Newsletter | Issue 7

In this edition:

OceanICU is a five-year project that seeks to gain a new understanding of the biological carbon pump and its processes to provide fundamental knowledge and tools to help policy makers, regulators and Ocean industry—fishing and mining, along with the wider blue economy—manage and understand the impact of their actions on Ocean carbon. This will ultimately lead to a better approach for addressing climate change in alignment with the EU Green Deal to reduce the net emissions of greenhouse gases to Zero by 2050.

A Note from our Coordinator Richard Sanders

Hi Everyone, 

I hope you had a great holiday season! OceanICU turned two years old at the end of last year and it seems like a good point to reflect on our progress so far.

At the heart of OceanICU is an ambitious plan to allow us to address questions around the impact of human activities on the Ocean Carbon Cycle. Addressing this is complicated by not fully understanding all the key processes involved, and also by not understanding the likely future intensity of  human pressures. These factors guide much of OceanICU’s programme with a great deal of effort starting now on creating ocean system pathways to link future resource exploitation intensity to shared socioeconomic pathways.

All of the work packages are now well established and the next major staging point is the annual meeting in May in Sopot, Poland (hosted by our partners IO PAN) when we will spend most of the time working through how to bring the various work packages together to deliver the rest of the project. We will also reserve time for individual work package actions and to explore the beautiful Polish Baltic coast in springtime.

Wishing you all a great start to 2025 and looking forward to updating you in our spring newsletter.

Richard Sanders
NORCE
Bergen, Norway

Slow Science

In recent years there has been a trend in certain parts of the world toward slow cooking, a bit of a reaction to our fast-food cravings and on-demand culture. Slow cooking nurtures flavours, cultivates nuances and delivers better results. It’s like that with a lot of scientific research, as we all may know. Despite the emergence of machine learning and AI tools that expedite a lot of tasks, there are studies that need the test of time, and there are projects that face a lot of delays and obstacles, but in the end the results are worth it.

Stephanie Henson (NOC), Sarah Giering (NOC), Richard Sanders (NORCE).

Members of the OceanICU consortium recently saw the culmination of one such research endeavour manifest as a paper published in Nature GeoScience, describing the role of diatoms in mediating downward fluxes in the Southern Ocean (Spoiler alert: they aren’t as important as we once thought they were). The paper began as a proposal in 2014, with fieldwork taking place in 2017; the Covid pandemic slowed its progress to a simmer but with some OceanICU funding, among other sources, the process of writing-up yielded a solid paper, which is offered to you here: Inefficient transfer of diatoms through the subpolar Southern Ocean twilight zone.

And what will the implications of this work be for models and data synthesis? That needs a little more time in the oven. We’ll keep you posted.

COP29: The Ocean Carbon Cycle: Bridging science, policy development and concrete action

OceanICU hosted an online session as part of the Virtual Ocean Pavilion this past November, coordinated by partner World Maritime University (WMU). Consortium scientists and guest experts integrated presentations on recent scientific findings with different perspectives on how ocean carbon should be considered in policy. To learn more, watch the video recording here.

Demystifying the COP: The Inaugural OceanICU Podcast

How do the voices of scientists find their way onto the international stage and into the ears of policy makers? On the heels of the COP29, Richard Sanders (NORCE) is joined by special guest Toste Tanhua (GEOMAR) to discuss whether or not the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) on Climate has an impact on how scientists, policy and society address the climate crisis.

Tune into the discussion here

Science Papers Enhanced ocean CO₂ uptake due to near-surface temperature gradients

What’s the latest research on surface Ocean CO₂ uptake? It is looking like the slightly cooler skin of the ocean is absorbing more atmospheric carbon dioxide than previously understood.

Partially funded by OceanICU, this recent work has been published in Nature GeoScience: Enhanced ocean CO uptake due to near-surface temperature gradients. Congratulations to our colleagues Daniel Ford and Jamie Shutler (University of Exeter) for the significant paper and all the publicity it’s been getting!

Find it here.

