Carbonate State Space
The amount of $\ce{CO2}$ in the atmosphere is increasing as a result of human activity and feedback from the Earth system. The oceans, home to roughly $50\%$ of Earth’s primary biological production, absorb a large percentage of this $\ce{CO2}$, driving numerous changes in seawater chemistry. This project seeks to quantify the consequences of rising atmospheric $\ce{CO2}$ on chemical speciation in seawater, and to demonstrate how these predictions can be used to identify chemical changes that are likely to change selective pressure within marine ecosystems.
We will perform chemical speciation calculations of seawater under increasing concentrations of atmospheric $\ce{CO2}$ while accounting for uncertainty and variation within the composition of modern seawater. The resulting thermodynamic database will be unprecedented in its size and scope, and accompanied by novel tools designed to
- analyze and compare environmental measurements actively being generated from a host of globally distributed sampling stations;
- quantify the distance between different seawater compositions in all thermodynamic and compositional dimensions;
- estimate missing compositional data between disparate oceanic observations; and
- make thermodynamic predictions about future seawater compositions and their effect on biogeochemical cycles.
To demonstrate how these thermodynamic predictions can be used to understand the future of living systems in the ocean, we will use the dataset to estimate the expected change in energetic efficiencies of membrane ion pumps, which are ubiquitous in the biosphere.
Taken together, the results of this project will demonstrate a novel approach to understanding the integration of geochemical and biological systems by deploying high throughput thermodynamic calculations and demonstrating how they can be used to anticipate biological changes. This will power a new, data-driven paradigm for the prediction and study of anthropogenic changes in the biosphere.