Breaking down disciplinary silos in marine sciences, a key to climate forecasting

Science Highlights

7 December 2023

In a Nature comment, Alessandro Tagliabue (2023, see reference below) exposes how ocean modelling must evolve to take the biological complexity of the surface ocean into account. There is an urgent need to understand how marine microbes are affected by the climate change, allowing us to forecast the future state of the oceans. Indeed, there is little confidence today on predictions of how marine microbes will react to global changes.

After an analysis of the pro and cons of the biogeochemical models, the mechanistic metabolic models, or the exploitation of statistics, Tagliabue advocates that researchers in mathematical and ecological theory should break down their disciplinary silos, to improve and share their fundamental knowledge and benefit from the growing computing power to develop new generations of models. These models allowing a considerable step forward in our ability to overcome the ocean complexity and to forecast it.

Phytoplankton blooms (green and light blue) in the southwestern South Atlantic Ocean near the Falkland Islands.
Credit: NASA Ocean Biology Processing Group. Collected by the two VIIRS sensors (NOAA 20 and Suomi-NPP) on January 5, 2021. NASA Ocean Biology Distributed Active Archive Center. Retrieved from https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/738/

Reference:

Tagliabue, A. (2023). ‘Oceans are hugely complex’: modelling marine microbes is key to climate forecasts. Nature, 623, 250–252. Access the paper:10.1038/d41586-023-03425-4

Latest highlights

Mercury content and isotopes in bird’s guano: a window to reconstruct past climates

By analysing peat cores, Chuxian Li and her colleagues have shown how populations of nesting seabirds have fluctuated on a sub-Antarctic Island over the last 8,000 years.

Contraction of North Atlantic Deep Water during glacial times: a paradigm called into question

Blaser and co-authors propose a new distribution of deep-water masses in the Atlantic Ocean during the Last Glacial Maximum and the Heinrich Stadial..

Authigenic radiogenic neodymium isotope composition traces millennial-scale overturning circulation variability in the Arabian Sea

The neodymium isotopic signature of the sediment authigenic fraction is, a priori, a valuable proxy for reconstructing deep-water mass trajectories…

Magmatic activity at the Carlsberg Ridge in the Indian Ocean triggered by glacial sea-level variation

De and colleagues provide a high-resolution record of magmatic input and associated hydrothermal activity over the past 49 kyr from a core recovered from a magmatic segment of the slow-spreading Carlsberg Ridge in the Indian Ocean.

Rechercher