Program
 
Special Session 3: Size matters or not, particles export in marine environments
 
 
 
Poster
Size distribution of sinking particles in different marine environments
SS3-04-S
Yi-Fong Wu* , Department of Oceanography, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, 80424 Taiwan.
Chin-Chang Hung, Department of Oceanography, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, 80424 Taiwan.
Ying-Hsueh Chien, Department of Oceanography, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, 80424 Taiwan.
Presenter Email: cd22562531@gmail.com
Recent research has shown that small particles may transport organic carbon to the deep water, but traditional sequential filtration (i.e. from large size screen to small size screen) may not perfectly separate sinking particles sizes into targeted size classes. In this study, we collected sinking particles with three different instruments (cylindrical and conical sediment traps and LISST-100X) from the northern South China Sea (NSCS-where diatoms are the most dominant group), the upwelling region off the northeast Taiwan and the western North Pacific (picoplankton dominated water), measured POC for various particle size classes (1-50¦Ìm, 50-330¦Ìm and >330¦Ìm, (herein we defined that <50¦Ìm is the ¡°small particle¡¯¡¯). We found that small particles, collected by both sediment traps, had the largest proportion of POC (46-66%, by cylindrical traps) and (37-75%, by conical traps) in these regions. The size distribution (1-10¦Ìm, 10-50¦Ìm, 50-150¦Ìm, >150¦Ìm) of sinking particles measured by LISST (without running a sequential filtration) in the upwelling area showed fine (1-10¦Ìm, 33%) and small (10-50¦Ìm, 36%) particles with the elevated shares of total particle volume which is comparable with the measured POC flux by sediment traps. The results suggest that the contribution of particles smaller than 10¦Ìm (or 50¦Ìm) to the sinking POC export can be an important fraction.