page_title: Particulate organic carbon
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Particulate organic carbon / Overview
caption_attribution_description: English: Marine particulate organic carbon (POC) in the ocean POC includes components of living cells as well as dead material (detritus), and originates from both allochthonous and autochthonous sources. The POC pool can also exchange material with the dissolved OC (DOC) pool through aggregation and disaggregation of particles. This process and others may be involved in the formation of the molecularly uncharacterized component (MUC), which may incorporate both autochthonous and allochthonous OC.
context_page_description: Particulate organic carbon is the fraction of total organic carbon operationally defined as that which does not pass through a filter pore size that typically ranges in size from 0.22 and 0.7 micrometers. The fraction that does pass through the filter is called dissolved organic carbon.
  Particulate organic matter is a closely related term often used interchangeably with POC. POC refers specifically to the mass of carbon in the particulate organic material, while POM refers to the total mass of the particulate organic matter. Thus, in addition to carbon, POM includes the mass of the other elements in the organic matter, such as nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen. In this sense POC is a component of POM and there is typically about twice as much POM as POC. Many statements that can be made about POC apply equally to POM, and much of what is said in this article about POC could equally have been said of POM.
context_section_description: Marine primary production can be divided into new production from allochthonous nutrient inputs to the euphotic zone, and regenerated production from nutrient recycling in the surface waters. The total new production in the ocean roughly equates to the sinking flux of particulate organic matter to the deep ocean, about 4 × 10⁹ tons of carbon annually.
caption: Marine particulate organic carbon (POC) POC includes components of living cells as well as dead material (detritus), and originates from both allochthonous and autochthonous sources. The POC pool can also exchange material with the dissolved OC (DOC) pool through aggregation and disaggregation of particles. This process and others may be involved in the formation of the molecularly uncharacterized component (MUC), which may incorporate both autochthonous and allochthonous OC.[7]
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