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A regional biogeochemical model is applied to the NW African coastal upwelling between 19° N and 27° N to investigate how a water temperature proxy is produced at the sea surface and recorded in the slope sediments. The biological model has two phytoplankton groups, to distinguish an alkenone producer group (considered as coccolithophores) from other phytoplankton. The Regional Ocean Modelling System (ROMS) is used to simulate the ocean circulation, and takes advantage of the Adaptive Grid Refinement in Fortran (AGRIF) package to set up an embedded griding system. The results show that the alkenone-like temperature records in the sediments are between 1.1 and 2.1°C colder compared to the annual mean SSTs. Despite the seasonality of the coccolithophorid production, this temperature difference is not mainly due to a seasonal bias, nor to the lateral advection of phytoplankton and phytodetritus from the cold water domain to most offshore locations, but to the production depth of the coccolithophores. If core-top sediment alkenone-derived temperatures are effectively recording the annual mean SSTs, the quantitative alkenone production in the water column must be inhomogeneous among the coccolithophore population and depend on physiological factors (growth rate, nutrient stress).

The delta(15)N Signal in marine sediments appears to be a good palaeoceanographic tracer. It records biological processes in the water column and is transferred to and preserved in the sediments. Changes in forcing factors in upwelling systems may be recorded by delta(15)N. These forcing conditions can be of a biogeochemical nature, such as the initial isotopic signal of the nutrients or the trophic structure, or of a physical nature, such as wind stress, insolation, temperature or dynamic recycling. A simple nitrogen-based trophic chain model was used to follow the development of the nitrogen isotopic signal in nutrients, phytoplankton, zooplankton and detritus. Detrital delta(15)N, influenced by the isotopic signature of the upwelled nutrients and isotopic fractionation along the trophic chain (photosynthesis and zooplankton excretion), was then compared to the sedimentary signal measured off Mauritania. In our model, the biological variables are transported at shallow depths by a simple circulation scheme perpendicular to the coast depicting a continental shelf recirculation cell. Because cell length depends on the extension of the continental shelf, modifications of the cell length mimic sea level changes. Long cell length (high sea lever) scenarios produce higher delta(15)N values whereas short cell length scenarios result in lower values as in the glacial low sea level periods. Despite changes in many climatic parameters throughout this period, our results show that changing the sea level is sufficient to reconstruct the main pattern of the sedimentary delta(15)N variations offshore of the Mauritanian upwelling, i.e. an increase from about 3 parts per thousand to 7 parts per thousand during the deglaciation, without invoking any change in nitrogen fixation or denitrification.

Using a regional circulation-ecosystem model subject to a set of boundary conditions that reflect present-day (PD) and Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) conditions, we investigate how changes in preformed subsurface nutrient concentrations as opposed to a local drop in sea level or increase in wind stress influence the biological productivity off the northwest African coastal upwelling area. A reduction of subsurface nutrient concentration at LGM reduced the zonally averaged primary production (PP). The sea level change modifies the shelf morphology, the upwelling circulation, and the productivity and displaces the high-productivity zone. According to our model results, the sedimentary record of PP is best explained by a simulation considering a doubled wind stress over NW Africa. We conclude that production regionally along the coast of NW Africa during the LGM may have been lower than today, despite the fact that most of the sediment cores north of 22°N show local increases in PP during the last glacial period. This paradox may be due to the sea level change and the associated eastward shift of the coastline and upwelling system.

[1] The growing world population increases the demand for water, energy, and land. This demand for natural resources impacts the transport of material and the supply of nutrients in the coastal ocean by rivers. We assess the potential impact of river N, Si, Fe, and organic carbon (OC) fluxes on the global and coastal ocean biogeochemistry, using an ocean biogeochemistry model and observations, in eight different scenarios. We assess two extreme scenarios, one with no river nutrients, corresponding to a complete stop of nutrient input by rivers, and one with high nutrient fluxes, corresponding to a world population of 12 billion people. Compared to today's scenario values, primary production (PP) changes from −5% to +5% for the open ocean, and from −16% to +5% for the coastal ocean. In the coastal ocean the impact of river nutrients on PP depends on regional nutrient limitation. River inputs have a larger impact on PP in areas where upwelling and high runoff are combined. The coastal ocean is typically N- or Si-limited. River Fe not assimilated by the phytoplankton is exported to open ocean areas, and its fertilizing effect depletes coastal and open ocean surface waters from N and Si. The impact on PP is reflected on global ocean low-O2 areas whose extent changes from −16% to +23% across the range of scenarios. River nutrients have a modest impact on the global ocean CO2 sink of up to 0.4 Pg C a−1, depending on the amount of inorganic and organic carbon transported by the rivers.

