Revisiting Carbon Flux Through the Ocean's Twilight Zone

By K. Buesseler, C. Lamborg, Philip W. Boyd, P. Lam, T. Trull, R. Bidigare, J. Bishop, K. Casciotti, Frank Dehairs, M. Elskens and 8 more. Science, 2006

637 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The oceanic biological pump drives sequestration of carbon dioxide in the deep sea via sinking particles. Rapid biological consumption and remineralization of carbon in the “twilight zone” (depths between the euphotic zone and 1000 meters) reduce the efficiency of sequestration. By using neutrally buoyant sediment traps to sample this chronically understudied realm, we measured a transfer efficiency of sinking particulate organic carbon between 150 and 500 meters of 20 and 50% at two contrasting sites. This large variability in transfer efficiency is poorly represented in biogeochemical models. If applied globally, this is equivalent to a difference in carbon sequestration of more than 3 petagrams of carbon per year.

Subfields: Environmental Chemistry, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c7356be83f553c115338bd9c63865c7195f7f7a0

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In Environmental Chemistry

1. C. Robinson
2. Thomas R. Anderson
3. J. Arístegui
4. C. Carlson

In Oceanography

1. D. Steinberg
2. C. Robinson
3. Peter C. Davison
4. J. Koslow
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7. A. Lara-Lopez
8. A. Ueda

Citations in the corpus

• Time series of vertical flux of zooplankton fecal pellets on the continental shelf of the western Antarctic Peninsula (2012, background): “Thus, macrozooplankton are integral in carbon flux as they produce rapidly sinking fecal pellets, bypassing sources of attenuation and resulting in carbon export to the seabed with a high transfer efficiency (Volk and Hoffert, 1985; Buesseler et al, 2007).”
• Coupled energy pathways and the resilience of size-structured food webs (2011, background): “For example, when Buesseler et al. (2007) compared the fluxes of particulate organic matter (POC) at two oceanic sites with similar depths but different biophysical characteristics they found that only 20% of the POC flux reached 500 m in a warm, low macronutrient oligotrophic subtropical gyre…”
• Mesopelagic fish biomass in the southern California current ecosystem (2015, background): “Similarly, carbon export models have generally ignored the role of mesopelagic fishes in active transport of carbon from near-surface waters to the deep ocean (Buesseler et al., 2007; Falkowski et al., 2003; Longhurst et al., 1990).”
• Impacts of ontogenetically migrating copepods on downward carbon flux in the western subarctic Pacific Ocean (2008, methodology): “Sinking fecal pellet POC (FZ) at 50 and 100 m (z) is estimated from the power function 182 (Martin et al. 1987) to fit the feces flux at the 150 m reference depth (F150) using the rate of 183 flux attenuation “b” for each deployment from Buesseler et al. (2007) and Lamborg et al. 184 (this issue).”