ever stolen someone else's chloroplasts and used them as my own. And never have I ever helped pull carbon out of the atmosphere and help sequester it in the deep sea. But if you have done any of those things, you might be a microzoplankton. So what is it? Let's break it down. Micro, meaning small. Well, how small? Around 20 to 200 micrometers. To visualize that.
On the small end, that's about the size of a human red blood cell, which is still a little hard to visualize. But on the upper side, we get to a small grain of fine flour or a tiny bit of beach sand. So they're really small and some of them are even only one cell big. So that's the micro part. Then we have zo or zoo. The jury is still out on that one. This part means animal. So a living animal species. And I'll highlight another word you may have heard of, which is phytoplankton.
These are the plant guys, and zooplankton are the critters. We will be speaking about both of them today. And finally, bringing it all together, we have plankton, which refers to a type of ocean organism that essentially does not swim. They're just floating around, going wherever the waves take them, taking the lazy river route. So that's what a micro zooplankton is, and why are we talking about them today? Because these little critters that fill our oceans are foundational to our climate's ability to regulate itself. More specifically, they form the foundation of a system that scientists have called the biological carbon pump. Now that is kind of wordy, but it is basically a system by which carbon from the atmosphere moves through the environment, through ecosystems, through plants and animals, and ultimately gets stored in the deep sea. And if this system didn't exist, carbon and other greenhouse gases would be even more of a problem than they are right now. So these planktonic powerhouses are climate regulators and we do need them.
Clark Marchese (03:13.526)
In today's episode, we're going to learn in greater detail about how this system works, the questions scientists still have about the biological carbon pump and the microzoplankton that contribute so vitally to the system. In just a moment, we'll hear from PhD candidate Aaron Jones. Aaron's research is part of a larger network of scientists all working under the NASA exports program. We're going to be learning about what that is today too. And stick with me because I promise it is all connected. This NASA exports program is a large scale interdisciplinary project that at its core is trying to understand how the biological carbon pump is working in the sea. And as NASA is involved, you may not be surprised that it does involve satellites. So how do satellite images of the whole ocean relate to tiny microscopic microzoplankton? We're going to find out. There are a lot of vocab words that have already been mentioned so far, but Erin can define them a lot better than me. So we'll wait to hear from her. But don't worry if it's not all making sense quite yet. We're going to move slowly here together.
We'll explore how microzoplankton fit into this carbon export system, what it means to fix carbon in the first place, how diversity in the microbial world can impact climate predictions, and how researchers like Aaron are using molecular technologies to unravel it all, one filtered milliliter of seawater at a time. Okay, we are just about to get started, but before we do, if you enjoy this episode or if you think that science communication like this is important, we would invite you to subscribe to the show if you aren't already, or to share it with someone you know And if science communication is really something you're passionate about, can consider joining us on Patreon. We've got some extra resources from episodes that are posted there. You can also leave us a 5 star rating or write a short review, all of which helps more listeners find the show. Alright, with that, think we can get started.
Clark Marchese (05:09.294)
Okay, it looks like we are recording, so hello. Thank you so much, Erin, for coming on the show today. Why don't we start by having you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your research.
Erin Jones
So my name is Erin Jones. I'm a soon to be doctor. I'm a PhD candidate in biological oceanography at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography. So here I study microzooplankton diversity, metabolism, and trophic ecology in the lab of Dr. Tatiana Reynerson.
Clark Marchese
First of all, congratulations. All of the scientists I talked to have had their own academic scientific journey, but you're right in the thick of it. And I'm often interested how scientists found themselves to be where they are. So what made you interested in studying microzoplankton or ocean science more broadly in the first place?
Erin Jones
Great question. So prior to graduate school, I had kind of dabbled throughout my undergraduate career in different sectors of ocean science. I had studied salmon, I had studied harmful algal blooms, I'd studied microplastics. Like I just kind of let my wild interests reign free. So I actually didn't know anything about Microsoft LinkedIn before joining Tatiana's lab. And so quickly learned that Microsoft LinkedIn are these heterotrophy capable Brotists. So that all just means that they are these single-celled eukaryotic organisms that are capable of consuming other sources for their nutrition and their energy acquisition. And in this case, most of them graze on primary producers or the photosynthetic phytoplankton, just like how land plants are photosynthesizing, phytoplankton are doing the same thing. And what I didn't know about microzooplankton...
