Hey, I’m Carbon. Welcome to the Carbon & H₂Optics Lab!
But Carbon, do you know how important you are? You’re not just a letter and a few numbers
When we talk about you, Carbon, a whole wide world around us opens up. Organic and inorganic. Gases and solids. Trees and oceans.
Our lab focuses on aquatic systems, and how organic carbon – carbon associated with living matter – moves through them.
But, we also focus on optics, the science of understanding our world from how light interacts with matter.
Take one of our favorite combinations of carbon and water – coffee!
See, coffee is carbon, and a whole bunch of other things. When coffee and water mix, the water becomes brown. That brown color represents all of the molecules that dissolve into the water and give coffee its characteristic taste.
You can do the same thing with tea, sugar...the list goes on, but each represents a certain group of molecules. Coffee and tea are complex, and include molecules that interact with light. Sugar water is clear to our eyes, but there’s a molecular party hiding in the water that tastes oh so sweet!
The kaleidoscope of colors and flavors is our way of sensing those different molecules. But those are just a few examples. In our lakes, rivers, and oceans, colors emerge from dissolved molecules like coffee or tea – we even call colored dissolved organic matter, or CDOM, the tea of the sea! – to particles like phytoplankton or algae that color the water various shades of green, brown, red, and gold, to sediment that can make the water look like chocolate milk.
What our lab specializes in is looking at these colors in aquatic systems, from taking a water sample off a boat, to looking at lakes and oceans with satellite sensors.
We use these colors and knowledge that the scientific community collects to understand what is in the water and how that water changes through time. Sometimes it’s green with algae, other times black with dissolved molecules, and other times a bright brown. Our sensors observe these molecules and particles swirling through the water, and use these colors that are seen at high resolution from various sensors to characterize and quantify the various processes. Whether it’s an algal bloom or carbon on its usual Saturday stroll, our science helps us observe and understand the myriad ways water and all that it carries supports our connected planet.