Abstract

Having descended through the water column, microplankton in ocean sediments are representative for the ocean surface environment, where they originated from. Sedimentary microplankton is therefore used as an archive of past and present surface oceanographic conditions. However, these particles are advected by turbulent ocean currents during their sinking journey. So far, it is unknown to what extent this particle advection shapes the microplankton composition in sediments. Here we use global simulations of sinking particles in a strongly eddying global ocean model, and define ocean bottom provinces based on the particle surface origin locations. We find that these provinces can be detected in global datasets of sedimentary microplankton assemblages, demonstrating the effect provincialism has on the composition of sedimentary remains of surface plankton. These provinces explain the microplankton composition, together with e.g. ocean surface environment. Connected provinces have implications on the optimal spatial extent of microplankton sediment sample datasets that are used for palaeoceanographic reconstructions, and on the optimal spatial averaging of sediment samples over global datasets.

Highlights

  • Microplankton communities are sensitive to surface oceanographic conditions in which they live

  • We find that these provinces can be detected in global datasets of sedimentary microplankton assemblages, demonstrating the effect provincialism has on the composition of sedimentary remains of surface plankton

  • We find that areas near Western boundary currents may only split into clusters at 145 relatively high iterations, because the sediments in these areas have a relatively large connectivity, with particles originating from a large area (see Nooteboom et al (2019))

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Summary

Introduction

Microplankton communities are sensitive to surface oceanographic conditions in which they live. Their remains are preserved in the sedimentary archive of the ocean basins and are used to recontruct present and past surface ocean conditions. The sedimentary microplankton community is not driven by abiotic climate variables (e.g. temperature or nutrient 15 availability) alone. There is a large unexplained residual error in relationships between plankton composition and environmental conditions. This impacts accuracy of recontruction of past environmental conditions using microfossil allemblages. It is crucial to investigate which other processes determine the species distribution in the sedimentary archive, especially when such distributions are 20 used to reconstruct these sea surface variables in the geologic past

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