Erin Jones (06:50.358)
I did know though that I was really excited and curious in general about all these microbial communities in the ocean, which is kind of why I had this wayward science path to get here. But I was lucky that I came across Tatiana's lab and we really jived personality wise and she is equally, if not more excited and curious about all the different kinds of microbial diversity in the ocean, the processes, the metabolic activity of these communities, you name it, she's done it. And so her lab was kind of this perfect fit of trying to understand the mystery of these ocean microbes. Since I don't have to totally specify on exactly what I wanted to study right away, it allowed me to really explore, explore the whole ocean.
Clark Marchese
Yeah, I can definitely relate to having lots of different curiosities. So I'm happy that you were able to kind of follow them wherever they took you. And it seems like they took you exactly to the right place. So that's great. Now, it's my understanding that these micro zooplankton play a big role in something called carbon export. I also understand that your research looks into that role as part of a larger project called the NASA exports program, which I see exports as in all caps. So I'm guessing it might be an acronym of some kind. Maybe we can start by having you tell us about what this NASA program is first, and then we can get into the science you're doing and how it fits into the program.
Erin Jones
Yeah. So ocean ecosystems, they play this critical role in Earth's carbon cycle and the quantification of the impacts for both the current conditions and predicting what future conditions there will be. That is our greatest challenge in oceanography, trying to figure out how the ocean ecosystems fit into that current and future state of the carbon cycle and Earth's ecosystems. And so the exports project, which is of course,
Erin Jones (08:36.926)
government fashion an acronym. It stands for export processes in the ocean from remote sensing, but it aims to develop a predictive understanding of the export and fate of a global ocean net primary production and its implications for the current state of the ocean and future climates. So it really pertains to climate change as well as just understanding our ocean today. So the achievement of that goal is a huge multidisciplinary effort within oceanography. And it requires us being able to quantify all these different mechanisms and learning about all the different communities and processes that are involved in the control of that transport and transformation of carbon from the surface where it is fixed from carbon dioxide into the biomass of phytoplankton. And then however it's processed throughout the open ocean, ultimately into the ocean interior, which our goal then would be it's sequestered for upwards of millennia. But there's so many question marks in between those two processes. We kind of understand the beginning and we kind of understand the end, but we really have all these questions remaining for all these middle mechanisms that are going on. And so my research zooms in on that upper ocean, that sunlit part of the ocean, where I'm trying to understand the microbial activity that's just booming up there. So these microzooplankton, these protists that are capable of consuming those primary producers, they're readily eating them like every day just chowing down, consuming this fixed carbon. And what that does is that shunts that carbon that was just fixed from the atmosphere in the surface waters right into the microbial food web. And so instead of that carbon ultimately like sinking down in a dead cell, it is put into the food web where a microzoplankton might consume a cell. It might get eaten by another microzoplankton species and so on and so forth, all the way up different trophic levels even. So it can delay this process of carbon export, of that carbon making its way down to the deep ocean. And so we just really don't understand who's in these communities because they're super, super diverse. There's so much that's unknown about them.
Clark Marchese (10:42.702)
Okay, so it seems like they're a pretty important player in our global climate system, so I'm glad this program exists. I wonder, what exactly is your role in it?
Erin Jones
So my work specifically is aimed at capturing not only who's in the community from the perspective of their taxonomic diversity, which just means that it is just grouping together different lineages of phytoplankton across the evolutionary tree into one diverse group just to be able to generalize a little bit about them. But really, because it's a generalized functional group, it's full of different kinds of species of plankton. It's full of different metabolic and trophic capabilities of these plankton. They do different things. They are different species. They have evolved with different advantages and disadvantages. And because of that, it means that their impact on the different communities and processes that they're involved with is totally variable just within microzoa plankton.
Clark Marchese
Okay, got it. So microzoplankton is still a giant umbrella with a bunch of different subsets that all contribute to this system differently. And you're trying to understand the contributions of these different groups. Maybe just to help us paint a little bit more of a picture, can you give us some examples of what the differences are between these different types of microzoplankton?
