Studies of the Decomposition of Organic Matter in the Marine Environment

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Lee9810852Marine chemists have known for several decades that there is a ubiquitous thin film of living and non-living material on the sea surface. Past research has established that chemical concentrations, especially concentrations of organic substances, in this film are several orders of magnitude higher than in bulk seawater. This project will move beyond simply measuring the classes and identities of compounds in the microlayer into studies of the chemical reactions responsible for interconversion, production, and decomposition of those compounds. Efforts will conctentrate on conversions of enzymatically-labile carbon and nitrogen moieties constituting the bulk of the microlayer organics. The investigators will thus provide pioneering insight into the behavior of the microlayer as a geochemical system.