A conceptual diagram of major environmental processes which change the quantity and quality of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) stored in the global ocean.
The vast majority of freshly produced oceanic dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is derived from marine phytoplankton, then rapidly recycled by heterotrophic microbes. A small fraction of this DOC survives long enough to be routed to the interior ocean, which houses the largest and oldest DOC reservoir. The oceanic DOC cycle is an essential part of the global carbon cycle, however Earth system models currently lack a coherent implementation of oceanic DOC.
Sasha Wagner and co-authors recently published a review entitled “Soothsaying DOM: A current perspective on the future of oceanic dissolved organic carbon” in Frontiers in Marine Science. The review paper synthesizes current budgets of oceanic DOC, considers what is meant by the term “DOC recalcitrance,” spotlights new isotopic approaches for probing DOC cycling, and discusses potential changes to oceanic DOC budgets that are expected to occur in response to our changing climate.
Formative discussions for this review took place at the Marine Organic Geochemistry Workshop held at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study (Delmenhorst, Germany) in April 2019.