Erin Jones
So they're these like crazy intermediary communities that we just only know a fraction about. And they are the first link in that trophic chain. They're the first organisms to consume those photosynthetic phytoplankton. And they're perfectly capable of being heterotrophic, consuming cells to get their nutrition, mixotrophic, which is both consuming cells and also photosynthesizing. Why not do both? And even parasitic.
Erin Jones (12:27.084)
so they can take over a host cell. So they've got these different mechanisms of interacting with organisms and we're lumping them together in one group. So there's like this immense diversity there, both functionally and taxonomically. And so my work is focused on trying to understand who's there and what they're doing.
Clark Marchese
so cool. And as you're explaining that, it starts to make sense how these feeding habits would contribute quite differently to the carbon export. Which, in case we have jumped ahead of ourselves just a little bit. Carbon export. That is a term that was new for me. What exactly do we mean when we say carbon export?
Erin Jones
So carbon export is a catchy phrase to describe the different kinds of carbon, whether it's particulate, dissolved in the form of organisms or dead or living or otherwise, that is exported, is basically sunk to the ocean interior. And due to the way that ocean circulation happens, once that carbon reaches a certain depth, it will take hundreds to thousands of years for that carbon to then circle back up to the surface. So we consider that carbon sequestered. That's why the ocean is such a good carbon sink. It can take in a ton of different forms of carbon and it can hold on to it for upwards of millennia.
Clark Marchese
Okay, so to visualize, when we hear the word export, we think of a good being sold and sent from one place to another, right? In an economic context. I'm from Idaho, so we export a lot of potatoes. But here, carbon is the potato, and it's getting exported from the atmosphere and the ecosystem to the deep sea where it stays.
Erin Jones (14:08.91)
However, because there's biological processes occurring in the ocean at the same time as all these chemical and physical processes, not all of the carbon that is fixed at the surface through photosynthesis taken out of the atmosphere by phytoplankton, not all of that carbon is going to be exported to the deep ocean. So that's where we are trying to link these two large processes. How much of that fixed carbon is transported and transformed to get to the deep ocean where it can be held for a really long time. And that has its implications for climate change because we're trying to understand how much carbon dioxide in our atmosphere that's rapidly warming, can the ocean take up? How long is it going to hold on to it? Will it just spit it right back out? And will that then contribute to warming because it's just being recycled rapidly? There's a lot of complex processes that are involved in carbon export pathways, but ultimately it's how that carbon from the surface gets to the deep ocean. And if it even does.
Clark Marchese
Okay, that's really helpful and very relevant. Another term that I've heard just a handful of times already since we've been speaking is the idea of carbon once it's fixed or the ability to fix carbon. So I think I'm a bit lost myself. Can you help us understand what it means to fix carbon?
Erin Jones
Yeah. So carbon fixation, another buzz phrase, is just a term to describe the process of taking atmospheric carbon dioxide that dissolves into the water from the air and then is used in photosynthesis by these plant-like organisms and taken into their bodies to produce more cells. So the fixation is simply taking what is a dissolved compound in the ocean.
Erin Jones (15:58.302)
and building it into the biomass of an organism. That's kind how we think of fixing the carbon is taking this dissolved carbon dioxide and then putting it into like a building block of a cell.
Clark Marchese
Okay, wonderful. And that's important for us because we are carbon-based organisms ourselves. In fact, all known living organisms on Earth are carbon-based. And now that we have all these definitions in order and we understand that you're trying to classify the different contributions among the different diverse subgroups of microzoplankton within this system, let me ask you why it's important to understand this diversity.
Erin Jones
That's a great question. So phytoplankton, plankton in general, have evolved over many different lineages in the evolutionary history. They're not just one group of organisms. And with that inherent taxonomic diversity, it comes with functional diversity and advantages and disadvantages in different ecosystems. They're well adapted. They're evolved for certain purposes, for certain niches in the microbial food web. It's really hard to actually capture this diversity because the ocean is enormous and we can go out there on one ship, time, sample as best we can over a period of time and try and understand who's there in that tiny little spot compared to the global ocean. There's so patchy what we know about who's there. But if we can understand more of who's there, we can capture larger patterns in the communities that are global. We can capture patterns in who's at the surface versus who's at depth. We can try and understand more of their ecological roles that are associated with certain species. I always go to an example of harmful algal blooms because certain species are capable of over reproducing basically. And that's what forms these harmful algal blooms and then can cause all kinds of terrible things in local ecosystems. And those are specific species. So if we can understand who's there, we can then
Erin Jones (17:57.408)
understand better what the ecological implications are for these communities. What does that mean for a future when the ocean is warmer? What species are going to be there and have be more suited to a warmer, more acidic ocean than other species?
