Carbon Outgassing in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current Is Supported by Ekman Transport From the Sea Ice Zone in an Observationâ€Based Seasonal Mixedâ€Layer Budget

• Published in: Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans
• Main Authors: Sauvé, Jade, Gray, Alison R., Prend, Channing J., Bushinsky, Seth M., Riser, Stephen C.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: American Geophysical Union 2023
• Subjects: Antarctic; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1029/2023jc019815

Despite its importance for the global cycling of carbon, there are still large gaps in our understanding of the processes driving annual and seasonal carbon fluxes in the highâ€latitude Southern Ocean. This is due in part to a historical paucity of observations in this remote, turbulent, and seasonally iceâ€covered region. Here, we use autonomous biogeochemical float data spanning 6 full seasonal cycles and with circumpolar coverage of the Southern Ocean, complemented by atmospheric reanalysis, to construct a monthly climatology of the mixed layer budget of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC). We investigate the processes that determine the annual mean and seasonal cycle of DIC fluxes in two different zones of the Southern Ocean—the Sea Ice Zone (SIZ) and Antarctic Southern Zone (ASZ). We find that, annually, mixing with carbonâ€rich waters at the base of the mixed layer supplies DIC which is, in the ASZ, either used for net biological production or outgassed to the atmosphere. In contrast, in the SIZ, where carbon outgassing and the biological pump are weaker, the surplus of DIC is instead advected northward to the ASZ. In other words, carbon outgassing in the southern Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), which has been attributed to remineralized carbon from deep water upwelled in the ACC, is also due to the windâ€driven transport of DIC from the SIZ. These results stem from the first observationâ€based carbon budget of the circumpolar Southern Ocean and thus provide a useful benchmark to evaluate climate models, which have significant biases in this region. © 2023 The Authors.This is an open access article under the terms of theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. This work was supported through National Science Foundation Grants OPP-193622 (SOCCOM) and awards 1946578 (GO-BGC) and 2110258 (GO-BGC Operational Support). Additionally, we acknowledge ...