Search for: All records

Shipboard training equips early career ocean professionals (ECOPs) with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to tackle the challenges of marine research. Such training helps develop a workforce essential for implementing a truly global ocean observation system and advancing understanding of the ocean and its sustainable use. Working with other organizations and individuals, the Partnership for Observation of the Global Ocean (POGO) offers opportunities to ECOPs, mainly from developing countries, to join research cruises and acquire hands-on experience with real-world oceanographic work. These learning experiences can be organized either as one-on-one training on research cruises with spare berths or collective training on dedicated expeditions designed for larger groups of international students. This article introduces POGO’s shipboard training program by presenting examples from each of the modalities, and it explores the program’s long-term impacts and future directions. 

Anthropogenic emissions to the atmosphere have increased the flux of nutrients, especially nitrogen, to the ocean, but they have also altered the acidity of aerosol, cloud water, and precipitation over much of the marine atmosphere. For nitrogen, acidity-driven changes in chemical speciation result in altered partitioning between the gas and particulate phases that subsequently affect long-range transport. Other important nutrients, notably iron and phosphorus, are affected, because their soluble fractions increase upon exposure to acidic environments during atmospheric transport. These changes affect the magnitude, distribution, and deposition mode of individual nutrients supplied to the ocean, the extent to which nutrient deposition interacts with the sea surface microlayer during its passage into bulk seawater, and the relative abundances of soluble nutrients in atmospheric deposition. Atmospheric acidity change therefore affects ecosystem composition, in addition to overall marine productivity, and these effects will continue to evolve with changing anthropogenic emissions in the future.