Dissolved Organic Carbon (C13 and C14) Measurements, Beaufort Sea, 2012 USCGC Healy

• Main Author: Druffel, Ellen
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: NSF Arctic Data Center 2017
• Subjects: dissolved organic carbon; radiocarbon; amino acids; DOC; dissolved inorganic carbon; Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Beaufort Slope; Beaufort Sea
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.18739/a22n4zj13; https://arcticdata.io/catalog/view/doi:10.18739/A22N4ZJ13

Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in the ocean is thousands of 14C years old, yet a portion of the DOC cycles on much shorter time scales (days to decades). We present 14C measurements of DOC in the Arctic Ocean and estimate that ≥8% of the DOC in the deep Eurasian basin contains bomb 14C. While this is a limited dataset, there appears to be selective loss of modern DOC in the surface and halocline waters of the open Beaufort Sea versus the Beaufort slope. At one of the Beaufort Sea stations, there is a linear relationship between DOC ∆14C values and previously measured total hydrolysable amino acid concentrations as reported by Shen et al. (2012), indicating that deep DOC contains small amounts of bioavailable DOC. The 14C data show that not all of the deep DOC is recalcitrant.