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Currency of Life

May 29, 2012

Researchers aboard the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St. Laurent recover a mooring during a 2008 expedition to measure levels of carbon in the Arctic Ocean. The resulting study by MIT/WHOI Joint Program student David Griffith and his colleagues provides data that will help scientists better understand the Arctic Ocean’s carbon cycle. “Carbon is the currency of life,” said Griffith. “Where carbon is coming from, which organisms are using it, how they’re giving off carbon themselves—these things say a lot about how an ocean ecosystem works.”(Photo by David Griffith, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)