His proposal was selected as one of 52 winners out of 369 submitted proposals and as the lead Future Investigator of his project, Zhou took part in a scientific research cruise to the Arctic Ocean in 2024. 

Organized by Fisheries and Oceans Canada and conducted in collaboration with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), Zhou’s research cruise traveled to the Canadian-Pacific side of the Arctic Ocean from the end of August through September. For 30 days, he lived and worked aboard the nearly-400-foot icebreaker.

“The ship went from the coast all the way to the Canada Basin to sample and measure ocean properties and the sea ice conditions,” Zhou said. “This program has been conducted for around 20 years and the ship performs this survey every year in order to study how the western Arctic Ocean is changing from year to year.” 

As a main part of Zhou’s FINESST project, he aimed to derive net community production (NCP) by measuring the oxygen-to-argon ratio in the surface water along the ship’s track. NCP is part of the ocean’s biological pump — it refers to the portion of phytoplankton production exported from the euphotic zone, the well sunlit surface layer of the ocean, to the twilight zone which is directly below.

A recent publication in Geophysical Research Letters by Zhou, Li and collaborators from UD and WHOI found that, with long‐term sea ice loss, such NCP export has increased in the western Arctic Ocean. The NCP data collected during this cruise will continue to be used by researchers to monitor and decode the ongoing changes.

Zhou also collected dissolved inorganic carbon samples in the seawater for the lab of Wei-Jun Cai, associate dean for research and the Mary A.S. Lighthipe Chair of Earth, Ocean and Environment. 

“After the cruise, the scientists of the Canadian institution shipped our water samples back to UD,” Zhou said. “Around a quarter of the anthropogenic, or human-made, carbon emissions that go into the atmosphere will end up in the ocean. The Cai lab will analyze how much anthropogenic carbon the western Arctic Ocean has absorbed based on carbon isotopes in the samples.”

Onboard the ship, Zhou worked with a conductivity, temperature and depth (CTD) system to collect these water samples. He and his fellow researchers launched the equipment to measure the temperature, salinity and pressure of seawater from the sea surface down to the bottom. The CTD system was equipped with 24 large Niskin bottles that, at the desired depths, close and trap sea water inside.

“This is how the water samples were collected at the desired depth, which were then sent to the labs for subsequent analysis,” Zhou said. 

Data collected on the annual surveys contribute to a long-term dataset, giving scientists a clear picture of how the hydrography and chemical properties are changing in the surface water and deeper parts of the Arctic. 

For his first time in the Arctic on a research cruise, Zhou said it was great to be out at sea for a month. 

“At first, actually, I was so busy with assembling the equipment and with measuring the samples in the lab that I didn’t actually feel like I was at sea,” Zhou said. “But when I had time to rest and when I was walking around the deck, I would take a lot of photos. One time, I spent an hour just looking at the sea ice, looking out everywhere at everything surrounding me, and it was so amazing. I really enjoyed my time and I hope to have the opportunity to participate in another scientific cruise to the Arctic.”