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Krill Close-up

In 2009, former MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Andrew McDonnell captured this image of an Antarctic krill off the West Antarctic Peninsula. McDonnell was on a cruise with WHOI chemist Ken Buesseler to study the ocean’s biological pump, in which phytoplankton, microbes, and zooplankton like this krill create particles that sink from surface waters to the deep sea, sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. The researchers used a video plankton recorder to collect thousands of images to identify and quantify particles throughout the water column.(Photo by Andrew McDonnell, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)