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Comment
. 2011 Oct 4;108(40):16485-6.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1112236108. Epub 2011 Sep 26.

Evolution of the ocean's "biological pump"

Andy Ridgwell  1
Affiliations
Comment

Evolution of the ocean's "biological pump"

Andy Ridgwell. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Illustration of potential differences in modern vs. ancient carbon cycling. (A) Illustration of the operation modern biological pump (12) shows it is dominated by a strong vertical settling flux of particulate organic matter that decreases approximately exponentially with depth. Some of this degrading particulate flux is converted into refractory DOM (black arrows) and persists in the ocean. A large flux of DOM is produced in the surface ocean, but is predominantly highly labile (light gray) and semilabile (dark gray) and hence is not transported far. Overall, the ocean reservoir of dissolved inorganic carbon is the dominant source of exchangeable carbon at the Earth's surface. Carbon inventories for the modern (pre-Industrial) ocean are from Sundquist and Visser (15) and are in units of PgC (or GtC). (B) Illustration of how carbon cycling may have differed in the less well oxygenated Precambrian ocean. A fraction of the DOM produced in the modern ocean that was rapidly degraded now becomes refractory (dark gray). Both atmospheric and ocean inorganic carbon reservoirs are likely to have been larger (16), but both together are potentially dwarfed by the size of the ocean DOM reservoir required in the hypothesis of Rothman et al. (6).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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References

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