Inventory of specific carbon pools and carbon fluxes currently measured in the Palmer LTER program. The solid circles are the standard hydrostations where samples are routinely collected. The contours are water depth, in meters. The numbers in the upper panel indicate the Julian day when those data were collected. These export fluxes are also characterized by very rapid order of magnitude changes in particulate carbon flux between consecutive collection periods, especially at the beginning and at the end of the peak export periods.
P ratios each summer period.
P export of particulate matter has implications for the net export and sequestration of carbon dioxide. The two independent estimates of primary production, based on export production models and chl a distributions, are more than an order of magnitude different for the LTER region. By comparison to the HOT annual average, the Palmer LTER data set suggests lower primary production and lower export and may qualify this coastal Antarctic shelf environment as the global minimum for both of these important ecosystem rates. Return to the Laboratory for Microbiological Oceanography's home page. Return to LTER SciMtg97 page.