330 Marine Biogeochemical Cycles

The oceans play a key role in the biogeochemical cycling of elements on our planet. This course will follow the flow of elements and energy through the open ocean from production to export, with a focus on understanding the key mechanisms that result in the patterns we observe. 

Students that will finish the course will be able to:

• the distribution of life and chemical elements in the ocean, understand the relationships between these patterns and the physical processes affecting these patterns.
• Describe how organisms and the structure of marine ecosystems influence the fate of carbon and other elements in the ocean, the role humans play in the modern carbon cycle, and how the carbon cycle has changed through time.
• Identify the processes affecting the distribution and cycling of an element through the ocean.
• Distinguish the implications of the rates of biological processes from those of the abundance of the organisms driving those processes
• Interpret graphical data for a wide range of physical, chemical and biological patterns and activities in the ocean, in advance of generating your own data in future courses and endeavors
• Describe and compare the advantages and disadvantages of the basic sampling strategies and experimental methodologies used to study biogeochemical cycles in the oceans, and generate a crucial experiment and describe necessary control experiments when provided with a hypothesis. 

This is the third in a three-quarter series of 300 level interdisciplinary core courses for Oceanography majors.