Angelicque White
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Earth & Environmental Science
The open ocean far from land changes slowly, but it does change, and only decades of consistent measurements can reveal how. Two projects ask how the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the vast low-nutrient region around Hawaii, works and how it is shifting.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
Hawaii Ocean Time-series
Station ALOHA
North Pacific Subtropical Gyre
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Sustain time-resolved hydrographic, biogeochemical and biological measurements at Station ALOHA through ten five-day cruises per year plus moored platforms, extending the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre climatology to 40 years.
- Quantify seasonal-to-decadal changes in reservoirs and fluxes of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and silicon, and constrain air-sea carbon exchange, carbon transformation through the plankton food web, and carbon export to the ocean interior.
- Support ancillary projects, new sensor development and calibration/validation efforts that depend on regular open-ocean access and the program's long temporal context.
- Test whether eukaryotic phytoplankton rely mainly on nitrate while prokaryotic phytoplankton use recycled nitrogen, by measuring natural-abundance nitrogen isotopes in flow-cytometry-sorted populations with the persulfate-denitrifier method.
- Identify which plankton clades use nitrate versus ammonium by querying nitrogen uptake pathways with metatranscriptomics, and quantify the fraction of primary production fueled by nitrate across seasons at Station ALOHA.
More about the research
One sustains a long-running monthly observation program that tracks the physics, chemistry and biology of the water column. The other tackles a specific puzzle within that system: how tiny algae in sunlit surface water, where nutrients are nearly absent, obtain the nitrogen they need to grow.
Why it matters
Decades of continuous measurements at Station ALOHA give scientists and policy makers a baseline for separating natural variability from human-driven change in the Pacific Ocean, and the data are freely available worldwide. Resolving which plankton use deep-sourced nitrate clarifies how much carbon this vast region exports to the deep sea, which could help anticipate how climate change will alter the productivity of subtropical oceans.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
James Potemra
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Earth & Environmental Science
Operate and maintain the ALOHA Cabled Observatory, a seafloor station 4,728 m deep north of Oahu, including repairing and redeploying core pressure, fluorometer, and temperature/salinity sensors.
Oscar Sosa
University of Puget Sound, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether methane made from methylamine and methane made from methylphosphonate in high-molecular-weight dissolved organic matter carry distinct stable carbon isotope signatures.
Angela Knapp
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure dissolved organic nutrients and nitrogen and oxygen isotopes in southwest Pacific seawater to build seasonal delta 15N budgets, isotope-based accounts of how much newly fixed nitrogen sinks to the deep ocean.
The school
University of Hawaii at Manoa: 23 labs on PI Pages, $376M a year on research, 182 research doctorates a year.
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