K.D. Nelson Lecture Series – Dr. Allison Jacobel

The Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences presents the K.D. Nelson Lecture Series featuring speaker Allison Jacobel. Her talk is titled: Multiproxy Constraints on Respired Carbon Storage in the Deep Pacific Ocean. 

The partitioning of carbon between the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere, and shallow lithosphere is one of the most fundamental controls on Earth’s climate system. Reconstructions of past changes in the concentration of dissolved carbon and oxygen in the abyssal ocean are of interest to paleoceanographers because of their potential to characterize changes in the climate system on glacial-interglacial timescales, and improve our understanding of the mechanisms and feedbacks driving change.

Direct approaches to constraining deep ocean carbon storage have proven challenging due to inherited air-sea 𝛿13C signatures, the input of 14C-dead hydrothermal carbon and more. To better describe and model past and future changes in ocean carbon storage, paleoceanographers have developed and refined new proxies to quantify the biogeochemical reciprocal of deep ocean respired carbon storage, oxygen availability. Here, Dr. Jacobel presents data from new proxies and classic indicators measured at new sites, synthesizing these findings with companion reconstructions from locations across the Pacific. She will discuss the implications of these records for finding and quantifying the glacial CO2 reservoir, identifying regions of carbon entry into the deep ocean, and understanding ‘Pacific style’ carbonate preservation patterns.