Oceanic efflux of ancient marine dissolved organic carbon in primary marine aerosol

Steven R Beaupré; David J Kieber; William C Keene; Michael S Long; John R Maben; Xi Lu; Yuting Zhu; Amanda A Frossard; Joanna D Kinsey; Patrick Duplessis; Rachel Y-W Chang; John Bisgrove

doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax6535

Oceanic efflux of ancient marine dissolved organic carbon in primary marine aerosol

Sci Adv. 2019 Oct 23;5(10):eaax6535. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aax6535. eCollection 2019 Oct.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA.
² Department of Chemistry, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, State University of New York, Syracuse, NY 13210, USA.
³ Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA.
⁴ John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
⁵ Department of Chemistry, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
⁶ Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA.
⁷ Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS NS B3H 4R2, Canada.

Abstract

Breaking waves produce bubble plumes that burst at the sea surface, injecting primary marine aerosol (PMA) highly enriched with marine organic carbon (OC) into the atmosphere. It is widely assumed that this OC is modern, produced by present-day biological activity, even though nearly all marine OC is thousands of years old, produced by biological activity long ago. We used natural abundance radiocarbon (¹⁴C) measurements to show that 19 to 40% of the OC associated with freshly produced PMA was refractory dissolved OC (RDOC). Globally, this process removes 2 to 20 Tg of RDOC from the oceans annually, comparable to other RDOC losses. This process represents a major removal pathway for old OC from the sea, with important implications for oceanic and atmospheric biogeochemistry, the global carbon cycle, and climate.

Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).

Publication types

Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't