Illuminating Deep Sea Considerations in Ocean Carbon

Policy Discussions

As society looks to the marine environment for climate mitigation services through proposed marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) technologies, it is important that there is a holistic cost-benefit evaluation of these proposals, including an examination of impacts to the deep sea. In her recently penned blog, Natayla Gallo (NORCE) shares insights that she presented during the OceanICU’s COP29 Virtual Ocean Pavilion session.

Read it here.

OceanICU joins EU4Ocean

OceanIU has become a member of the EU Maritime Forum’s European Ocean Coalition (EU4Ocean), a program that seeks to connect diverse organisations, projects and people to contribute to ocean literacy and the sustainable management of the ocean. Supported by the European Commission, this bottom-up inclusive initiative aims at uniting the voices of Europeans to make the ocean a concern of everyone! 

AQUARIUS Transnational Call NOW OPEN

There’s Still Time to Score…

The Horizon Europe funded project AQUARIUS is brokering 8 million euro in funds, offering researchers the opportunity to access a diverse set of integrated research infrastructures. Of key interest is the one-stop shop portal that centralises the procurement of licences and permits for winning applicants.

Check out the impressive catalogue of 57 participating research infrastructures including vessels, aircraft, mobile and fixed freshwater facilities, specialised laboratories, drones and more, guidelines and FAQs on their website. 

OceanICU Early Career Researcher Group

A consortium comprising 30 partners from across Europe offers early career researchers a good opportunity to network with other scientists in the dawn of their careers. OceanICU’s ECR group meets quarterly to share insights and knowledge across the project’s spectrum of domains. Recent activities have included a presentation on Ocean Literacy and the project’s plan to work with IBO schools by Ivo Grigorov and Christian Riisager-Simonsen (DTU), a talk by Jack Laverick (University of Strathclyde) about the StrathE2E model and a presentation from Sreeush Mohanan (AWI) on his work on benchmarking ocean carbon cycle models that contribute to the global carbon budget.

Ocean Best Practices System Workshop (OBPS WSVIII)

On 15 October, Jaime Shutler (University of Exeter) presented OceanICU work at the Ocean Best Practices workshop which promoted dialogues across science and technology to showcase the cross-cutting role of best practices in operational oceanography. 

Launch of the Blue Manifesto

On the 1st of October Maria Angel (SSBE) attended the Launch of the Blue Manifesto at the EU Parliament: a roadmap for a healthy ocean by 2030 in Brussels, and discussed the OceanICU project with interested stakeholders, including Riccardo Gambini (Birdlife International) pictured above. 

Deep Ocean Carbon Sink Event
Brussels Belgium:  3-7 Feb 2025
A special event to showcase work in OceanICU, EuroGO-SHIP and TRICUSO, all Horizon Europe projects being led by NORCE, that support streamlining access to high quality historical observational data from the ocean, and establishing the infrastructures necessary to obtain such data in the future.

OceanICU Annual Meeting
Sopot, Poland: 19-23rd May 2025
Our partner IO PAN will host the consortium for the Third Annual Meeting and General Assembly where partners will physically meet for the first time since the project Kick-off in February 2023.

FABM Workshop
Eupen, Belgium: 16-20th June 2025
Jorn Bruggeman (Bolding & Bruggeman) is organising this hands-on event for FABM users and developers. The workshop will cover numerous recent developments in and around FABM, including new tools and models being developed within the European projects OceanICU and NECCTON. More information here

The Royal Society Meeting – OceanICU Session
London, UK: 1-2 December 2025
The Royal Society hosts a programme of scientific meetings throughout each year organised by leaders in a particular area of science, using their expertise to ensure the key topics are covered. OceanICU will be organising a session. The audience comprises a variety of interested stakeholders and fellow scientists at various stages of their career, so we are expecting invigorating discussions, and maybe the answer to the session’s title: Will biodiversity loss impact the ocean’s role in regulating climate and delivering sustainable marine resources?  

More details in our next newsletter.

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