Abstract
The Casamance estuary, on the coast of Senegal, is an inverse hypersaline estuary: salinity increases landward, and dry season salinity values are up to 172 psu due to the evaporation of seawater. Dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) concentrations decreased landward as a negative linear function of salinity. Thermodynamic modelling and the absence of CaCO3 in the sediments indicate that this loss of DIC was not due to calcite precipitation in the main water body. The innermost, almost landlocked, waters contained high phytoplankton biomass (50–300 μg chl I−1) and high concentrations of allochthonous dissolved organic carbon. Photosynthetic uptake of DIC and subsequent particulate organic carbon sedimentation is proposed as hypothetical explanation of the relationship between DIC and salinity; localized overheating in shallow waters might also be involved.
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