Oceanographer Jeffrey Richey to coordinate research in Brazil

University of Washington professor gets green light for a FAPESP-funded study under the foundation’s São Paulo Excellence Chairs pilot project.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – Professor Jeffrey Edward Richey, of the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington, will be coming to Brazil more often and staying longer than he normally does over the next five years.

After studying the role of Amazon rivers in the carbon cycle since the late 1970s in collaboration with researchers at the Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture (Cena) at Universidade de São Paulo (USP) in Piracicaba, Richey received approval for his Thematic Project under the auspices of FAPESP’s São Paulo Excellence Chairs (SPEC) program.

SPEC’s goal is to attract renowned scientists to the country to coordinate Thematic Projects in their area of activity at São Paulo’s universities and laboratories. The researchers continue working at their institutions of origin but should remain in Brazil for 12 weeks per year throughout the five-year – or more – duration of the project, coordinating a group of FAPESP fellows including post-doctoral students and even scientific initiation students.

Richey talked to Agência FAPESP about the motivations for his research in Brazil and his principal discoveries about the emission and absorption of carbon-containing gases by the Amazon River throughout more than three decades of study in the region.

“The arrival of Professor Richey to participate in this project consolidates our decades-long collaboration, which, in addition to myriad results, has contributed to the training of researchers in the area. I, myself, was trained in his group at Cena,” commented Maria Victoria Ramos Ballester, professor at Cena and one of the project’s lead researchers. The interview with Richey during his visit to São Paulo follows.

Agência FAPESP – How did your collaboration with researchers in Brazil begin?
Jeffrey Edward Richey – I have always been very interested in doing research in Brazil, specifically the Amazon. I was part of one of the first voyages of the Alpha Helix, an oceanographic vessel from the United States that travelled along the Amazon, Solimões and Negro rivers from 1976 to 1977. Since then, I have been very interested in the major research challenges that the region presents regarding themes such as the carbon cycle. In 1980, I began to work with Eneas Salati, then director of the National Institute of Amazon Research (Inpa), who soon after became the director of Cena. At the time, he introduced me to researchers at Cena like Reynaldo Victoria, and in 1982, we began a project called “Carbon in the Amazon River Experiment” (Camrex), which created a major research program in the Amazon.

Throughout this program, which lasted 10 years, we made a series of up to seven-week-long voyages, departing from Manaus and travelling to Lower Amazonas (in the region around Pará), to Upper Amazonas and other places in the Amazon Basin. The program was very good for advancing knowledge of the region, which involved several Brazilian students and allowed research training on the processes that control the distribution of bioactive elements along the margins of the Amazon River in Brazil. We were the first group in the world to study this topic. The first funding for this project came from the National Science Foundation. Soon after, we also obtained funding from NASA through the project Amazon Boundary Layer Experiment (ABLE). Most recently, I participated in the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Program (LBA), a large research project involving many Brazilian lead researchers, in addition to other projects funded by FAPESP. After all of this, I am still interested in continuing to research Amazonia.

Agência FAPESP – Why?
Richey – Because we have only just begun researching the role of the Lower Amazon in the carbon cycle. We already can tell that this type of study is feasible. Until then, nothing of the sort had been done in the manner that we had done it. We still have several questions on how the Amazon Basin’s process of absorption and release of carbon gas works. In addition to the enormous flow of water that it has, the Amazon River has tributaries like the Tapajós, Xingu, Tocantins and Vargem Grande rivers. We need to know what role these rivers have in the final carbon cycle of the Amazon River. The region is also experiencing a process of development. There are companies setting up there and there is soybean production in some areas. We also need to evaluate how social and economic factors affect the carbon cycle. The technological advances of recent years create totally different research prospects than we had at the beginning of the studies on the role of the Amazon Basin in the carbon cycle. Now, with FAPESP’s funding for this project, we can acquire the instruments that will help us to answer these questions.

Agência FAPESP – What type of equipment?
Richey – Mass spectrometers, for example. In the past because this was enormous, delicate equipment, it required that we conduct much slower analyses. Now, we can get the tubes with water samples from a river, throw them directly into portable equipment the size of an ice chest and obtain results on the isotopic composition of the carbon released by the river on the spot. The challenge now is to process all this volume of information.

Agência FAPESP – What have been the principal discoveries resulting from this series of collaborations?
Richey – One of the aspects of our research that changed the understanding of the carbon cycle was that we showed that the Amazon fluvial system already has a big role in the carbon cycle by emitting CO2 because the water has a lot of CO2 in it.

Agência FAPESP – What are the main challenges for studies on the role of Amazon rivers in the carbon cycle?
Richey – Collecting samples of the carbon absorbed and emitted by the Amazonian hydrographic web is undoubtedly a major challenge. But, through a series of projects in the last few decades, it has been possible to begin to understand the dynamics of this process and know the volume and chemical composition of waters of the Amazon rivers that flow to the sea. Now, we are taking the first steps to measure the quantity of carbon that leaves the Amazon Basin and flows to the ocean, and, at the same time, training people in the region to help in the studies.

Agência FAPESP – What types of problems do you intend to cover during the FAPESP-funded project?
Richey – We intend to evaluate, for example, the seasonal behavior of the hydrological flow and chemical composition of the water in the Amazon Basin rivers. We also want to evaluate the real contribution of the water plumes that leave the river in the direction of the ocean and to understand the consequences of the changes in water flow from the river to the ocean. This set of questions is part of the research concept that we call “liquid exchanges in the ecosystem.” The second aspect is to analyze the metabolism of water in the Amazon Basin – or, rather, what is the primary producer versus its “respiration.” We know that respiration is much greater in the river than at its margins, but we also observed many signs of primary production in other locations. For this reason, we need to better understand where CO2 is produced inside the river – in the water canopy or in the lowlands.

Agência FAPESP – Is there a publication about the subject?
Richey – In May, we published an article in Nature Geoscience, one of the first results of the Thematic Project supported by FAPESP, showing, for example, that lignin and other macromolecules of organic material found in the Amazon River contribute significantly to the river’s CO2 emissions.

Agência FAPESP – Is the idea to take advantage of the collaborative network built over the past decades to strengthen the project’s research efforts?
Richey – Exactly. Based on my experience in research, I can say that it is more difficult to do the “heart” of the project. Later, doing the arteries is much easier.

Agência FAPESP – How will you coordinate the project?
Richey – I should stay in Brazil three or more months out of the year, more or less, and I will be a visiting professor at USP. But it is very probable that I will spend more time than that. I am very excited about the possibility of doing research in São Paulo for a longer period of time than my earlier projects.