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Water column

About: Water column is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 13706 publications have been published within this topic receiving 496626 citations.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The distribution of dissolved Cd, Cu, and Zn in the Scheldt estuary has been studied during eight axial surveys, carried out between February 1987 and February 1988.

170 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors measured archaeal lipid distributions from globally distributed samples of freshwater, marine, and hypersaline suspended particulate matter, and identified four distinct groups, including: (1) marine epipelagic (<100 m), (2) marine mesopelagic (200-1500 m) and upwelling waters, (3) freshwater/estuarine waters, and (4) hypersaline waters.

169 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors found that water column production is transmitted to the shelf floor in intense pulses of particulate organic matter, although these pulses are often difficult to correlate with local phytoplankton blooms or sea-ice conditions.
Abstract: The Antarctic continental shelf is large, deep (500–1000 m), and characterized by extreme seasonality in sea-ice cover and primary production. Intense seasonality and short pelagic foodwebs on the Antarctic shelf may favor strong bentho-pelagic coupling, whereas unusual water depth combined with complex topography and circulation could cause such coupling to be weak. Here, we address six questions regarding the nature and strength of coupling between benthic and water-column processes on the continental shelf surrounding Antarctica. We find that water-column production is transmitted to the shelf floor in intense pulses of particulate organic matter, although these pulses are often difficult to correlate with local phytoplankton blooms or sea-ice conditions. On regional scales, benthic habitat variability resulting from substrate type, current regime, and iceberg scour often may obscure the imprint of water-column productivity on the seafloor. However, within a single habitat type, i.e. the muddy sediments that characterize much of the deep Antarctic shelf, macrobenthic biomass appears to be correlated with regional primary production and sea-ice duration. Over annual time-scales, many benthic ecological processes were initially expected to vary in phase with the extraordinary boom/bust cycle of production in the water column. However, numerous processes, including sediment respiration, deposit feeding, larval development, and recruitment, often are poorly coupled to the summer bloom season. Several integrative, time-series studies on the Antarctic shelf suggest that this lack of phasing may result in part from the accumulation of a persistent sediment food bank that buffers the benthic ecosystem from the seasonal variability of the water column. As a consequence, a variety of benthic parameters (e.g., sediment respiration, inventories of labile organic matter, macrobenthic biomass) may act as “low-pass” filters, responding to longer-term (e.g., inter-annual) trends in water-column production. Bentho-pelagic coupling clearly will be altered by Antarctic climate change as patterns of sea-ice cover and water-column recycling vary. However, the nature of such climate-driven changes will be very difficult to predict without further studies of Antarctic benthic ecosystem response to (1) inter-annual variability in export flux, and (2) latitudinal gradients in duration of sea-ice cover and benthic ecosystem function.

169 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Intact polar membrane lipid distributions in the Black Sea are stratified in accordance with geochemical profiles and provide information on vertical successions of major microbial groups contributing to suspended biomass, vastly extending knowledge of the distribution of complex microbial lipids in the ocean.
Abstract: The stratified water column of the Black Sea produces a vertical succession of redox zones, stimulating microbial activity at the interfaces. Our study of intact polar membrane lipids (IPLs) in suspended particulate matter and sediments highlights their potential as biomarkers for assessing the taxonomic composition of live microbial biomass. Intact polar membrane lipids in oxic waters above the chemocline represent contributions of bacterial and eukaryotic photosynthetic algae, while anoxygenic phototrophic bacteria and sulfate-reducing bacteria comprise a substantial amount of microbial biomass in deeper suboxic and anoxic layers. Intact polar membrane lipids such as betaine lipids and glycosidic ceramides suggest unspecified anaerobic bacteria in the anoxic zone. Distributions of polar head groups and core lipids show planktonic archaea below the oxic zone; methanotrophic archaea are only a minor fraction of archaeal biomass in the anoxic zone, contrasting previous observations based on the apolar derivatives of archaeal lipids. Sediments contain algal and bacterial IPLs from the water column, but transport to the sediment is selective; bacterial and archaeal IPLs are also produced within the sediments. Intact polar membrane lipid distributions in the Black Sea are stratified in accordance with geochemical profiles and provide information on vertical successions of major microbial groups contributing to suspended biomass. This study vastly extends our knowledge of the distribution of complex microbial lipids in the ocean.

169 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the presence of several species that use and modify the same sediment space, impact of invertebrates on ecosystem processes was essentially due to the most efficient bioturbator of the community (N. diversicolor), suggesting that the functional traits of an individual species in a community could be more important than species richness for some ecosystem processes.

169 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
2023458
2022969
2021497
2020502
2019502
2018466