As Earth’s climate warms, numerous changes to the atmosphere and ocean result. These changes can be difficult to diagnose without direct measurements, and of particular importance are the emissions of nitrous oxide from the marine system. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas and agent of stratospheric ozone loss, three hundred times more potent than carbon dioxide and one of the most important ozone-depleting substances. It is naturally produced by microorganisms subsisting under low oxygen conditions, conditions that are likely to be exacerbated in a warmer world. These effects of climate change, however, have yet to be investigated due to a dearth of direct observation in geographically unique hotspots.

The eastern tropical Pacific is a particularly important greenhouse gas source region as it hosts the two largest permanent oxygen minimum zones in the global ocean. The Galápagos islands are ideally and uniquely suited to establish a new long-term monitoring site and expand the atmospheric monitoring network to investigate marine emissions.

We are building the infrastructure in the Galápagos to be precisely this monitoring program to constrain the magnitude and variability of the marine nitrous oxide budget and evaluate changes into the future. Our instrument, a cavity ring-down laser spectrometer can measure nitrous oxide to great precision to resolve the spatiotemporal heterogeneity in its marine emissions. Moreover, utilizing computational methods of atmospheric inverse modeling, we can precisely map the emissions across the eastern Pacific continuously for decades into the future.

We hope to see this Galápagos station join a global network of similar atmospheric chemistry installations as we monitor the health of the planet, reveal long-standing mysteries of the ocean-atmosphere-climate system, and utilize the data to help inform policy decisions to maintain a sustainable and equitable environment for generations to come.