The sensitivity of estuarine aragonite saturation state and pH to the carbonate chemistry of a freshet-dominated river
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Ocean acidification threatens to reduce pH and aragonite saturation state (ΩA) in estuaries, potentially damaging their ecosystems. However, the impact of highly variable river total alkalinity (TA) and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) on pH and ΩA in these estuaries is unknown. We assess the sensitivity of estuarine surface pH and ΩA to river TA and DIC using a coupled biogeochemical model of the Strait of Georgia on the Canadian Pacific coast and place the results in the context of global rivers. The productive Strait of Georgia estuary has a large, seasonally variable freshwater input from the glacially fed, undammed Fraser River. Analyzing TA observations from this river plume and pH from the river mouth, we find that the Fraser is moderately alkaline (TA 500–1000 µmol kg−1) but relatively DIC-rich. Model results show that estuarine pH and ΩA are sensitive to freshwater DIC and TA, but do not vary in synchrony except at high DIC : TA. The asynchrony occurs because increased freshwater TA is associated with increased DIC, which contributes to an increased estuarine DIC : TA and reduces pH, while the resulting higher carbonate ion concentration causes an increase in estuarine ΩA. When freshwater DIC : TA increases (beyond ∼ 1.1), the shifting chemistry causes a paucity of the carbonate ion that overwhelms the simple dilution/enhancement effect. At this high DIC : TA ratio, estuarine sensitivity to river chemistry increases overall. Furthermore, this increased sensitivity extends to reduced flow regimes that are expected in future. Modulating these negative impacts is the seasonal productivity in the estuary which draws down DIC and reduces the sensitivity of estuarine pH to increasing DIC during the summer season.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".