Oceans are critical to stabilizing the world’s climate, absorbing a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions and capturing 90 percent of the excess heat they generate. By some estimates, the ocean also accounts for up to half the annual emissions of another greenhouse gas – nitrous oxide (N2O), the third most important climate emission after carbon dioxide and methane. With the climate changing amid record high atmospheric levels of all three gases, the importance of the marine nitrogen cycle is ripe for study.

Conducting research can be a career-defining opportunity for an undergraduate student. This experience helps build their CV for graduate school, it can open doors to internships and jobs, and many students present their results at international scientific conferences. Recognizing the increasingly critical role that independent research plays in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, each fall BIOS welcomes a cohort of undergraduate interns as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program.

This summer marks year two of a three-year ASU BIOS study designed to expand understanding of how ocean eddies might be affecting coral reefs, as well as what role eddies may have played in reef accretion and overall functioning in the past.

A new school dedicated to the study of the ocean and its ecosystems, and it is based in the desert?

Murdock, 47, calls microbes the engines of the ocean. They’re responsible for feeding other sea life, breaking down waste, making oxygen, and absorbing carbon dioxide. These tiny creatures, among the oldest living organisms on Earth, range from algae and bacteria to fungi and plankton. In Murdock’s early teens she saw a National Geographic magazine featuring newly-discovered deep-sea hydrothermal vents teeming with giant clams, tube worms, and other marine life supported by nutrient-providing microbes. Since then, those ecosystems have been objects of her fascination.

Nicole Coots, a PhD student in her third year of evolutionary biology research at Arizona State University, is smitten by radiolarians, drifting plankton known for their complex, beautifully-sculpted miniature skeletons they make from minerals in ocean water. Like snowflakes, they seem to exist in almost unlimited variety. They are also key members of the food web throughout the surface waters of the global ocean, providing nutrition for other sea life.

In 1991, BIOS became a site for the competitive and prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, which provides participants with the opportunity to work alongside the Institute’s faculty and staff on research projects in a variety of topics in ocean sciences.

Damian Grundle, on board the research vessel Atlantic Explorer, recently joined the BIOS faculty.

The research vessel Atlantic Explorer sailed from BIOS in June sporting a new instrument package on its mast and bow designed to measure climate-relevant, constantly shifting gases, moisture, and heat between the ocean and the atmosphere.

When science came calling for James Galloway in the mid-1970s, he was a potter building garden planters in a Virginia pool hall that he and friends had converted into a craft cooperative. He had recently earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California at San Diego, but after receiving the degree he felt burned out by academia. Instead, with his wife Nancy (a pastel artist and potter) and a group of jewelers, wood workers, and weavers, he spent his days throwing clay on a potter’s wheel.