Tara Oceans – three years of scientific exploration.

It is now unequivocal that global warming is occurring at a rate 100 times greater than documented in geological studies. The major part (>50%) of global primary biomass production occurs in the upper 200 m surface water layer of the oceans (the photic zone) and this also drives most of the global elemental cycling involved in climate regulation. Key actors in these elemental cycling processes are thought to be plankton protists, which produce oxygen and recycle carbon dioxide. However, protists are embedded in a network of plankton organisms that range from viruses to fish larvae and the complex, dynamic food webs that these organisms form remain largely un-investigated.

TARA OCEANS will analyze plankton ecosystems in relation to physicochemical conditions throughout the world’s oceans, assessing their adaptation to and feedback on a rapidly changing earth system. Large scale genomics and metagenomics projects coupled to newly developed high-resolution and high-throughput imaging methods will allow quantitative studies of plankton ecosystems and identification of the plankton composition within these ecosystems. Integrative bio-informatics analyses of the imaging, genomes, physicochemical and climate data generated in the project, will be used to assess plankton biodiversity and activity in the diverse ocean ecosystems sampled. All of the data generated through the project will go to form an open-source multidimensional bio-oceanographic database that will allow generating predictive models of the spatio-temporal evolution of plankton ecosystems.

The results of this project will have outstanding implications for our understanding of early life evolution, global biogeochemical cycles and spatio-temporal evolution of the earth climate.