Quantification of the pelagic primary production beneath Arctic sea ice
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Authors
Kinney, Jaclyn Clement
Maslowski, Wieslaw
Osinski, Robert
Jin, Meibing
Frants, Marina
Jeffery, Nicole
Lee, Younjoo
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Date of Issue
2020-02
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ESS Open Archive
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Abstract
In high-latitude environments such as the Arctic Ocean, phytoplankton growth is strongly constrained by light availability. Because light penetration into the upper ocean is attenuated by snow and ice cover, it was generally believed until recently that phytoplankton growth was limited to areas of open water, with negligible growth under the ice. However, under-ice phytoplankton blooms have been reported multiple times over the past several decades [e.g. Fukuchi et al. (1989); Legendre, Ingram, and Poulin (1989)]. In July 2011, Arrigo et al. (2012) observed a massive phytoplankton bloom beneath sea ice in the Chukchi Sea. Observational evidence suggests that this bloom was not an isolated case, and that under-ice blooms maybe widespread on Arctic continental shelves (Arrigo et al., 2014; Lowry, van Dijken, & Arrigo, 2014). Arrigo and van Dijken (2011) estimate the total primary production north of the Arctic Circle to be 438 +/- 21.5 Tg C yr -1. However, due to observational limitations, this estimate did not include under sea ice production. Therefore, an open question remains: How important are under-ice phytoplankton blooms to the total Arctic primary production? RASM is a high-resolution, fully-coupled, regional model with a domain encompassing the entire marine cryosphere of the Northern Hemisphere, including the major inflow and outflow pathways, with extensions into North Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The components of RASM include: atmosphere, sea ice, ocean, biogeochemical, and land hydrology (Maslowski et al. 2012, Roberts et al. 2015, DuVivier et al. 2016, Hamman et al. 2016, Hamman et al. 2017, Cassano et al. 2017). The ocean BGC component in RASM is a medium-complexity Nutrients-Phytoplankton-Zoo-plankton-Detritus (NPZD) model (Jin et al. 2018). The model has three phytoplankton categories: diatoms, small phytoplankton and diazotrophs. RASM results show that under-ice pelagic chl-a and primary production values can at times be very high, particularly during the spring and early summer. Our numerical model results produce a mean of 495 Tg C yr -1 north of the Arctic Circle during 1980-1998 (and 507 Tg C yr -1 during 1980-2018). We also see an increase in primary production over the last several decades. This increase is attributed to the reduced sea ice cover, which increases light availability to the upper ocean. We conclude that under-sea-ice pelagic primary production makes up a large fraction of the total production and cannot be considered negligible.
Type
Poster
Description
Presented, 2020 Ocean Sciences Meeting, 16-21 February 2020, San Diego, CA USA
The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1002/essoar.10502377.1
The article of record as published may be found at https://doi.org/10.1002/essoar.10502377.1
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1 p.
Citation
Clement Kinney, Jaclyn, et al. "Quantfication of the pelagic primary production beneath Arctic sea ice."
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This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.