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It is widely believed that during winter and spring, Arctic marine phytoplankton cannot grow until sea ice and snow cover start melting and transmit sufficient irradiance, but there is little observational evidence for that paradigm. To explore the life of phytoplankton during and after the polar night, we used robotic ice-avoiding profiling floats to measure ocean optics and phytoplankton characteristics continuously through two annual cycles in Baffin Bay, an Arctic sea that is covered by ice for 7 months a year. We demonstrate that net phytoplankton growth occurred even under 100% ice cover as early as February and that it resulted at least partly from photosynthesis. This highlights the adaptation of Arctic phytoplankton to extreme low-light conditions, which may be key to their survival before seeding the spring bloom.

The Green Edge initiative was developed to investigate the processes controlling the primary productivity and the fate of organic matter produced during the Arctic phytoplankton spring bloom (PSB) and to determine its role in the ecosystem. Two field campaigns were conducted in 2015 and 2016 at an ice camp located on landfast sea ice southeast of Qikiqtarjuaq Island in Baffin Bay (67.4797N, 63.7895W). During both expeditions, a large suite of physical, chemical and biological variables was measured beneath a consolidated sea ice cover from the surface to the bottom at 360 m depth to better understand the factors driving the PSB. Key variables such as temperature, salinity, radiance, irradiance, nutrient concentrations, chlorophyll-a concentration, bacteria, phytoplankton and zooplankton abundance and taxonomy, carbon stocks and fluxes were routinely measured at the ice camp. Here, we present the results of a joint effort to tidy and standardize the collected data sets that will facilitate their reuse in other Arctic studies. The dataset is available at http://www.seanoe.org/data/00487/59892/ (Massicotte et al., 2019a).

Dead zooplankton, including crustaceans, are increasingly recognized as important agents of vertical carbon export from surface waters and in marine food webs. Quantifying the contribution of passively sinking copepods (PSCs) to vertical fluxes of total particulate organic carbon (POC) is important for understanding marine ecosystem carbon budgets. Information on this is limited because identifying PSCs in sediment trap samples is difficult. Generally, swimmers (undecomposed metazoans, including PSCs, caught in sediment traps) are removed from a trap sample before the POC content is measured, although ignoring PSCs causes the total POC flux to be significantly underestimated. We quantified temporal and regional variability in PSC flux and contribution of PSCs to total POC flux (PSCs + detrital sinking particles, generally analyzed to estimate detrital POC flux) at the Mackenzie Shelf margins in the Beaufort Sea. Six datasets were used to examine PSC flux variability at ~100 m depth, which is deeper than the winter pycnocline depth (30-50 m), at the continental margin. The average (±SD) annual PSC flux (1378 ± 662 mg C m-2 yr-1, n = 6 [datasets]) and PSC contribution to the total POC flux (21 ± 10%, n = 6) suggested that PSCs, especially Pareuchaeta glacialis, were important agents of POC export from the surface layer (~100 m) to deeper water at the inter-regional and multiyear scales. We propose a hypothesis that processes controlling PSC flux variability may vary seasonally, perhaps relating to life cycle (reproduction) in winter (February) and osmotic stress in July-October when the PSC flux is relatively high.

Bering Strait is the single gateway between the Arctic and Pacific Oceans, and has localized strong currents, which can exceed 100 cm s^-1. Although massive spring phytoplankton blooms and the subsequent production of particulate organic matter that sinks to the seafloor are observed in the surrounding regions of the Bering Strait, the impact of the locally strong current on the horizontal and vertical transport of the particles remains unclear. Therefore, we conducted year-round mooring measurements from 2016 to 2017 by focusing on near-bottom processes associated with ocean currents. Our time-series analysis showed that high-turbidity events, triggered by strong barotropic currents, occurred near the seafloor in all seasons. Consequently, the fluorescence sensor detected highly concentrated chlorophyll a in the resuspended sediment; however, the amount of chlorophyll a release was seasonal, with large and small amounts being released during the warm and cold seasons, respectively. The small amounts of chlorophyll a may be attributed to small amounts of phytoplankton in the sediment owing to less input of fresh phytoplankton from the overlaying water column and organic matter decomposition in the sediments under no-light conditions. The barotropic currents were modulated by surface winds associated with an intercontinental atmospheric pattern having a 5000-km spatial scale on a timescale of 6 days. The locally strong ocean current in the Bering Strait, driving the upward transport of sediment and the subsequent horizontal transport, may play a vital role in supplying particulate organic matter/phytoplankton/nutrients to the downstream region of the southern Chukchi Sea where the formation of biological hotspots is reported.

