Image

Go Set a Sediment Trap

Bethanie Edwards, Justin Ossolinski and Peter Liarikos (left to right) prepare the float on a sediment trap for deployment from the R/V Knorr. While steaming from Woods Hole to St. George, Bermuda in the spring of 2012, the researchers stopped to collect water and sediment samples over a 24-hour period at two stations. Edwards exposed the diatoms (a type of phytoplankon) in the traps to bio-active molecules called PUAs, which stimulated their metabolism. As published in Edwards’ April 2015 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the diatoms’ reaction sheds new light on the role of phytoplankton in the ocean’s “biological pump”.(Photo by Ben Van Mooy, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)