Clark Marchese
Okay, so I'm hearing that we don't only want to know who's there for the sake of this current moment, but this information can help us understand changes that might occur or are already starting to occur in our changing climate.
Erin Jones
We're seeing that rapidly changing in places like the Arctic and the Antarctic oceans, because those are places where it's rapidly warming the most. And we're seeing what used to be communities of really heavy, big diatoms that capture tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, switching to more well-suited dinoflagellates, which require less energy. They are mixotrophic, so they're capable of consuming other organisms and photosynthesizing and they do better in warmer waters. So we're already seeing a shift in the community diversity of places that are undergoing rapid change.
Clark Marchese
So that's the why of it all. Let me ask you about the how. How do you go about locating, identifying, classifying, and analyzing these various types of microzoplankton that exist out there in the ocean?
Erin Jones (19:14.126)
So I mentioned that because the ocean is huge and it's really hard to sample in the ocean. It takes a lot of time and money and ships go out and physically be able to collect these samples. And so what's been really beneficial for the field of oceanography has been the advancement and accessibility of high throughput sequencing, which is just fancy lingo for DNA and RNA sequencing. It's just... genetic sequencing of all the different parts of cells and what's useful because that's a lot cheaper and faster now and requires far less material than other historical methods, even like microscopy, looking at something through a microscope and trying to identify it. We can get so much more information by using sequencing methods. And so my work goes out, collects all this water. I kind of act like a glorified Brita filter because I'm just filtering liters and liters and liters of ocean water onto these teeny tiny little filters and then freezing them so that I've got all this biomass that was in the ocean and then I can extract the DNA from those cells when I get back onto land. And then I can send all of those samples off to a sequencing center that's going to go through a whole complicated lab process of actually sequencing the DNA that I've pulled out of those cells.
And then I can take that and basically do what's called meta barcoding. It sounds scary, but all it is really is if you, I like to think about grocery store, like barcodes on all different products. Everything's got a unique code associated with it so that when you scan, you know, if it's an apple or banana or milk or whatever, the computer knows. And the same thing applies to this DNA sequencing. We specifically look for a gene region that is unique but shared so that we know every single organism has this gene, but they have a different variation. And because they have a different variation, it's like your own little grocery store barcode. I can use these massive databases that scientists have been curating for decades of these gene sequences, basically just the barcode of what that organism is. And then the sequencing gives me all of this information of who's in my sample.
Erin Jones (21:31.864)
just based on this little barcode. It says, that one is this kind of phytoplankton, it's this kind of phytoplankton, it's this kind of phytoplankton. So what I'm able to do with just a tube that's about an inch and a half long is examine the entire plankton community in about a milliliter of water to understand who's there. Obviously this entirely hinges on what is already known and in databases. That's our greatest limitation right now in the downstream process.
It's way more effective than looking at a thousand microscope slides to try and identify who's in the community as time and manual labor, but also because these species, some of them have evolved so closely together that they are actually almost visually identical, but they are genetically distinct. And so if you use one method versus another, you might get different results. And so that's another way why using these sequencing methods, this DNA meta bar coding is really helpful in the field of oceanography, especially for trying to address questions like I have about who's in the microzooplankton community. Where are they in the water column? Are they at the surface? Are they at a thousand meters? Are they at 500 meters? Are they there over the entirety of a month? If I can sample every single day for a month. Are they there in the summertime versus the wintertime? You see where I'm going here.
Clark Marchese
And one thing he said that struck me was that it sort of depends on what is already known and you're taking what is already known and adding to it, which I guess is the point of a PhD thesis and also science in general. But if scientists in the past have already classified these species, identified them, studied them, discovered their relationship with carbon, if you add what you're doing, we can quantify how much carbon could be fixed in a certain area of the ocean based on knowing the quantity of each species in that area.
