The ocean enabled the diversification of life on Earth by adding O2 to the atmosphere, yet marine species remain most subject to limitation by this essential resource.  Human industrialization has intensified the aerobic challenges to the ocean’s ecosystems by depleting its O2 inventory through the global addition of heat and the local addition of nutrients. The dynamic balance of O2 supply and demand provides a unifying framework for understanding these causes and consequences of these phenomena across scales from the global ocean to individual organisms. This talk will synthesize recent advances in forecasting the loss of O2 and its impacts on the biogeography, biodiversity, and biogeochemistry of marine ecosystems, from microbes to macrofauna and from Earth history to the future. The results confirm that reducing both the global and local impacts of warming and O2 loss will be essential if humankind is to preserve the health and biodiversity of the future ocean.

Dr. Curtis Deutsch is an Earth Scientist studying the interactions between climate and ecosystems.   He combines mathematical models of varying complexity with diverse streams of biological and environmental data, to discover the ways in which climate produces spatial pattern and temporal variability in ecosystems.   His work has focused on how the ocean produces, transports, and recycles the nutrients and oxygen that sustain its plant, animal and microbial ecosystems, over a range of time scales from years to millennia.  He has previously held faculty positions at UCLA and the University of Washington, and is now a professor in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University.  

For the zoom information; please contact Rey Garduño (rgarduno@stanford.edu)