Bridging International Activity and Related Research Into the Twilight Zone (BIARRITZ)

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The Twilight Zone spans from 100m to 1000m depth in the ocean. It is a region where very little light penetrates and where little is known about the processes that take place within it. Each year, nearly as much plant material is produced by microscopic plankton in the surface ocean as by all the land's forests and plains. Although created in the sunlit top 100m, this organic material eventually sinks, potentially taking a huge amount of carbon with it deep into the ocean interior where it could be trapped, away from the atmosphere, for up to hundreds of years. All but a few percent of this material is converted back into carbon dioxide within the Twilight Zone. To understand the role that marine life plays in regulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it is thus crucial to understand what controls this enormous recycling activity in the Twilight Zone. The UK is world-leading in this area, recently providing the first "budget" for how the Twilight Zone processes carbon. UK projects currently extend from the North Atlantic to the Southern Ocean and represent an investment of over £9M. Simultaneously there are similar current projects in the US and Spain totalling £19M, with major projects being developed in France and Germany. A new US project alone has received £26M from the Audacious Project (previously TED) fund to explore the Twilight Zone. Although each project tackles different aspects of the functioning of the Twilight Zone, by bringing them together a much more profound analysis is possible than by one alone. Working together there is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to revolutionise how we understand the functioning of the Twilight Zone. Therefore BIARRITZ will seek to create something even greater than the sum of these already significant parts by using two linked approaches. It will provide fora for the projects to meet, to share data, best practice and novel approaches, to pool data from the huge span of environments they encompass and to initiate collaborations to address gaps identified by this interaction. It will also lead by example, to stimulate the necessary four types of collaboration, by initiating four small scale collaborations representing something old, something new, something borrowed and something out-of-the-blue. These seedcorn collaborations will have the primary purpose of providing incentive to the BIARRITZ community to develop a larger network of collaborations, but they will also significantly enhance the scientific insights from an ongoing research programme:- 'Something old' is to reinforce existing collaborations. In BIARRITZ we re-establish a collaboration with a French expert in measuring how much carbon enters the top of the Twilight Zone.- 'Something new' is to build new collaborations. In BIARRITZ we begin a collaboration with an American world-leading expert on dissolved organic carbon, to quantify the importance of this little studied pathway into the interior.- 'Something borrowed' is to bring in new skills and equipment. In BIARRITZ we will be trained by a French researcher whose equipment allows us to quantify the 'dragon kings' of the ocean, the large particles that may dominate the downward rain of material deep in the ocean.- 'Something out-of-the-blue' is to provide opportunities for young scientists outside the established projects. In BIARRITZ we will provide a young US researcher with his first opportunity to deploy a new high-tech approach to measuring organic carbon in the open ocean. These small scale collaborations will exploit the NERC CUSTARD project which, as part of the Role of the Southern Ocean in the Earth System programme (RoSES), is investigating how marine life, in the remote part of the S. Ocean southeast of the Tierra del Fuego, influences the global carbon budget. This both provides BIARRITZ with a unique platform for these collaborations and in turn significantly enhances the understanding that will be gained from CUSTARD and RoSES.