Low-latitude (LL) oceans account for up to half of global net primary production and export. It has been argued that the Southern Ocean dominates LL primary production and export, with implications for the response of global primary production and export to climate change. Here we applied observational analyses and sensitivity studies to an individual model to show, instead, that 72% of LL primary production and 55% of export is controlled by local mesopelagic macronutrient cycling.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci
June 2023
The Southern Ocean is a major sink of atmospheric CO, but the nature and magnitude of its variability remains uncertain and debated. Estimates based on observations suggest substantial variability that is not reproduced by process-based ocean models, with increasingly divergent estimates over the past decade. We examine potential constraints on the nature and magnitude of climate-driven variability of the Southern Ocean CO sink from observation-based air-sea O fluxes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnviron Sci Technol
August 2022
Agricultural intensification in India has increased nitrogen pollution, leading to water quality impairments. The fate of reactive nitrogen applied to the land is largely unknown, however. Long-term records of riverine nitrogen fluxes are nonexistent and drivers of variability remain unexamined, limiting the development of nitrogen management strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCarbon storage by the ocean and by the land is usually quantified separately, and does not fully take into account the land-to-ocean transport of carbon through inland waters, estuaries, tidal wetlands and continental shelf waters-the 'land-to-ocean aquatic continuum' (LOAC). Here we assess LOAC carbon cycling before the industrial period and perturbed by direct human interventions, including climate change. In our view of the global carbon cycle, the traditional 'long-range loop', which carries carbon from terrestrial ecosystems to the open ocean through rivers, is reinforced by two 'short-range loops' that carry carbon from terrestrial ecosystems to inland waters and from tidal wetlands to the open ocean.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNew estimates of CO from profiling floats deployed by the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling (SOCCOM) project have demonstrated the importance of wintertime outgassing south of the Polar Front, challenging the accepted magnitude of Southern Ocean carbon uptake (Gray et al., 2018, https://doi:10.1029/2018GL078013).
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