GENERAL OVERVIEW

Global warming, the long-term heating of the Earth’s surface, has been observed since the Industrial Revolution, when humans began activities such as burning fossil fuels. Climate change has affected a plethora of aspects of the Earth’s environments, specifically changes in temperature in both the atmosphere and ocean, precipitation, storming and earthquakes. One of the major results of climate change is a warming, rising ocean. The drastic increases in oceanic temperatures over short periods of time have lasting effects on the structure and biology of oceanic environments and organisms. My goal with this project is to analyze how a realistic increase in temperature in the next 100 years as a result of global warming will affect plankton taxa and their contribution to carbon cycling within the ocean. These creatures play an important role in carbon cycling because the oceanic biological pump is driven by plankton. Therefore, future oceanic carbon intake is directly correlated with the abundance (and type) of phytoplankton and zooplankton in the ocean. In this data analysis project, I utilize the outputs from the Darwin Model, a global-scale, ecosystem mathematical model developed by researchers at MIT that allows us to quantify the impacts of thermal scaling across worlds oceans. The model captures cycling of various nutrients (C, N, P, Si, and Fe) and 31 plankton communities. The parameters that influence plankton growth, grazing and sinking in the model are related to size which is limited by nutrients and light and morality which comes from grazing and a mortality term. Here, I utilize a model that simulates a realistic increase of oceanic temperatures over the next 100 years, exhibiting a higher increase near the equator and lower near the poles. My research builds on research that explores the effects of climate change on planktonic food webs mediated by temperature effects on metabolism. I create visualizations of the Darwin model’s outputs to explore patterns and effects on the rising temperatures, specifically looking at competition, nutrients availability and short and long term effects of the results.