Ocean oxygen concentrations control where organisms thrive in the ocean and provide important clues to biological productivity rates and the impacts of climate change. Yet despite being one of the oldest and most robust oceanographic chemical measurements, our understanding of oxygen cycling and variability has been limited by the infrequency of shipboard observations. Oxygen sensors mounted on Argo floats offer the means of vastly expanding the ocean oxygen database. These autonomous robotic floats change their density to profile through the water column. Shipboard observations remain important to calibrate sensors, to deploy floats, and especially to conduct intensive studies to understand the processes affecting observed oxygen variations. Oxygen data from Argo floats in the Labrador Sea, one of the few sites in the world where surface waters move into the deep ocean, have been used to determine the low oxygen content of these newly formed water masses. Oxygen data from Argo floats in the North Pacific Ocean have been used to estimate biological productivity rates over an annual cycle. Some of the new questions that can be answered using such observations include documenting and understanding recent downward trends in oxygen throughout most of the ocean’s subsurface waters (known as ocean deoxygenation) and linking oxygen cycles with other sensors now being deployed on Argo floats such as pH, nitrate, and optical properties.

The Natural Resources & Environmental Studies Institute (NRESi) at UNBC hosts a weekly lecture series at the Prince George campus. Anyone from the university or wider community with interest in the topic area is welcome to attend. Presentations are also made available to remote participants through Livestream (Channel 1). Go to http://www.unbc.ca/nres-institute/colloquium-webcasts to view the presentation remotely.

Past NRESi colloquium presentations and special lectures can be viewed on our video archive, available here.