Profile of David M. Karl

Abstract

From the moment 17-year-old David Karl first glimpsed the ocean from the summit of Cadillac Mountain on Maine's Mount Desert Island, he was captivated by the blue waters surrounding the fog-veiled islands. Since then, he has contributed to some of the world's most pivotal discoveries in oceanography. Karl, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2006 and is now a professor of oceanography at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii, has witnessed iconic moments like the discovery of hydrothermal vents at the Galapagos Rift. His work on 23 research expeditions to Antarctica helped to reveal the unanticipated thriving food web that exists in those frigid waters. He has developed or refined more than 50 analytical methods to probe ocean life and biogeochemistry. Many, like the MAGnesium Induced Co-precipitation (MAGIC) method for measuring phosphate, have been widely adopted. The work that has earned him the most recognition, however, is the Hawaii Ocean Time-series (HOT) program. David M. Karl. The C-MORE Hale laboratory. Since 1988, HOT program researchers have made monthly measurements of water column biogeochemistry and microbial dynamics at Station ALOHA, a site ∼100 km north of Oahu. Their datasets are freely available and have been used by hundreds of researchers worldwide. The most startling finding to emerge from HOT program data is that climate change is affecting the ocean ecosystem. Data from the HOT program provided the first “bulletproof” evidence that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels is making the ocean more acidic, a finding that was published in PNAS and won the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize (1). Karl's work has garnered many honors, including the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Medal from the American Society for Limnology and Oceanography in 1998, the A. G. Huntsman …