BIOLOGICAL CARBON PUMP ASSESSMENT USING THE TRANSPORT MATRIX METHOD AND GLOBAL NUTRIENT DISTRIBUTIONS (BATMAN)

海洋生物在地球气候中起着关键作用。为了生长，海藻每年从大气中吸收的二氧化碳几乎和陆地上所有的植物一样多。这种“初级生产”为海洋生态系统提供燃料。由此产生的废物作为“出口”，在远离大气的深处封存了大量的碳。大气中的二氧化碳水平对深度的微小变化非常敏感，在这个深度上，这些废物的再循环（或“再矿化”）发生了，重新变成了营养物质。我们对下沉的物质有足够的观察来研究再矿化的过程，但还远远不足以制作一张全球地图，用来测试气候模型。我们确实有这样的营养分布图，这是再矿化的结果，但传统的模型需要很长时间才能运行，无法进行这样的比较。一种新技术（传输矩阵方法）提供了一种运行模型的更快的方法。随着这一技术的发展，近年来人们对控制出口过程的机制有了更好的了解。因此，将这些最新进展结合起来，以确保气候模型准确地捕捉地球系统的这一关键过程，是及时的。

Marine life plays a key role in the Earth's climate. To grow, marine algae extract almost as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually as all plants on land. This 'primary production' fuels the marine ecosystem. The resulting waste sinks, as 'export', sequestering large amounts of carbon at depth, away from the atmosphere. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels can be very sensitive to small changes in the depth at which recycling (or 'remineralisation') of this waste back into nutrients takes place. We have sufficient observations of sinking material to investigate the process of remineralisation but far from enough to produce a global map that could be used to test climate models. We do have such maps for nutrient distributions, that are the consequence of the remineralisation, but traditionally models take too long to run to allow such comparisons. A new technique (the Transport Matrix method) provides a means of running models much faster. In tandem with this technical development, the mechanisms controlling the process of export have become much better understood in recent years. It is timely therefore to unite these recent advances to ensure that climate models accurately capture this key process of the Earth system.