Annual net community production and carbon exports in the central Sargasso Sea from autonomous underwater glider observations

TL;DR

This study uses autonomous underwater gliders to measure the annual carbon cycle in the Sargasso Sea, revealing detailed seasonal dynamics and contributions from migrating communities, thereby resolving previous ambiguities in carbon flux estimates.

Contribution

It introduces high-resolution, autonomous measurements of ANCP and carbon exports, clarifying seasonal and biological processes influencing the regional carbon cycle.

Findings

Seasonal shifts in nutrient supply and biological activity were observed.

Vertical migrations of salps significantly contribute to carbon export.

Enhanced data resolution improved agreement between production and export estimates.

Abstract

Despite decades of ship-based observations at the Bermuda Atlantic Timeseries Study (BATS) site, ambiguities linger in our understanding of the region's annual carbon cycle. Difficulties reconciling geochemical estimates of annual net community production (ANCP) with direct measurements of nutrient delivery and carbon exports (EP) have implied either an insufficient understanding of these processes, and/or that they are playing out on shorter time and spatial scales than resolved by monthly sampling. We address the latter concern using autonomous underwater gliders equipped with biogeochemical sensors to quantify ANCP from mass balances of oxygen (O2) and nitrate (NO3) over a full annual cycle. The timing, amplitude and distribution of O2 production, consumption, and NO3 fluxes reaffirm ideas about strong seasonality in physical forcing and trophic structure creating a dual system: i.e. production fueled by NO3 supplied to the photic zone from deeper layers in the first half of the year, versus being recycled within the upper ocean during the second half. The evidence also supports recently proposed hypotheses regarding the production and recycling of carbon with non-Redfield characteristics, deplete in nitrogen and phosphorus, to explain observed patterns of high NCP in the absence of significant NO3 supply. It further identifies significant contributions to ANCP and EP potentially linked to vertically migrating communities of salps in spring after all convective activity has ceased. The improved resolution of the datasets, combined with more precise definitions of photic and subphotic integration depths, brings the estimates of ANCP and EP into better alignment with each other.