Erin Jones (23:25.952)
Yeah, it's certainly the, the, the capabilities of that, like locale to, to drop carbon. Yeah. It, knowing who's there has a direct relationship to what they're functionally capable of doing. I have some species in my data set that are carnivorous and they only eat other Microsoft Plunkton completely throws a wrench in like our understanding of what's happening in that community there. I'm like, well, they're not photosynthesizing and they're not eating smaller things. They're actually eating things that are like themselves. so it's knowing who's there based on what we already know. So there's a lot of unknowns still, but even just being able to highlight those unknowns can allow other researchers currently or in the future to focus on those.
The main way we learn about other species so that we have a barcode for them is usually based on cell culture, like isolating that particular species, growing it up, and then trying to learn about it, what through different experiments or sequencing or what have you, but focusing on one species. A lot of people do that and it's really valuable work. I'm taking the step back and trying to look at whole communities, but it does require all these other people having to have looked at individual organisms over time. Thankfully, I can benefit from all the work of my predecessors, but there's still so much more to discover. And it's one of the reasons why actually, I just released like last week, a accessible open access database of probably, what is it like 400 different microzooplankton species and their known trophic ecology.
Clark Marchese
Wow, that sounds like quite involved. You know, when you go to Google Scholar, like the home page, I think one of the tag lines under the search bar, it says something to the effect of standing on the shoulders of giants. And it sounds like you've relied on the research of others. And it also sounds like the research that you're doing is going to be something that other people can stand on as well, especially with that database. So that's great to hear. Another thing I'm curious about though, is if we're scooping up DNA from the sea and scanning it,
Clark Marchese (26:20.598)
like barcodes in a database, cross-referencing them with species that we already know a lot about, what if you scan something and it's not in the database? And then also, when that happens, does this process lead to a lot of new species discovery?
Erin Jones
I mean, the problem is that if there's a barcode that's unknown in the database or is only known to a certain taxonomic level, like we know if you're an animal versus a bacteria or something like that, and then it goes all the way down to genus, species, et cetera. But sometimes we only know up to a certain level, like family or order, phylum or whatever. And then the rest of it will just be like unknown, unknown, unknown, unknown. We can use those in the future to help try and match it to published genomes when people sequence like the genome, all the genes in an entire cell, or if people do culture work and they have isolated something and then do that sequencing and can submit that and then there's no information added, like you could kind of match it up. But unless I have the physical cells, you're kind of left with just question marks.
Clark Marchese
I also want to know if we have enough data yet, or if it's been around long enough, rather, to be able to identify any shifting trends in our anthropogenic world there's a lot of unknowns to figure out still about what is changing in the global ocean from this diversity. And that's part of my motivation. But what is known is predominantly in these really well-surveyed parts of the world. I mentioned the polar oceans before, the Arctic and the Antarctic, because those are areas of rapid change from global climate change. They're areas of very regular research. They're surveyed year round.
Erin Jones (28:08.022)
The main thing that people have been finding is that, surprise, it's changing. These really cold polar oceans that are warming up rapidly, it's changing the community of phytoplankton that are present. When they're present, how much of them there are. So we're going from diatoms, which are these larger phytoplankton cells that photosynthesize rapidly. They're very heavy because they have a silica casing around them. It's like a little glass house that they live in. And that means that they're involved in biogeochemical cycles that involve silica, that involve carbon, and involve nitrogen, phosphorus, etc. Those populations are more stressed from the warming temperatures than other populations, other species of phytoplankton. So we are seeing a change there in who's making up the community in these places of rapid change. The same kind of change is occurring in a lot of coastal communities. If I think of like the Gulf of Mexico, that is an area where there are more frequent harmful algal blooms because it's an area of rapid warming. It's an already warm place, but it is warming even more and becoming more acidic. Acid is actually the nemesis of anything that's like calcified or is silica based. So it's preventing the growth of certain species that rely on certain dissolved compounds in the ocean because it's too acidic and it's too warm. Whereas a dinoflagellate that is capable of producing neurotoxins and blooming like crazy and forming these harmful algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico, they're doing great this is the perfect ecosystem for them. So we're seeing kind of a shift. It's not necessarily that we're seeing like lower diversity globally or anything like that. Ultimately, these organisms have been around for millions of years. They've gone through the different ice ages and meltings and everything they've seen, well seen, I don't know if I've but their lineages have survived so much global change. It's just a fluctuation, balance of who's on top.
