Poster Presentation 2024 Australian Marine Sciences Association Annual Meeting combined with NZMSS

Observational estimates of net community production in Antarctic sea ice (#676)

Laura Dalman 1 2 , Klaus M Meiners 1 3 4 , David N Thomas 5 , Florian Deman 6 , Kevin R Arrigo 7 , Sophie Bestley 1 2 , Karley Campbell 8 , Matt Corkill 2 , Stefano Cozzi 9 , Bruno Delille 10 , Agneta Fransson 11 , Alexander D Fraser 1 , Sian F Henley 12 , Julie Janssens 13 , Delphine Lannuzel 2 4 , Sebastien Moreau 11 , Daiki Nomura 14 , Louiza Norman 15 , Stathys Papadimitriou 16 , Christina Schallenberg 1 13 , Jean-Louis Tison 17 , Martin Vancoppenolle 18 , Pier van der Merwe 2 , François Fripiat 19
  1. Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, Hobart, TAS, Australia
  2. Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Battery Point, TASMANIA, Australia
  3. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, Australian Antarctic Division, Kingston, Tasmania, Australia
  4. Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
  5. Faculty of Biological & Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
  6. Analytical, Environmental, and Geo-Chemistry Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
  7. Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
  8. Department of Arctic and Marine Biology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway , Tromsø, Norway
  9. CNR-ISMAR Istituto di Scienze Marine, Trieste, Italy
  10. Unité d’océanographie chimique, Université de Liège, Liege, Belgium
  11. Norwegian Polar Institute, Tromsø, Norway
  12. School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
  13. CSIRO, Hobart, TAS, Australia
  14. Hokkaido University, Hakodate, Japan
  15. School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
  16. National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, UK
  17. Laboratoire de Glaciologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
  18. LOCEAN-IPSL, CNRS/IRD/MNHN, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France
  19. Department of Geosciences, Environment and Society, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

Antarctic sea ice is one of the largest ecosystems on Earth, most of which consists of annual pack ice, which contains various habitats for sea-ice algae to grow and fix carbon dioxide into biomass. Sea-ice biogeochemical models suggest that Antarctic pack ice contributes to a small but significant fraction of the primary production in the ice-covered area of the Southern Ocean. Actual measurements of primary production in Antarctic sea ice remain scarce and an observational estimate of primary production has not been revisited in over 30 years. A historical ice core dataset of particulate and dissolved organic carbon from 362 ice cores sampled between 1989 and 2019 was used to place observational constraints on sea-ice net community production. Our estimate of 26.8-32.2 Tg C year-1 accounts for 13-15% of the total primary production in the Antarctic sea-ice zone, and is in remarkable agreement with model estimates.