Endeavor

This research cruise will be a working engagement and training exercise between Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence and an Academic Research Fleet Vessel. The purpose of the cruise will be cross-training, information exchange, and security exercises between sailing marine technicians and Trusted CI.

Our study will use cutting-edge in situ imaging (using a UVP-DEEP) of Rhizaria to bypass limitations in other sampling methods and to produce accurate estimates of Rhizaria biomass. Additionally, sampling will occur across a wide depth range (0-1200 m), at monthly intervals, and in conjunction with a wide array of other biological, chemical, and physical oceanographic measurements (as part of the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study, BATS). UVP imagery data will be integrated with molecular identification of Rhizaria using community metabarcoding and barcoding of individual Rhizaria collected from MOCNESS net tows taken in conjunction with UVP casts. Size-specific elemental analyses of Rhizaria and seasonally and vertically explicit estimates of Rhizaria biomass will be used to model their contributions to vertical flux in the system.

Long-term observations over several decades are a powerful tool for investigating ocean physics, biology, and chemistry, and the response of the oceans to environmental change. The Bermuda Atlantic Time-Series Study, known as BATS, has been running continuously since 1988. The research goals of the BATS program are: (1) to improve our understanding of the time-varying components of the ocean carbon cycle and the cycles of related nutrient elements such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and silicon; and, (2) to identify the relevant physical, chemical and ecosystem properties responsible for this variability. In addition, the BATS program has strong and diverse broader impacts, contributing to the field of ocean sciences by providing high quality ocean observations and data for seagoing scientists and modelers, and a framework through which researchers can conceive and test hypotheses. This award will support the operations of the BATS program for five more years. The primary BATS research themes are as follows: (1) Quantify the role of ocean-atmosphere coupling and climate variability on air-sea exchange of CO2, and carbon export to the ocean interior; (2) Document trends and the controls on the interannual to decadal scale variability in carbon and nutrient cycles to their coupling in the surface and deep ocean via the Redfield Ratio paradigm; (3) Quantify the response of planktonic community structure and function, and impact on biogeochemical cycles to variability in surface fluxes and dynamical processes; (4) Facilitate development, calibration and validation of next generation oceanographic sensors, tools and technologies; and, (5) Generate a dataset that can be utilized by empiricists, modelers and students. This research integrates ocean physics, chemistry and biology into a framework for understanding oceanic processes and ocean change in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre. The existing 29 years of BATS data provide robust constraints on seasonal and interannual variability, the response of the Sargasso Sea ecosystem to natural climate variability, and signal detection of potential ocean changes. This project would extend the BATS program through years 31-35 to address a series of ten interlinked questions through integrated research approaches and a multitude of collaborative efforts. In addition to the themes above, and embedded into the ten questions and approaches, the BATS team will focus on, for example, coupling of particle production and biogeochemistry; revisiting the complexities of the biological carbon pump; oxygen decline; and changes in the hydrography, physics, ocean carbon cycle and biogeochemistry of the Sargasso Sea. The highest quality data observation and collection will be maintained and used to address these questions. Importantly, a wide range of collaborations at the BATS site, spanning the physical and biogeochemical disciplines, will aid these broad goals. Strong links to community stakeholders, and close collaboration (including methods intercomparisons and personnel exchanges) with the Hawaii Ocean Time-series are proposed. This work will extend the research findings of the project into educational and training opportunities within and beyond the oceanographic community, including training and mentorship of both undergraduate and graduate students.

One of the longest open-ocean hydrographic stations in the world is maintained at the Hydrostation S site (formerly known as the Panulirus site) located ~25 km southeast of Bermuda in the North Atlantic Ocean. This program of repeat biweekly hydrographic observations began in 1954 (by Hank Stommel) and now, in its seventh decade, has proved to be the catalyst for numerous studies of ocean physics, biological processes and biogeochemistry. Hydrostation S continues to be recognized as one of the most important sustained ocean time–series. The renewal of the Hydrostation S program is proposed herein, extending this invaluable time–series of ocean hydrography to almost 70 years. The upper ocean warming trend has strengthened (about +1.4° C since the 1970's; ~+0.8°C in last decade) with significant salinification (+0.16). Deeper waters such as the Labrador Sea Water has cooled by a few tenths of a degree and freshened with a marked decadal oscillation. The signature of deoxygenation has been observed at Hydrostation S in the upper ocean (about 4 µmoles kg -1 decade -1 decrease in dissolved oxygen) as well as the oxygen minimum zone (~2.5 µmoles kg -1 decade -1 ). Hydrostation S also supports the longest global ocean CO 2 and acidification time-series (from 1983 to present) The major objective of the proposal is to continue Hydrostation S into the eighth decade with numerous questions related to warming and cooling, salinification and freshening, deoxygenation and insights on biogeochemical changes over time. This program constitutes frequent water column sampling of temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen (and indirectly, sampling of important ocean carbon time–series) of the North Atlantic subtropical gyre at the Hydrostation S site. Such work is complementary to other sustained observations such as the Bermuda Atlantic Time–series Study (BATS) and Ocean Flux Program (OFP). We propose to carry out a similar sampling format that has been followed for the past 68 years. As for the past ten years, we would continue to conduct two CTD profiles to better capture the deep–water variability while maintaining all the previous discrete depths. The first CTD cast will profile to full ocean depth (3,300–3,500 m) while the second CTD cast will profile to 500 m (to allow for instrumentation not rated for full ocean depth such as a PAR sensor). One indirect objective will be to continue to collaboratively evaluate a BIOS-based glider program with Hydrostation S data as critically important ground truthing data. The existing glider program has challenging issue, and the aim of this effort is to use robust and highly accurate Hydrostation S data to test the capability of emerging technologies over the next five to ten years.

