BIODIVERSITY IN DEEP-SEA ECOSYSTEMS
Deep-Sea ecosystems include species that can provide important drugs, food, and help predict earthquakes and tsunamis.
PROVIDE DRUGSCollect: Diverse invertebrate vent communities that consist of arthropods (crustaceans), mollusks (clams), annelids (worms), and sponges.
They acquire carbon by hosting symbiotic microbes that use chemical energy to convert carbon dioxide/methane into usable forms of organic compound. extract: Such organisms would be extracted using solvents through a process called high performance liquid chromatography. |
PROVIDE FOOD-Seamounts provide structure for animals to live on, and the structures create oceanographic effects that promote the production of food.
-Seamounts have strong currents that provides the animals living along its flanks with a constant supply of planktonic food. -Currents produces upwelling of water around the seamount, nutrients like nitrate and phosphate. |
PREDICTS TSUNAMISThe deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean is the Puerto Rico Trench. It exceeds 8,400 meters in depth. It is located at a boundary between two plates that slide each other with only a small component of subduction is larger. It is also associated with the most negative gravity anomaly on earth. The region makes it difficult to study because its underwater location makes it difficult to study.
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OCEAN ACIDIFICATIONThe ocean absorbs about a quarter of carbon dioxide that we release into the atmosphere every year. Which means that as our atmospheric CO2 levels increase, so do the levels of the ocean. CO2 absorbed by the ocean is changing the chemistry in seawater, a process called Ocean Acidification. Research Cruisers would then make measurements of the partial pressure of CO2 in the surface water. They add pH, oxygen, chlorophyll, and turbidity sensors to the existing moored and underway systems to more accurately and study the changes associated with ocean acidification.
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