[1] A new model of the marine ecosystem coupled into a global Earth System Climate Model suitable for long-term (multimillennial timescale) simulations is presented. The model is based on nitrate as the sole limiting nutrient. Prognostic equations for nutrients, phytoplankton, zooplankton, and detritus are solved online in the three-dimensional ocean circulation model component. Experiments with different parameterizations of vertical mixing, including a scheme of tidally driven mixing, changes in buoyancy forcing in the Southern Ocean, different particle sinking velocities, and the inclusion of dissolved organic matter are performed, and the results are compared with observations. The results reemphasize the roles of Southern Ocean freshwater forcing and diapycnal mixing in the low-latitude pycnocline in setting the global deep water circulation and properties. The influence of high mixing in the Southern Ocean as inferred from observations is much more limited. The deep water circulation also has a strong influence on the marine ecosystem and nutrient distributions. We demonstrate that larger values of vertical diffusion lead to a shallower nutricline due to increased upwelling. Export production and nutrient distributions respond sensitively to changes in mixing and to the ratio of particle sinking to remineralization in the upper ocean. The best fits to global measurements of temperature, salinity, deep ocean radiocarbon, mixed layer depth, nutrients, and chlorophyll are obtained for values of vertical mixing in the pycnocline of around 0.2–0.3 × 10−4 m2/s and for e-folding depth for particle remineralization of 100–200 m. A simple parameterization of dissolved organic matter dynamics increases primary production and nutrient concentrations in the upper ocean and improves chlorophyll distributions in the subtropical gyres but has no discernible influence on particulate export fluxes. Remaining model deficiencies are identified, and strategies for future model improvement are outlined.

[1] A physical-biogeochemical model is used to simulate the evolution of the δ15N signal during the last glacial-interglacial transition in sedimentary cores offshore from the Mauritanian upwelling. The biological model is a classical nitrogen-based trophic chain model, which also computes the nitrogen isotope fractionation. The 2D physical primitive equation model simulates the coastal upwelling circulation and is applied for different sea level scenarios. The effect of the sea level rise, inducing the shelf immersion, seems to be a main factor explaining the organic nitrogen flux and isotopic signal variations along the last deglaciation. This effect is modulated by an upwelling seasonality that may have been much longer at the Last Glacial Maximum, around 10–11 months instead of 4–5 months at present. Between 15 and 5.5 kyr ago, 60% of the sedimentary δ15N variations could be explained by this local shelf immersion effect. This reconstruction also reproduces the strong isotopic fall occurring between 5.5 kyr and the present.

Sediments on the Namibian Margin in the SE Atlantic between water depths of ∼1000 and ∼3600 m are highly enriched in hydrocarbon-prone organic matter. Such sedimentation has occurred for more than 2 million years and is geographically distributed over hundreds of kilometers along the margin, so that the sediments of this region contain a huge concentrated stock of organic carbon. It is shown here that most of the variability in organic content is due to relative dilution by buried carbonates. This reflects both export productivity and diagenetic dissolution, not differences in either water column or bottom water anoxia and related enhanced preservation of organic matter. These observations offer a new mechanism for the formation of potential source rocks in a well-ventilated open ocean, in this case the South Atlantic. The organic richness is discussed in terms of a suite of probable controls including local wind-driven productivity (upwelling), trophic conditions, transfer efficiency, diagenetic processes, and climate-related sea level and deep circulation. The probability of past occurrences of such organic-rich facies in equivalent oceanographic settings at the edge of large oceanic basins should be carefully considered in deep offshore exploration.