Erin Jones (30:20.78)
Really? And who's more disadvantaged in that?
Clark Marchese
Can we quantify how these changes in populations or processes are impacting the carbon cycle at this stage?
Erin Jones
When it comes to if the community is changing such that it'll directly affect like how much carbon is fixed in the surface ocean and can hopefully make its way to depth for sequestration. That's something that's very much undergoing active research. So that's one of the main parts of why I'm so interested in figuring out who's there is because it's pretty much unknown. A lot of the studies that I look at, it's like either broad metabar coding surveys of like different parts of the world, wherever these ships went, or their long-term microscopy based work that was done decades ago. There's just a huge question mark and some of it's inconsistent. So that's one of the many facets of the exports project, trying to understand these communities who's involved in these carbon cycling processes and food web dynamics that will affect how much carbon might be exported to the deep ocean.
Clark Marchese (31:30.286)
Okay, I'm glad you brought us back to the NASA exports project. Let's zoom out a bit because we've been talking about DNA and microscopes and genetics, but the NASA program is also relying on satellite imagery, which is way zoomed out. First of all, what is this ocean-wide imaging approach focused on trying to understand? And also, how do these two far ends of the research spectrum work together?
Erin Jones
Yeah, it's definitely weird that I am part of this project. I've had to convince NASA that you have to understand the biology, like who's there? They're like, we like satellites. What are you talking about? So the connection, it seems distant, but in reality, it's because there's like 10 steps in between satellites at NASA and DNA in the ocean. But the goal still is like shared between us. Basically, if I can understand who's there using the DNA in the communities, that will also allow us to connect to what are already known about different, only for photosynthetic cells, the pigments that are within these cells. These are colored pigments that are within the chloroplasts, so the photosynthetic machinery of a cell that they're unique. There's different versions of these pigments. They're not unique to the species level, but they're unique to like a sub phytoplankton group level. So we can get at whether they're a diatom versus a dinoflagellate. So we can get to these like phylum level differences of the community based on the color of their pigments in these cells. That connects to these optical properties of the ocean, the ocean color, among other optical properties, but mostly ocean color that NASA satellites can already detect actually. There are satellites that the PACE program, NASA PACE is a whole program that that satellite launched a year ago or so, give or take, and that is specifically about ocean color and plankton. And so what it can connect to is that these satellites that NASA has now, they can remotely detect the ocean color, all these different pigments that are in the surface of the ocean. So it is limited to this surface level depth.
Erin Jones (33:45.388)
And it's limited to these kind of semi-broad groups of plankton, but it connects them to who's there. So VASA satellites can look at the ocean, detect the color, identify the pigments that are there. And then scientists that know what those pigments are, I don't personally do this work. My colleagues do this work. They can then identify the different amounts of those pigments that relate to the composition of the community that is detectable from those satellites. That's where my work can start drawing more direct connections to these indirect properties that NASA can measure. The satellites are going all over the earth and they're capturing on a daily scale the entire earth, like one whole loop of the world, which is way more data than I could ever collect.
Clark Marchese
Fascinating. And by using these two methods together, how accurately can we try to estimate carbon export?
Erin Jones
Yeah. So currently there are numerous models that try and estimate anything from primary production to export biomass. There's a bunch of different models. The ones that are trying to pull at all those different factors and actually estimate how much carbon, they call it carbon flux, basically how much carbon is going through a space through amount of time. They're improving regularly, but right now our predictions leave out most of these really complex communities and mechanisms. And they're relying on the patchy parts of our data because we haven't covered the entire global ocean. So these models are built on data sets that satellites have covered, that ships have covered, communities that I'm studying, such as these.
