Production and export of organic matter

Abstract

The ocean is one of the largest reservoirs of CO2 on Earth, and one of the largest sinks for anthropogenic emissions (Sabine et al., 2004). The ocean’s capacity for CO2 storage is strongly affected by biological processes (Raven & Falkowski, 1999). Organic matter production and export processes in the ocean drive CO2 sequestration and therefore feed back to atmospheric CO2 and global climate. The magnitude of CO2 that is fi xed each year by biological processes and exported from the surface ocean is estimated to be ~10 GTC (Boyd & Trull, 2007), and therefore about the same magnitude as the total amount of CO2 released each year by anthropogenic activities. Thus, changes in export processes could, in principle, have a major infl uence on atmospheric CO2 concentrations.