FLOW-Lab: Fluxes in Low Oxygen Waters

We want to understand the role of different ocean processes, from large to small scales, in tipping the balance back and forth between oxygen supply and oxygen consumption across the world’s oceans.

Oxygen minimum zones are vast layers in the ocean with little to no oxygen and vital implications for marine habitats, carbon and nitrogen cycling, and greenhouse gas production.

Over the last 50 years, global oceans have been warming and deoxygenating, yet leading climate models are unable to reproduce observed changes in oxygen minimum zones and forecasts vary drastically under all future climate scenarios. The main obstacle is that models cannot resolve features smaller than their computational grid cells and use simplified biogeochemistry and biology.