Constraints on the Cycling of Iron Isotopes From a Global Ocean Model

Although iron (Fe) is a key regulator of primary production over much of the ocean, many components of the marine iron cycle are poorly constrained, which undermines our understanding of climate change impacts. In recent years, a growing number of studies (often part of GEOTRACES) have used Fe isotopic signatures (δ⁵⁶Fe) to disentangle different aspects of the marine Fe cycle. Characteristic δ⁵⁶Fe endmembers of external sources and assumed isotopic fractionation during biological Fe uptake or recycling have been used to estimate relative source contributions and investigate internal transformations, respectively. However, different external sources and fractionation processes often overlap and act simultaneously, complicating the interpretation of oceanic Fe isotope observations. Here we investigate the driving forces behind the marine dissolved Fe isotopic signature (δ⁵⁶Fe_diss) distribution by incorporating Fe isotopes into the global ocean biogeochemical model PISCES. We find that distinct external source endmembers acting alongside fractionation during organic complexation and phytoplankton uptake are required to reproduce δ⁵⁶Fe_diss observations along GEOTRACES transects. δ⁵⁶Fe_diss distributions through the water column result from regional imbalances of remineralization and abiotic removal processes. They modify δ⁵⁶Fe_diss directly and transfer surface ocean signals to the interior with opposing effects. Although attributing crustal compositions to sedimentary Fe sources in regions with low organic carbon fluxes improves our isotope model, δ⁵⁶Fe_diss signals from hydrothermal or sediment sources cannot be reproduced accurately by simply adjusting δ⁵⁶Fe endmember values. This highlights that additional processes must govern the exchange and/or speciation of Fe supplied by these sources to the ocean.

GEOTRACES: Accelerating Research on the Marine Biogeochemical Cycles of Trace Elements and Their Isotopes

The biogeochemical cycles of trace elements and their isotopes (TEIs) constitute an active area of oceanographic research due to their role as essential nutrients for marine organisms and their use as tracers of oceanographic processes. Selected TEIs also provide diagnostic information about the physical, geological, and chemical processes that supply or remove solutes in the ocean. Many of these same TEIs provide information about ocean conditions in the past, as their imprint on marine sediments can be interpreted to reflect changes in ocean circulation, biological productivity, the ocean carbon cycle, and more. Other TEIs have been introduced as the result of human activities and are considered contaminants. The development and implementation of contamination-free methods for collecting and analyzing samples for TEIs revolutionized marine chemistry, revealing trace element distributions with oceanographically consistent features and new insights about the processes regulating them. Despite these advances, the volume and geographic coverage of high-quality TEI data by the end of the twentieth century were insufficient to constrain their global biogeochemical cycles. To accelerate progress in this field of research, marine geochemists developed a coordinated international effort to systematically study the marine biogeochemical cycles of TEIs-the GEOTRACES program. Following a decade of planning and implementation, GEOTRACES launched its main field effort in 2010. This review, roughly midway through the field program, summarizes the steps involved in designing the program, its management structure, and selected findings.

Diagnosing oceanic nutrient deficiency

The supply of a range of nutrient elements to surface waters is an important driver of oceanic production and the subsequent linked cycling of the nutrients and carbon. Relative deficiencies of different nutrients with respect to biological requirements, within both surface and internal water masses, can be both a key indicator and driver of the potential for these nutrients to become limiting for the production of new organic material in the upper ocean. The availability of high-quality, full-depth and global-scale datasets on the concentrations of a wide range of both macro- and micro-nutrients produced through the international GEOTRACES programme provides the potential for estimation of multi-element deficiencies at unprecedented scales. Resultant coherent large-scale patterns in diagnosed deficiency can be linked to the interacting physical-chemical-biological processes which drive upper ocean nutrient biogeochemistry. Calculations of ranked deficiencies across multiple elements further highlight important remaining uncertainties in the stoichiometric plasticity of nutrient ratios within oceanic microbial systems and caveats with regards to linkages to upper ocean nutrient limitation.This article is part of the themed issue 'Biological and climatic impacts of ocean trace element chemistry'.