Climate-Forced Variability of Ocean Hypoxia
Abstract
Oxygen (O2) is a critical constraint on marine ecosystems. As oceanic O2 falls to hypoxic concentrations, habitability for aerobic organisms decreases rapidly. We show that the spatial extent of hypoxia is highly sensitive to small changes in the ocean’s O2 content, with maximum responses at suboxic concentrations where anaerobic metabolisms predominate. In model-based reconstructions of historical oxygen changes, the world’s largest suboxic zone, in the Pacific Ocean, varies in size by a factor of 2. This is attributable to climate-driven changes in the depth of the tropical and subtropical thermocline that have multiplicative effects on respiration rates in low-O2 water. The same mechanism yields even larger fluctuations in the rate of nitrogen removal by denitrification, creating a link between decadal climate oscillations and the nutrient limitation of marine photosynthesis.
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Science
Volume 333 | Issue 6040
15 July 2011
15 July 2011
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Copyright © 2011, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Submission history
Received: 3 January 2011
Accepted: 27 May 2011
Published in print: 15 July 2011
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments: Supported by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (C.D.) and NSF grants OCE-0851483 (C.D.) and OCE-0851497 (T.I.).
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