Bering Strait is the single gateway between the Arctic and Pacific Oceans, and has localized strong currents, which can exceed 100 cm s^-1. Although massive spring phytoplankton blooms and the subsequent production of particulate organic matter that sinks to the seafloor are observed in the surrounding regions of the Bering Strait, the impact of the locally strong current on the horizontal and vertical transport of the particles remains unclear. Therefore, we conducted year-round mooring measurements from 2016 to 2017 by focusing on near-bottom processes associated with ocean currents. Our time-series analysis showed that high-turbidity events, triggered by strong barotropic currents, occurred near the seafloor in all seasons. Consequently, the fluorescence sensor detected highly concentrated chlorophyll a in the resuspended sediment; however, the amount of chlorophyll a release was seasonal, with large and small amounts being released during the warm and cold seasons, respectively. The small amounts of chlorophyll a may be attributed to small amounts of phytoplankton in the sediment owing to less input of fresh phytoplankton from the overlaying water column and organic matter decomposition in the sediments under no-light conditions. The barotropic currents were modulated by surface winds associated with an intercontinental atmospheric pattern having a 5000-km spatial scale on a timescale of 6 days. The locally strong ocean current in the Bering Strait, driving the upward transport of sediment and the subsequent horizontal transport, may play a vital role in supplying particulate organic matter/phytoplankton/nutrients to the downstream region of the southern Chukchi Sea where the formation of biological hotspots is reported.

Understanding and responding to the rapidly occurring environmental changes in the Arctic over the past few decades require new approaches in science. This includes improved collaborations within the scientific community but also enhanced dialogue between scientists and societal stakeholders, especially with Arctic communities. As a contribution to the Third International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARPIII), the Arctic in Rapid Transition (ART) network held an international workshop in France, in October 2014, in order to discuss high-priority requirements for future Arctic marine and coastal research from an early-career scientists (ECS) perspective. The discussion encompassed a variety of research fields, including topics of oceanographic conditions, sea-ice monitoring, marine biodiversity, land-ocean interactions, and geological reconstructions, as well as law and governance issues. Participants of the workshop strongly agreed on the need to enhance interdisciplinarity in order to collect comprehensive knowledge about the modern and past Arctic Ocean's geo-ecological dynamics. Such knowledge enables improved predictions of Arctic developments and provides the basis for elaborate decision-making on future actions under plausible environmental and climate scenarios in the high northern latitudes. Priority research sheets resulting from the workshop's discussions were distributed during the ICARPIII meetings in April 2015 in Japan, and are publicly available online.

The Arctic in Rapid Transition (ART) network in cooperation with the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS) and European Institute for Marine Science (IUEM) organized an international multidisciplinary science workshop “Integrating spatial and temporal scales in the changing Arctic System: towards future research priorities” (ISTAS) in October 2014. The workshop aimed at discussing future priorities of Arctic research from an early career scientists’ perspective. In total, 76 scientists from thirteen different countries participated in the workshop, 60% of them were early to mid-career researchers. In plenary and parallel sessions, trends and variability in the Arctic marine and coastal systems were reviewed over various spatial and temporal scales in order to better understand the presently changing Arctic system as a whole. Participants presented the newest results of their ongoing research, which eventually fed into comprehensive discussions on future Arctic research priorities on biological and physical oceanography, sea ice, marine biodiversity, land-ocean interactions, paleo-reconstruction and biological archives, as well as law and economics. Here we present the fact sheets, the main outcome of the workshop which highlights the research directions from the perspective of early career scientists. This is of great importance to ensure the involvement of the next generation of Arctic researchers and their contribution to the ICARP III process.

Through the transfer of carbon from the surface to the deep ocean via the passive sinking and active transport of organic material, the biological pump is a key global process for the regulation of atmospheric CO2. Over the last decades, studies relying on sediment traps and other bio-devices moored over an annual cycle in the Arctic Ocean helped to resolve how the Arctic biological pump is operating and how it is responding to global change. Here, we provide a short review of the pioneer work done in the 1980-90’s and we present key knowledge gained on Arctic ecosystem functioning with a series of case-studies conducted in the 2000’s on the basis of bio-moorings: (1) carbon export in response to warm anomalies in the main Arctic gateway, the Fram Strait; (2) ecosystem-level analyses in Beaufort Sea from a vertical flux perspective; (3) the importance of lateral processes for sinking flux events in the Central Basin; and (4) the impact of zooplankton life-cycle strategies on the biological pump in fjord-like systems. We also identify regional challenges and potential future research avenues in terms of new sampling tools and coordination for the development of an Arctic biogeochemical observatory network aligned with global initiatives. As such, this paper represents a call to sustain and further develop observing activities that rely on bio-mooring arrays in the Arctic Ocean over the next decade. By capturing the full seasonality of ice-covered environments, we argue that bio-moorings are one of the most powerful approaches to distinguish natural variability from actual shifts that might affect the structure and function of Arctic marine ecosystems in response to human-induced changes.