Publication Date:
2023-08-18
Description:
Over the past decade an increasing body of evidence has accumulated indicating that much, perhaps most, of the deep sea floor is an environment of substantial temporal variability (Smith and Baldwin, 1984 doi:10.1038/307624a0; Smith, 1987; Deuser and Ross, 1980 doi:10.1038/283364a0; Thiel et al., 1988). This variability is driven largely by seasonal changes of processes occurring in the surface waters (Smith, 1987; Deuser and Ross, 1980; Billett et al., 1983 doi:10.1038/302520a0). The coupling of the deep sea floor environment to the surface waters is the result of rapid vertical transport of particulate matter through the water column (Honjo, 1982 doi:10.1126/science.218.4575.883; Deuser et al., 1986 doi:10.1016/0198-0149(86)90120-2; Lampitt, 1985 doi:10.1016/0198-0149(85)90034-2), affording only limited time for degradation before arrival at the sea floor. Studies in the Pacific Ocean have indicated that temporal variations in particulate organic carbon fluxes to the sea floor are accompanied by temporal variability in sediment oxygen demand by as much as a factor of four (Smith and Baldwin, 1984; Smith, 1987). We report here time-series studies of oxygen fluxes into the sediments of the oligotrophic Atlantic near Bermuda which contrast sharply with these previous reports. At the Bermuda site, despite large seasonal variations in particulate organic carbon fluxes, in situ measured sediment oxygen consumption does not vary significantly. These results imply that large areas of the sea floor may be characterized by seasonally invariant sediment oxygen demand.
Keywords:
-; ADEPD; ADEPDCruises; Atlantic Data Base for Exchange Processes at the Deep Sea Floor; Benthic flux chamber; BFC; Date/Time of event; DEPTH, sediment/rock; Duration, number of days; Event label; In situ benthic flux chamber; ISBFC; Latitude of event; Longitude of event; Oxygen, flux, sediment oxygen demand; Oxygen, flux, standard deviation; S_BATS-12; S_BATS-14; S_BATS-15; S_BATS-16; S_BATS-17; S_BATS-18; S_BATS-3; S_BATS-4; S_BATS-5
Type:
Dataset
Format:
text/tab-separated-values, 35 data points
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