Abstract:
The Costa Rica Dome (CRD) is an open-ocean region in the eastern tropical Pacific that overlies the largest oxygen minimum zone in the global ocean and typically shows a strong mid-summer enrichment in satellite images of surface chlorophyll. Despite being known physically as a prominent upwelling feature, the region is poorly studied ecologically with many paradoxes in its described characteristics and relationships, such as unusually high picophytoplankton dominance, high biomass of mesozooplankton and higher level consumers, and low reported estimates of primary production. In July 2010, we conducted the first coherent study of the relationships among phytoplankton community structure, productivity, growth rates, grazing and export in the CRD. In this talk, I will describe the unlikely origins of the CRD FLUZiE (FLUx and Zinc Experiments) cruise, our goals and hypotheses, and our still evolving research findings.
