Krill faecal pellets drive hidden pulses of particulate organic carbon in the marginal ice zone

Belcher, Anna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9583-5910; Henson, Stephanie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3875-6802; Manno, Clara ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3337-6173; Hill, Simeon ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1441-8769; Atkinson, A; Thorpe, Sally ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5193-6955; Fretwell, Peter ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1988-5844; Ireland, Louise ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0960-0486; Tarling, Geraint ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3753-5899. 2019 Krill faecal pellets drive hidden pulses of particulate organic carbon in the marginal ice zone. Nature Communications, 10, 889. 10.1038/s41467-019-08847-1

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Text (Open Access) Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2019 s41467-019-08847-1.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract/Summary

The biological carbon pump drives a flux of particulate organic carbon (POC) through the ocean and affects atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. Short term, episodic flux events are hard to capture with current observational techniques and may thus be underrepresented in POC flux estimates. We model the potential hidden flux of POC originating from Antarctic krill, whose swarming behaviour could result in a major conduit of carbon to depth through their rapid exploitation of phytoplankton blooms and bulk egestion of rapidly sinking faecal pellets (FPs). Our model results suggest a seasonal krill FP export flux of 0.039 GT C across the Southern Ocean marginal ice zone, corresponding to 17–61% (mean 35%) of current satellite-derived export estimates for this zone. The magnitude of our conservatively estimated flux highlights the important role of large, swarming macrozooplankton in POC export and, the need to incorporate such processes more mechanistically to improve model projections.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	10.1038/s41467-019-08847-1
ISSN:	20411723
Date made live:	22 Feb 2019 14:41 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/522109

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