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Century-scale carbon sequestration flux throughout the ocean by the biological pump

Nature Geoscience volume 16, pages 1105–1113 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

The ocean contains about 40 times more carbon than the atmosphere, storing 38,000 Pg C as dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) versus 900 Pg C as carbon dioxide (CO2) in the present atmosphere. The biological carbon pump contributes to ocean carbon storage by moving organic carbon out of the surface ocean into deeper waters in sinking particles, vertically migrating organisms and physical circulation. Century-scale (≥100 years) storage of the resulting biogenic DIC is commonly assumed to occur exclusively in the deep ocean, typically below 1,000 m. However, recent work has shown that carbon can be sequestered at century scales above 1,000 m in many ocean regions, in what we call ‘continuous vertical sequestration’. Here we calculate the century-scale carbon sequestration flux driven by the biological pump throughout the water column by combining previously published estimates of organic carbon flux and modelled values of water-mass sequestration time distributions. We estimate that the flux of organic carbon that is sequestered for ≥100 years in the contemporary ocean by the combined action of various biological pump pathways is 0.9–2.6 Pg C yr−1, which is up to six times larger than previous estimates based on the organic carbon flux reaching the deep ocean.

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Fig. 1: Schematic illustration of continuous vertical sequestration (CONVERSE) fluxes driven by the biological pump.
Fig. 2: Geographic and vertical distributions of the fraction of a water parcel that will remain in the ocean for ≥100 years (f100).
Fig. 3: Schematic illustration of the carbon export and sequestration mechanisms of the biological pump.
Fig. 4: Vertical profiles of Fremin, f100 and the resulting Fseq for POC and cumulative Fseq from surface to depth, in four ocean regions representative of different ocean conditions.
Fig. 5: Sequestration fluxes of biogenic carbon Fseq in CONVERSE versions 1, 2 and 4.

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Data availability

The f100 values are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15228690.v2. The SIMPLE-TRIM values are available at https://tdevries.eri.ucsb.edu/models-and-data-products/ under the SIMPLE-TRIM output. These include the values that we used to compute the POC Fexp data that we used to calculate sequestration fluxes in CONVERSE 4–5 and produce Extended Data Fig. 2b. The POC Fexp data that we used to calculate sequestration fluxes in CONVERSE 1–3, 6 and 7 and produce Extended Data Fig. 2a were kindly provided by S. Henson14 and are publicly available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8355514). The values of long-term burial fluxes of total organic carbon in world-ocean sediment (which we call FTOC) are available in the zip folder 2020GB006769-sup-0002-Supporting Information SI-S02.7z (ref. 43), where we use the following netCDFs: TOCConc1degR.nc and F_TOCMapR3.nc.

Code availability

The codes for the data analysis were developed by F. Ricour. They can be accessed at GitHub (https://github.com/fricour/CONVERSE) and are publicly available at the Zenodo repository (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8355514).

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Acknowledgements

We thank L. Prieur for his calculations for early versions of the manuscript and numerous suggestions, and G. Reygondeau for his contributions to early versions. We are grateful to S. Henson14 for providing us with her data for POC Fexp. We also thank S. Huld Jónasdóttir and A. Visser for additional information on values in their 2015 paper36. This work was supported by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) of Belgium (F.R.). L.G. and M.G. have received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant no. 862923. T.D. acknowledges support from NASA award 80NSSC22K0155. This output reflects only the authors’ views, and the European Union cannot be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained herein.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sorbonne University, CNRS, Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche, Villefranche-sur-Mer, France

    Florian Ricour, Lionel Guidi & Louis Legendre

  2. Freshwater and OCeanic science Unit of reSearch (FOCUS), University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

    Florian Ricour

  3. LSCE-IPSL, CEA, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Marion Gehlen

  4. Department of Geography and Earth Research Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Timothy DeVries

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Contributions

L.G. and L.L. conceived the initial project, with advice from T.D. F.R. performed data curation. F.R. and L.L. conducted the modelling and analyses, and wrote the manuscript with inputs from L.G., T.D. and M.G. All authors discussed and contributed intellectually to interpretation of the results.

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Correspondence to Florian Ricour or Louis Legendre.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Jamie Wilson and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: James Super, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Global-ocean distributions of f100 at six selected depths.

White areas: pixels with water depths shallower than the depth illustrated. Some of the same f100 distributions and additional ones can be found in Supplemental Fig. S2 of another publication5.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Global distributions of POC Fexp at zexp = 100 m used in this study.

Corresponding global POC Fexp: (a) 3.0 Pg C y−1, from the original publication14 (excluding the pixels without f100 values at 100 m; white areas in panel b) based on 234T-derived field measurements collated from the literature; and (b) 7.3 Pg C y−1, corrected from the published4 6.7 Pg C y−1 calculated using a model in which euphotic-zone biological processes were driven by satellite data and which assimilated ocean tracer observations.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Sequestration fluxes of biogenic carbon in CONVERSE 1-3.

Geographic distributions of (a–d) carbon pump Fseq, (e) Fseq into the sediment, and Fseq calculated at zseq of (f) 1000 m and (g) 2000 m (assuming entire sequestration of the POC flux below zseq). The latter two are the total sequestration fluxes estimated in many studies. Ocean areas shallower than 100 m are without colour. The seasonal migrant pump is not illustrated because our results concern the sole northern North Atlantic. Corresponding results are in Extended Data Tables 3 and 5.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Sequestration fluxes of biogenic carbon in CONVERSE 4, 5 and 7.

Geographic distributions of (a–d) carbon pump Fseq, (e) Fseq into the sediment, and Fseq calculated at zseq of (f) 1000 m and (g) 2000 m (assuming entire sequestration of the POC flux below zseq). The latter two are the total sequestration fluxes estimated in many studies. Ocean areas shallower than 100 m are without colour. The seasonal migrant pump is not illustrated because our results concern the sole northern North Atlantic. Corresponding results are in Extended Data Tables 4 and 5.

Extended Data Table 1 Acronyms and symbols used in the main text
Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Characteristics of the seven versions of CONVERSE Fremin estimates for POC, DOC, vertical migrations, and sediment
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Extended Data Table 3 Estimates of sequestration fluxes (Fseq, Pg C y−1) in the whole water column corresponding to seven versions characterized by different sequestration depths (CONVERSE, or zseq), b and Fexp at 100 m (same zexp = 100 m), calculated in this study (CONVERSE) or taken from previously published works
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Extended Data Table 4 Estimates of sequestration fluxes (Fseq, Pg C y−1) in the whole water column calculated in this study, corresponding to four CONVERSE versions characterized by different zexp, calculations of FseqDOC and Fexp
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Extended Data Table 5 Estimates of sequestration fluxes (Fseq, Pg C y−1) at, below and above 1,000 m and 2,000 m calculated in this study, corresponding to CONVERSE 1-7, the characteristics of which are given in Extended Data Tables 2–4
Full size table

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Sections 1–6, Tables 1 and 2, Methods and references.

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Ricour, F., Guidi, L., Gehlen, M. et al. Century-scale carbon sequestration flux throughout the ocean by the biological pump. Nat. Geosci. 16, 1105–1113 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01318-9

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