Yuan Gao
Rutgers University-Newark, NJ·Earth & Environmental Science
Tiny airborne particles, called aerosols, carry dust and trace metals such as iron from land and air into the ocean. There, some of these metals act as nutrients that feed phytoplankton blooms, the microscopic algae at the base of marine food webs.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Chemistry
- Topics
GEOTRACES
Amundsen Sea
Southern Ocean
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Determine aerosol composition and mineral content over the Amundsen Sea and trace the sources of dust and trace elements such as iron, aluminum, and zinc, using ICPMS, electron microscopy, and air-mass back-trajectory cluster analysis.
- Measure particle sizes of aerosol trace elements and how soluble and chemically bound aerosol iron is, using UV/VIS spectrophotometry and synchrotron X-ray absorption spectroscopy, along with ligands such as oxalate.
- Measure marine chemical markers such as methanesulfonate and non-sea-salt sulfate by ion chromatography, to understand processes that affect how soluble trace elements are.
- Quantify total delivery of trace elements to the Amundsen Sea by dry and wet deposition, using measurements of size-sorted aerosols and precipitation combined with atmospheric deposition models.
More about the research
How much of these metals reaches remote polar seas, and in what form, is poorly known. These inputs matter for understanding how the atmosphere, ocean, and ice interact within Earth's climate system.
Why it matters
This project will provide new observations of how much nutrient trace metals, such as iron, enter the Amundsen Sea from the air and how soluble they are. These data can support atmosphere and ocean models of air-sea interaction and climate projections. They could also improve understanding of what feeds phytoplankton blooms in the Southern Ocean.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Gregory Cutter
Old Dominion University, VA·Earth & Environmental Science
Quantify the total inventory of dissolved organic sulfur (DOS), trace carbon-bound sulfur compounds, across the Pacific Ocean using archived samples from over 100 sites between Alaska and Antarctica.
Carl Lamborg
University of California-Santa Cruz, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Characterize zooplankton communities along the central and western Aleutian Islands at sites with known differences in mercury levels in marine life, combining oceanography and genomics.
Robert Campbell
University of Rhode Island, RI·Earth & Environmental Science
Assess the sources and sinks of trace metals (iron, manganese, copper, nickel, cadmium, zinc, lead) and microplastics in the East Siberian and Laptev seas, including the role of river input and sea ice.
The school
Rutgers University-Newark: 3 labs on PI Pages, $26M a year on research, 80 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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