Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2010. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 37 (2010): L22606, doi:10.1029/2010GL045448.
Description:
Drifting cylindrical traps and the flux proxy 234Th indicate more than an order of magnitude higher sinking fluxes of particulate carbon and 234Th in January 2009 than measured by a time-series conical trap used regularly on the shelf of the west Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). The higher fluxes measured in this study have several implications for our understanding of the WAP ecosystem. Larger sinking fluxes result in a revised export efficiency of at least 10% (C flux/net primary production) and a requisite lower regeneration efficiency in surface waters. High fluxes also result in a large supply of sinking organic matter to support subsurface and benthic food webs on the continental shelf. These new findings call into question the magnitude of seasonal and interannual variability in particle flux and reaffirm the difficulty of using moored conical traps as a quantitative flux collector in shallow waters.
Description:
Funding was provided by the WHOI Rinehart Access to the Sea
program, the WHOI Coastal Oceans Institute, WHOI Academic Programs
Office, and most significantly, from the NSF Office of Polar Programs for
the PAL‐LTER (OPP 0823101), FOODBANCS and WAP Flux projects
(OPP 0838866).
Keywords:
Particle export
;
Sediment trap
;
Thorium-234
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
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