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Atlanta, GA | Posted: October 20, 2009
Summary Sentence:
Montoya awarded $381K for study of Amazon influences on the Atla
Full Summary:
GT Biology Professor Joe Montoya, in collaboration with a team of other researchers, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the influences of the Amazon River on the Atlantic.
Biological OceanographyGT Biology Professor Joe Montoya, in collaboration with a team of other researchers, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the influences of the Amazon River on the Atlantic.
The investigators hypothesize that large tropical river plumes with low nitrogen:phosphorus ratios provide an ideal niche for organisms that can fix nitrogen, and that this is responsible for significant carbon export in the Amazon River Plume. The PIs have identified a potentially significant but poorly understood, ecosystem-controlled, climate-sensitive carbon sequestration pathway that seems to violate the expectation of an inefficient open-ocean biological pump. Primary production fueled by external sources of nitrogen such as nitrogen fixation can drive a net transfer of carbon from the atmosphere to the ocean. Thus, this may represent a significant, yet previously overlooked biological pump mechanism.
