2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting

February 11-16

Arctic marginal seas are undergoing historically unprecedented reductions in sea ice volume and extent, concomitant with increasing ocean temperatures. It is uncertain how the marine ecosystem is responding to these sea ice thinning trends and alterations in the timing of seasonal sea ice retreat and formation. The scope of these possible changes include primary production, planktonic and benthic biomass, migration patterns of upper trophic level consumers, and overall biogeochemical cycling. In order to systematically track biological responses to sea ice loss and associated environmental changes, an international consortium of scientists have developed the “Distributed Biological Observatory” (DBO), which integrates biological measurements at multiple trophic levels with physical oceanographic sampling from ships, satellites and moorings. The DBO initially focused on five biological “hotspot” regions distributed along a latitudinal gradient extending from the northern Bering Sea through the Chukchi Sea; subsequently, three DBO regions were added in the Beaufort Sea. An Atlantic-DBO, comprised of five transect lines, is being developed in the northern Barents Sea and Fram Strait, and DBO lines have been proposed for Baffin Bay. This session provides a forum to present recent multi-disciplinary scientific findings associated with physical forcing and ecosystem response detected through the DBO change detection array.

• BN - Biogeochemistry and Nutrients
• IS - Ocean Observatories, Instrumentation and Sensing Technologies
• ME - Marine Ecosystems
• PS - Physical Oceanography: Mesoscale and Smaller