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70% of our planet is covered in ocean, but we know more about what's happening
on the surface of the Moon than we do about what's happening the depths of the
ocean. It's the final frontier in understanding truly how our earth works.
As an oceanographer, it's really exciting to do research in the Galapagos because
this area is so unique, the islands are a major convergent zone of different ocean
currents. We consider the Galapagos Islands and the waters surrounding the
islands as the front lines of this El Nino event. The Galapagos
Archipelago is home to a productive ecosystem where cold nutrient-rich water
basically flows up from the ocean floor creating an abundant biodiversity. When
El Nino comes in, the upwelling of cold nutrient-rich water actually subsides
which causes a reduction in the amount of nutrients that feeds the entire ecosystem.
So we study organisms at the base of the marine food chain and that's
really where the effects of El Nino are felt first. The waters get significantly
warmer and the phytoplankton abundance dropped. Phytoplankton are at the base of
the food chain and they are food for smaller fish which essentially are eaten
by larger fish and so that energy obtained through phytoplankton works its
way up the food chain to the larger animals, such as the iguanas, penguins, sea
lions, and sea turtles. The Galapagos Science Center is very critical through
our research as it allows us to go and sample from the environment and bring
our samples back to the center where we can process them before transporting
to UNC. While the majority of our planet is ocean, we typically only interact with a
very small fraction of it, so to be able to spend weeks immersed in oceanographic
research in a remote, unique, environment is just a really phenomenal opportunity
to better understand how the ocean shapes our world.