Grain-size distribution in surficial seafloor sediments of Eurasian Arctic seas ...

• Published in: Journal of Northern Studies
• Main Authors: Pantiukhin, Dmitrii, Popova, Elena, Piepenburg, Dieter, Kraan, Casper
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2019
• Subjects: Eurasian Arctic seas; Grain-size distributions; sediment; Arctic Ocean; Kara-Laptev; laptev
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.1594/pangaea.909392; https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.909392

Within the Russian-German collaborative research project The Changing Arctic Transpolar System (CATS; see www.transdrift.info), benthic species distributions have been modelled across large geographic scales in Eurasian Arctic seas. As surficial seafloor sediment grain size is one important explanatory variable used in these modelling studies, we compiled open-access information from 23 data sets on this environmental parameter, pooling validated grain-size data from a total of 2,134 sampling sites distributed across the Barents, Kara, Laptev and East Siberian Seas, as well as some abyssal regions of the central Arctic Ocean. As grain-size distributions are differently scaled in western European and Russian sources, all data were uniformly transformed to the Udden-Wentworth scale using the "approximation" function in R prior to further processing and archiving. For this, a linear interpolation was utilized to split the 50-100 µm grain-size fraction used in Russian data sets into the silt (≤ 63 µm) and sand ...