Erin Jones (35:30.33)
mixotrophic organisms that can both be a primary producer and a primary consumer. It's leaving out, certainly not accounting for parasitic organisms that are blowing up cells and letting all of that carbon that was inside the cell just float away into the ocean and maybe it gets sunk into the deep. There's a lot of question marks that aren't accounted for because you can't account for them because we haven't developed our predictive understanding yet. We don't have a number that they can pop into their model and recalculate things. So the models are like any model, they're inaccurate and trying to improve their accuracy. So they can only get better. I have a lot of colleagues that are modelers. It's so outside of my skill set, but because of the exports project, we're all these different, these biologists, these chemists, these physicists, these modelers, they're all trying to work together to try and get at these different. We call them stocks and rates. That's part of the reason why exports is such a huge project. It's like over 50 scientists or something like that.
Clark Marchese
That is amazing. We do love interdisciplinarity around here. know, listeners will be aware that we talk to different scientists doing lots of different things as it applies to the ocean. And, you know, we also talk to researchers at different stages of their academic journey, shall we say. I think you might be the first guest of this podcast who is actively in the middle of obtaining a PhD. As we start to round out to the last couple of questions, I want to ask if there's anything you'd like to share about what it's like to get a PhD either, you know, advice for someone who might be considering it or perhaps even as a time capsule for you with your own reflections in this moment.
Erin Jones (37:10.918)
It is a marathon. I'm in my sixth year. It is a long, long process that at times feels like you'll never finish and at times is flying by far faster than I wish it would. But it is also an incredibly rewarding and fundamentally changing experience. There's nothing more uncomfortable than being independent in your work and having to figure it out. Thankfully with my project being very collaborative in nature, not all projects are that way, but this project being one that is team based. I think having a collaborative project and one that draws on different disciplines is like far more valuable than I could have predicted going into graduate school. It's hard, but it's worth it. It's actually worth it.
Clark Marchese
Thank you for sharing and thank you for your work. My next question is, is there anything that we didn't talk about today that you'd like to mention about any of these specific research projects, about the concepts we've talked about, or your experience as a researcher? Open mic moment for you.
Erin Jones
Open mic moment. Let's see. I think the main thing I always like to share with people is that oceanography is such a diverse discipline, just in the kind of science and the kind of questions you can ask. One of my good colleagues is an oceanographer who is terrified to go to sea, but he is a brilliant scientist and he knows everything about the ocean. You can be a biologist, you can be a modeler, you can be a physicist, et cetera. There are like a million different kinds of jobs you could have. You could be an engineer. my gosh, be an engineer, please. We need more engineers in ocean science. And it's just a field that is so unique and it's so exploratory. We know more about space than we do about the ocean. And yet the ocean is right here. So we have this opportunity to really like discover things, find connections between systems. It's so exciting. I highly encourage anyone and everyone to pursue ocean science.
Clark Marchese (39:14.28)
And that is going in the promo. And my last question for you is where can people find you and follow your work?
Erin Jones
If anyone wants to reach out to me, I'm on LinkedIn. I have a Blue Sky account, the Jones boat, often all that's where I'll post any science updates, articles, et cetera. And if you want to learn more about the NASA exports project or any of the actual science projects that are within that overarching program, you can go to oceanexports.org and learn all about it. There's descriptions of all the different science teams involved.
Clark Marchese
Okay wonderful. Well I will make sure to include links to all of those things in the episode description so listeners who are curious can find it very easily there. And this is the part where I say thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Thank you for teaching us about carbon export and microzoplankton and also for your really important research in this space.
Erin Jones
Yeah, thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Clark Marchese (40:11.458)
You have been listening to Oceanography. Just a reminder to anyone who is interested in helping us reach more people, share scientific research like this, and continue making our shows, you can join us on Patreon, where you'll also find some additional resources for our previous episodes. That and a 5-star rating or a written review wherever you're listening are the easiest and most effective ways to help us out.
Oceanography is a Pine Forest Media production. You can find more information about the podcast in this week's guest in the episode description. Cover art for the show was done by Joe Miro-Emming and the music you're listening to was composed by Nila Ruiz. This show was hosted and edited by me, Clark Marchese, and you can find more information about Pine Forest Media and our other science podcasts at pineforestpods.com or follow us on social media at pineforestmedia. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next week.
