SMAST Professor Mark Altabet is part of a multi-institutional team that introduced a novel oceanographic instrument to the scientific community at December’s fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Researchers from the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory and SMAST/UMassD developed the instrument to monitor the biogeochemistry of oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) in the ocean on time scales impractical for shipboard studies.

The new Teflon-membrane-based “gas tension device” (GTD) measures the excess nitrogen gas microbially generated in OMZs, with a depth range from the surface to 550 meters, a significant advancement over previous GTD models. Two of the new instruments were field tested on floats deployed off Mexico’s Pacific coast for 15 days last summer, and the results were validated against independent measurements.

At the same meeting, SMAST Dean Steve Lohrenz presented an invited talk entitled “Assessing Impacts of Climate and Land Use Change on Terrestrial-Ocean Fluxes of Carbon and Nutrients and their Cycling in Coastal Ecosystems.” Overall, seven SMAST personnel authored or co-authored posters or oral presentations at the AGU meeting, the largest earth and space science conference in the world.