EAPS

Houghton Lecture Series: The Global Carbon Budget in a Changing Climate

"Marine Ecosystems and Ocean Acidification"
The ocean holds 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere. Because of its large buffer capacity, the ocean will eventually absorb 60 to 85% of the carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere on a time scale of 1000 years or longer. However the uptake of carbon dioxide by the ocean has the side effect of acidifying the water, with negative consequences for marine ecosystems and unclear implications for the functioning of the marine carbon cycle. This lecture will detail the linkages between marine ecosystem processes (from bacteria to jellyfish) and the carbon cycle. It will show how ecosystem processes can be understood through their biogeochemical functionality, and explain the knowns and unknowns of the impacts of ocean acidification. The lecture will end with a discussion of how changes in marine ecosystems could have knock on effects on climate regulation.

About the Speaker
Corinne Le Quéré is Professor of Climate Change Science and Policy at the University of East Anglia (UK) where she conducts research on the carbon cycle and its interactions with the Earth’s climate. Her research has helped to determine how and why the natural carbon reservoirs are changing, particularly in the Southern Ocean. She spearheaded the development of marine carbon-cycle models with new ways to represent plankton biodiversity and ecology.

Corinne is director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and member of the Scientific Committee of the Future Earth platform for global sustainability and of the UK Committee on Climate Change. She authored several assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and leads an annual update of the ‘global carbon budget’ by the Global Carbon Project, an international effort to keep track of global carbon emissions and their fate in the environment. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016.

Corinne completed a B.Sc. in physics from University of Montréal (1990), an M.S. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from McGill University (1992), and a Ph.D. in oceanography at University Pierre et Marie Curie (1999). She conducted research at Princeton University, at the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany, and at the British Antarctic Survey in the UK.

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