Seasonal grain-size measurements of surface sediments off Svalbard

• Main Authors: Titschack, Jürgen, Miksch, Sebastian, Meiners, Mirja, Meyerdierks, Anke, Probandt, David, Wegener, Gunter, Jensen, Maria A, Ellrott, Andreas, Amann, Rudolf, Knittel, Katrin
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2021
• Subjects: Isfjorden; Seasonal grain-size distribution; Svalbard; Arctic Ocean; Isfjord*
• Online Access: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.930523; https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.930523

All sediment samples were obtained from four stations close to the coast and within 1 km distance to each other (station 5: 78.11°N 14.35°E; station 6: 78.10°N 14.38°E; station 7: 78.10°N 14.38°E; station 23: 78.10°N 14.39°E) in Isfjorden, Svalbard, Arctic Ocean. The sampling was performed with a Van Veen grab deployed from R/V Farm. Six repeated sediment sampling campaigns took place between December 2017 and September 2019 (for further details see Miksch et al. 2020) Particle-size measurements were performed in the Particle-Size Laboratory at MARUM, University of Bremen with a Beckman Coulter Laser Diffraction Particle Size Analyzer LS 13320. Prior to the measurements, the samples were boiled with approximately 0.3 g tetra-sodium diphosphate decahydrate (Na~4~P~2~O~7~ * 10H~2~O, 3 min) to destroy aggregates. Sample preparation and measurements were carried out with deionized, degassed and filtered water (filter mesh size: 0.2 µm) to reduce the potential influence of gas bubbles or particles within the water. The obtained results provide the particle-size distribution of a sample from 0.04 to 2000 μm divided in 116 size classes. The calculation of the particle sizes relies on the Fraunhofer diffraction theory and the Polarization Intensity Differential Scattering (PIDS) for particles from 0.4 to 2000 µm and from 0.04 to 0.4 µm, respectively. The reproducibility is checked regularly by replicate analyses of three internal glass-bead standards and is found to be better than ±0.7 µm for the mean and ±0.6 µm for the median particle size (1 sigma). The average standard deviation integrated over all size classes is better than ±4 vol% (note that the standard deviation of the individual size classes is not distributed uniformly). All provided statistic values are based on a geometric statistic.