This project is a training cruise for ARF marine technicians focused on the Fortigate Next-Generation Firewall. The Fortigate system is being rolled out on Academic Research Fleet Vessels starting in CY2023. Marine technicians who will, or already are, using the Fortigates will receive comprehensive training on this and other pertinent IT topics.

NES-LTER cross-shelf transect cruises are conducted between Martha’s Vineyard and the continental shelf break directly south. The overarching goal of the NES-LTER is to understand and predict how planktonic food webs change through space and time in response to changes in the physical environment, and how those changes impact ecosystem productivity, including of higher trophic levels. Observations and models are focused on processes and mechanisms that structure pelagic food webs, trophic transformations, and productivity, as well as the key interactions and feedbacks that modulate relationships among them. NES-LTER transect process cruises are focused on characterizing cross-shelf distributions of physical properties, nutrients, production rates, and plankton. Approximately 11 stations will be occupied in waters depths typically less than 200 m, but up to ~1600 m. Operations will include underway sampling of biological and chemical properties with science-provided instruments, CTD/rosette casts, net tows, on-deck incubations, and deployment of a towed vehicle.

The overall aim of the spring 2025 Atlantic Zone Monitoring Program (AZMP) hydrographic mission led by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) is to collect physical, optical, chemical, and biological oceanographic observations on the Scotian Shelf and in Gulf of Maine during the spring season. The AZMP was initiated in 1998 with the aim to detect, track, and predict changes in the state and productivity of waters across the northwest Atlantic. Data describing physical hydrographic conditions (e.g., temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen conditions), phytoplankton and zooplankton abundance and biomass, nutrient and chlorophyll a concentrations, and ocean acidification (e.g., pH and alkalinity) will be collected during the mission and used to evaluate seasonal, inter-annual, and decadal variability in oceanographic conditions in the region. The data and samples collected during this mission will also be used to support a number ancillary research programs and initiatives led by both DFO staff and external partners.

We request ship time on the R/V Endeavor in Spring or Summer 2025 to evaluate the safety and efficacy of a proposed marine carbon dioxide removal technique (mCDR) referred to as ‘Alkalinity Enhancement’. While effective from a physical and chemical stand point, it is unclear to what degree the manipulation affects the health and physiology of marine plankton, the base of the food web and engines of global biogeochemical cycles. Our work leverages a 6-year time series which established the baseline structure and function of planktonic food web in coastal Rhode Island (Fig. 1) through the established North East Shelf Long Term Ecological Research site(NES-LTER). Specifically, we will be conducting feeding and carbonate chemistry experiments along a shore to shelf transect (yellow highlight in Figure 1) to concurrently examine seawater chemistry and biological processes. This work is being done as a field trial of an existing ARPA-e (DoD) pilot grant Wang and Menden-Deuer have and that we wish to expand into a larger effort with the National Science Foundation.

The Rhode Island Teachers at Sea Program offers a unique experience to Rhode Island K-12 teachers. The teachers participate in the deployment and recovery of oceanographic instrumentation (CTD, multicore, plankton nets) and work with the samples in the lab. There are discussions regarding the equipment as well as the samples. The teachers then discuss how they would use this knowledge in their classroom. In particular, they discuss how the same concepts would be delivered to the different levels (K- 12).

Methane seeps affect the geology, ecology, and chemistry of the near-seafloor environment. We will investigate newly-discovered methane seeps along the slope of the northern US Atlantic Margin. We will describe and study the characteristics, biogeochemistry, and evolution over the geological time of seeps along two representative transects extending from the shelf edge to the continental rise.

Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is one of Earth's major carbon reservoirs, but its sources and sinks remain poorly defined. Sunlight-induced photochemistry has long been postulated to be a DOC sink in the ocean, but its importance and impacts on marine DOC cycling, marine ecology, and atmospheric chemistry are far from resolved. This project aims to reduce this knowledge gap by addressing three key questions: 1) Are coastal-to-offshore acetone, pyruvate, and C1 and C2 compound photoproduction rates nonlinear functions of chromophoric dissolved organic matter (CDOM) absorption, as observed for DIC? 2) Is DIC the main carbon photoproduct produced from the photolysis of DOC in the open ocean? and 3) Is the production of C1 and C2 photoproducts, together with acetone and pyruvate, collectively a significant removal mechanism for DOC in the oceans on an annual basis? We will focus our study on C1 and C2 compounds because these are the main low molecular weight photoproducts that have been shown to be produced from the photolysis of marine DOC, and yet no one has co-measured these photoproducts in coastal or blue waters. Compounds that we will consider include CO, DIC, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, formate, glyoxal, glyoxylate and possibly acetate. We will also quantify the C3 compounds acetone and pyruvate, since both have reported photochemical production rates in the low nM C h -1 range. To address the abovementioned questions, we propose a three-year study involving one 19-day research cruise in the Northwest Atlantic to study the photochemical production rates of the compounds listed above as well collect samples for subsequent photochemical experiments back in the home laboratory.

Tools to measure the quantity and composition of gravitationally sinking biological organic matter, via the “biological carbon pump” (BCP) are of increasing importance. Decades of work have established the utility and also the potential methodological deficiencies of sediment traps for the collection of this sinking organic matter. Sediment traps that minimize hydrodynamic biases during particle collection, and underwater imaging devices that can resolve time-dependent fluxes and identify sources of sinking material, are some of the most powerful tools available for direct collection and characterization of BCP fluxes. However, such devices at present are expensive to develop and maintain, and typically operated only by their originating laboratories. Furthermore, few studies have tested the sediment trap platform hydrodynamic effects on sinking particle imagers. The proposed project would build upon work of each of the proposing PIs to develop sediment trapping and particle sensing tools that utilize openly shared software, and hardware designs that are based upon commercially-available components. The first objective of this project is to develop and test a sediment trap controller that would simplify the construction and deployment of neutrally-buoyant sediment traps (NBSTs) based upon commercially-available profiling floats, thus broadening the potential user base of such traps, which are minimally impacted by hydrodynamic effects. The second objective is to integrate with the trap controller a low-cost, upward-looking in situ camera to image sinking particles. Characterizing this camera’s performance under a variety of platform hydrodynamic conditions, and developing software for onboard data reduction, will lay the groundwork for its use to quantify sinking carbon fluxes aboard autonomous platforms. Finally, recognizing that the lower mesopelagic zone (defined here as 500-1000 m) is critical to observations of biological carbon sequestration over long timescales, the third project objective is to optimize these tools for use at these typically-undersampled depths.

The goal of the project is to understand nitrous oxide (N2O) consumption in surface waters, by measuring rates of N2O consumption, determining what factors control the rates, and characterizing the microbes involved in the process. Nitrous oxide consumption in surface waters has the potential to reduce net emissions of N2O to the atmosphere, but because biological N2O consumption is considered to be an obligately anaerobic process, it is generally not considered in evaluating N2O flux from the surface ocean. We have detected the presence of microbes capable of N2O consumption, and have measured potential rates of N2O consumption, in fully oxygenated surface waters. In order to assess its potential importance on a global scale, we need to measure N2O consumption in regions where N2O production is low on an aerial basis, but large overall because those regions comprise 97% of the surface ocean. Ship time is requested for one expedition to the North Atlantic, a region where N2O is close to equilibrium with the atmosphere, and can be a weak net source or sink. The region in the North Atlantic is not directly connected to any strong oceanic N2O sources and thus represents the vast oxygenated surface ocean where the only known source of N2O is nitrification. The proposal describes a multi prong attack on the problem, including field work (see below) and molecular biological analysis of microbes and pathways associated with N2O consumption.

Over the decades, several well sites for extraction of oil and gas have been developed, exploited and decommissioned off the northeastern coast of Newfoundland. Exploration and development of new sites continues, with both active extraction and approved future projects. The approach to decommissioning wells has changed over time, but the likelihood of leakage or residual contamination of sediments has not been well characterized. Both of these processes have the potential to impact different components of the ecosystem, both in the sediments and water column. This mission aims to take a multi-disciplinary approach to measuring oil and gas impacts around decommissioned well sites and compare them to control locations. We also aim to collect samples as close to active sites as possible and include sampling of the future production sites in the Bay du Nord region. Recognizing that microplastics interact with hydrocarbons, we aim to quantify abundances of microplastics within these areas.