Seasonally migrating zooplankton strongly enhance Southern Ocean carbon sequestration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract High‐latitude zooplankton can sequester millions of tons of carbon due to their seasonal migration from the surface ocean to depth, and their respiration and mortality during overwintering. This seasonal vertical migration pump (SVMP) efficiently removes carbon but not limiting nutrients such as iron from the surface layers. However, this process is not included in Earth System Models and whole Southern Ocean estimates are still lacking. Here, we compile large datasets of Southern Ocean zooplankton biomass and physiology to estimate that the SVMP transports 65 Mt carbon annually to sequestration‐achieving depths of > 500 m. Mesozooplankton are the main agents (80%), followed by krill (14%), and salps (6%), with respiration and mortality at depth contributing a similar share. This SVMP adds greatly to existing modeled or measured estimates of Southern Ocean carbon sequestration, equating to 38–56% of particulate organic carbon flux at 500 m and 78–103% of the flux at 1000 m. Given their large biomass but projected change under polar warming, understanding how zooplankton transport carbon and nutrients will underpin improved model projections of ocean carbon storage in a warmer world.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".