Journal
ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEWS
Volume 23, Issue 4, Pages 461-479Publisher
CANADIAN SCIENCE PUBLISHING
DOI: 10.1139/er-2015-0040
Keywords
Arctic Ocean; shelves; sediment; climate change
Categories
Funding
- Northern Oil and Gas Action Program (NOGAP)
- ArcticNet
- Northern Contaminants Program (NCP)
- International Polar Year (IPY)
- Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Canada Excellence Research Chair Program of NSERC
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The sediments of the pan-Arctic shelves contribute an important component to the Arctic Ocean ecosystem by providing a habitat for biota (benthos), a repository for organic and inorganic non-conservative substances entering or produced within the ocean, a reactor and source of transformed substances back to the water column, and a mechanism of burial. Sediments interact with ice, ocean, and the surrounding land over a wide range of space and time scales. We discuss the vulnerability of shelf sediment to changes in (i) organic carbon sources, (ii) pathways of sediment and organic carbon supply, and (iii) physical and biogeochemical alteration (diagenesis). Sedimentary environments of the shelves and basins are likely to exhibit a wide variance in their response to global change because of their wide variation in sediment sources, processes, and metabolic conditions. In particular, the Chukchi and Barents shelves are dominated by inflowing waters from oceans to the south, whereas the interior shelves are more closely tied to terrigenous sources due to river inflow and coastal erosion.
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