SEA-Quester Researchers Present at Challenger Society Meeting
Dr Sean Chen and Dr Cordelia Roberts from Imperial College London presented their SEA-Quester-funded research at the Challenger Society Meeting in Bangor, Wales, contributing to discussions on the ocean’s role in the global carbon cycle. The meeting also marked 150 years since the return of the historic Challenger Expedition, a landmark voyage that helped shape modern ocean science.
The Arctic Ocean plays an important role in the global carbon cycle, but how carbon moves through marine ecosystems—and how quickly it is stored or recycled—remains an important area of research.
Dr Cordelia Roberts, who researches marine biogeochemistry, presented her Arctic fieldwork from the east coast of Greenland. Her research explores how zooplankton fragment faecal pellets and how this process influences microbial carbon turnover along a gradient from ice-covered waters to the open ocean. Her work helps shed light on the processes that influence the fate of carbon in changing Arctic marine environments.
How Quickly Does the Arctic Ocean Store Carbon?
Dr. Sean Chen, who researches oceanic blue carbon, presented SEA-Quester-funded research investigating the timescales of carbon sequestration in the subarctic Atlantic.
Using numerical modelling, his work quantifies carbon transit time—a measure of how long carbon takes to move through the ocean as part of the biological carbon pump. This natural process transports carbon from the ocean surface into deeper waters, where some of it can remain stored for extended periods.
Sean’s research uses this approach to explore how a warming Arctic could alter the speed of the biological carbon pump, offering new insights into how climate change may affect the ocean’s capacity to store carbon.
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