Abstract
ABSTRACT Carbon is a keystone element in global biogeochemical cycles. It plays a fundamental role in biotic and abiotic processes in the ocean, which intertwine to mediate the chemistry and redox status of carbon in the ocean and the atmosphere. The interactions between abiotic and biogenic carbon (e.g. CO2, CaCO3, organic matter) in the ocean are complex, and there is a half-century-old enigma about the existence of a huge reservoir of recalcitrant dissolved organic carbon (RDOC) that equates to the magnitude of the pool of atmospheric CO2. The concepts of the biological carbon pump (BCP) and the microbial loop (ML) shaped our understanding of the marine carbon cycle. The more recent concept of the microbial carbon pump (MCP), which is closely connected to those of the BCP and the ML, explicitly considers the significance of the ocean's RDOC reservoir and provides a mechanistic framework for the exploration of its formation and persistence. Understanding of the MCP has benefited from advanced ‘omics’ and novel research in biological oceanography and microbial biogeochemistry. The need to predict the ocean's response to climate change makes an integrative understanding of the BCP, ML and MCP a high priority. In this review, we summarize and discuss progress since the proposal of the MCP in 2010 and formulate research questions for the future.
Highlights
The modern ocean accounts for ~50% of global photosynthesis, with its primary production of organic matter forming the core of the ocean carbon cycle
Global warming and ocean acidification and their respective consequences influence the functioning of the biological carbon pump (BCP), a major pathway for sequestering atmospheric CO2 in the ocean
The microbial carbon pump (MCP) (Jiao et al 2010) provides an additional path for carbon sequestration within the marine ocean carbon cycle (Stone, 2010), which is intimately linked to climate change
Summary
Chuanlun Zhang1,*, Hongyue Dang, Farooq Azam, Ronald Benner, Louis Legendre, Uta. 1. Department of Ocean Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China. 2. State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science, Institute of Marine Microbes and Ecospheres, College of Ocean and Earth Sciences, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361102, China. 3. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA. 4. Department of Biological Sciences and School of the Earth, Ocean and Environment, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA. 6. Marine Science Institute, University of California Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA. 8. School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK. 9. Departments of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Botany, and Microbiology and Immunology, and the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British
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