Award: OCE-2220659

The ocean's biology fuels fisheries, coastal productivity, and regulates the climate. Aggregates and fecal pellets are the detritus generated by biological growth in the ocean, and when these particles sink, they act as a "biological pump" of carbon into the deep sea. We need to measure how much carbon is sinking into the deep ocean to monitor ecosystem health and to make accurate predictions of the global climate. The amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere and sequestered into the deep sea by sinking particles is highly uncertain, costly to measure, and nearly impossible to directly observe at scale. 

To address these observational challenges, this project developed a new instrument (SnoCam+) that can measure the quantity of sinking particles at high time resolution, and with an open-source low-cost design. SnoCam+ is an upward-facing timelapse camera that is designed to be attached to a variety of drifting platforms in the ocean. Our team designed the instrument with parts that can be ordered online or 3-D printed. We iterated on the design to improve the ease of assembly and structural integrity during deployment in the ocean. We created assembly instructions with the intention for SnoCam+ to be buildable by a broad community of scientists. Across two summer seasons, we successfully deployed SnoCam+ prototypes on drifting ocean arrays and neutrally buoyant floats. The instruments collected time-resolved images of sinking particles that landed on the imaging surface and at depths between 50 m and 500 m. We began developing image analysis tools to automate the conversion of this imagery into quantitative measures of sinking particles and carbon.

This technology development project has created a new tool for observing ocean environments. SnoCam+ is already being integrated into future scientific research but we also anticipate its adoption by industry or environmental monitoring groups that need rapid assessment of detrital particles in ocean waters. Resolving the time variability of sinking particles in the ocean will lead to great advances in ocean ecosystem monitoring, improved estimates of the ocean's carbon cycle, and more accurate prediction of the global climate.

Last Modified: 12/29/2025
Modified by: Colleen A Durkin