Ocean Sciences
Earth & Marine Sciences Bldg.
A-312 Office
A-316 Mailroom
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Phone: (831) 459-4730
Fax: (831) 459-4882
Email: Ocean Sciences
Directions & Parking

Beneath the surface of Earth’s vital seas

Water of life. 

There’s a cliché in science:  We know more about our moon than the ocean’s depths.  And yet the sea remains Earth’s greatest frontier.  A reservoir of heat and life, the ocean controls and reacts to Earth's climate in myriad ways. Winds, currents, and nutrients dictate which species survive and where. Unknown stresses force so me microbes to release dangerous toxins. These cycles, from local to global, drive the research of ocean scientists at UC Santa Cruz.

Ocean sciences flourish where sea meets land in a spectacular way, and where marine researchers congregate in a critical mass. 

The central California coast has become such a place, thanks in no small part to UCSC's growing department and one of the world's finest set­tings for science: Monterey Bay. "This campus is poised perfectly to playa leader­ ship role in ocean sciences and aquatic health," says department chair Kenneth Bruland, Ida Benson Lynn Professor of Ocean Health.

To comprehend the health of the ocean, Bruland observes, scientists must grasp the interplay among the water's chemistry, its motions and other physical properties, and its living things. UCSC oceanographers display those strengths in several prominent projects.

For example, campus scientists helped identify the marine cells that caused puzzling toxic blooms in Monterey Bay in the 1990s, killing sea lions and sea birds. Now, UCSC leads a program to determine why the cells — an otherwise unremarkable algae sometimes turn poisonous. Lab workers are creating genetic probes to warn fisheries when harmful blooms get started. Images from NASA satellites and instruments on buoys help reveal the ebbs and flows of algae in nearshore waters.

In other coastal research efforts, UCSC ocean scientists explore the physical conditions that help sustain threatened species of fish in protected areas, called marine reserves. Farther north, UCSC has joined a major Pacific Northwest initiative to study the Columbia River as it mixes into the sea. The system is a model for understanding the influences of a major river and the imprints of civilization in its waters.

Ties between the ocean and global climate also are a major thrust. UCSC is at the van­guard of paleoceanography: deciphering the chemical fingerprints of the ancient ocean by analyzing fossilized shells of organisms under the sea floor. Without knowing how the sea responded to natural climate fluctuations in the past, researchers cannot predict what might happen as we force the atmosphere to change so radically today.

"We're not a department with its academic blinders on," Bruland summarizes. "We're out there on the national scene." On a campus with a tradition for environmentally focused research, he notes, ocean sciences blends right in.

Department Highlights

Professor Mary Silver received the Mary Sears Woman pioneer in Oceanography Award in 2002 from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for her career-long leadership in the field.

$4 million in grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have funded the Center for Integrated Marine Technologies  (http://cimt.ucsc.edu/ ), codirected by UCSC, to study how the upwelling of nutrient-rich water affects central California’s nearshore ecosystems.

Microbes control the chemistry of the oceans and, in turn, the atmosphere. We need to know what role they will play if we continue to change our environment. "

Fishing isn't easy when the things you are trying to catch are less than 1/100th of a millimeter long.  That is why the tools of Jonathan Zehr's trade are not hooks and bait, but gene chips and the techniques of molecular biology.

Zehr, who came to UC Santa Cruz in 1999 from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has made major discoveries about microbes and the ecology of the ocean. Invisible organisms are the key players on the marine scene­ — a fact that often startles Zehr's guests.

"It's hard for the public to think about tiny little things instead of furry or finned creatures," he says. But those microbes, added together, outweigh all other marine life.

"They're essentially the grass of the sea. If they don't produce, fish don't produce," and so on up the ocean's food chain, Zehr observes.

For that grass to grow, microbes must exploit one of life's critical nutrients: nitrogen. Earth's atmosphere consists mainly of nitrogen gas. However, only certain single-celled organisms can alter the gas into a form that other organisms can use, such as ammonium. This conversion, called "nitrogen fixation," happens on land as well as at sea. "It’s a natural fertilizer process," Zehr says.

Researchers knew some marine bacteria had that ability, but were far too few to explain the richness of ocean life.  In 2001, Zehr and his colleagues changed that picture profoundly. They discovered a whole new group of nitrogen fixers, called cyanobacteria, in deep waters near Hawaii.

To find them, the team developed a genetic test to reveal whether a particular gene — one that commands cells to make the central enzyme in the fixation cycle was turned on. Life in a more productive ocean consumes more carbon dioxide from the air, so mapping the full extent of these cycles is critical to grasping the ocean's role in regulat­ing and responding to global warming.

Zehr's techniques are the new model for marine microbial ecology. Powerful molecular screens can sift the sea in a way that micro­scopes and filters cannot. He is now using the same approach to explore how environmental factors affect microbial life in Chesapeake Bay, a vital estuary facing sustained threats. He also has funding from the National Science Foundation's Microbial Observatories program to study organisms in Mono Lake, one of California's most bizarre ecosystems. The lake's extremely salty waters may mimic the conditions in which life first emerged.

But the sea is Zehr's true home, and he intends to keep revealing its secrets. After all, there are about 100 million times more bacte­ria in the ocean than stars in the entire visible universe-and we still have no idea what most of them do.