Ideas and perspectives: Is dark carbon fixation relevant for oceanic primary production estimates?

Baltar, Federico; Herndl, Gerhard J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-16-3793-2019

Articles | Volume 16, issue 19

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-16-3793-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-16-3793-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 19

Ideas and perspectives

|

02 Oct 2019

Ideas and perspectives |

| 02 Oct 2019

Ideas and perspectives: Is dark carbon fixation relevant for oceanic primary production estimates?

Federico Baltar and Gerhard J. Herndl

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Final revised paper (published on 02 Oct 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 11 Jun 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

SC1: 'Follow the money (= energy)', Andrew Yool, 18 Jun 2019
- AC1: 'response to interactive comment', Federico Baltar, 03 Sep 2019
RC1: 'Review comments Baltar & Herndl', Anonymous Referee #1, 19 Jul 2019
- AC2: 'Response to Referee #1', Federico Baltar, 03 Sep 2019
RC2: 'Comments', Anonymous Referee #2, 29 Jul 2019
- AC3: 'Response to Referee #2', Federico Baltar, 03 Sep 2019
RC3: 'Review of F. Baltar and G.J. Herald "Is dark carbon fixation relevant 1 for oceanic primary 2 production estimates?"', Andrew K. Sweetman, 16 Aug 2019
- AC4: 'Response to Referee #3', Federico Baltar, 03 Sep 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (03 Sep 2019) by Jack Middelburg

AR by Federico Baltar on behalf of the Authors (03 Sep 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (09 Sep 2019) by Jack Middelburg

AR by Federico Baltar on behalf of the Authors (11 Sep 2019) Manuscript

Short summary

Around half of the global primary production (PP) is produced in the ocean. Here we quantified how much oceanic PP estimates would increase if we included the dark DIC fixation rates (which are usually excluded in the carbon-14 method) into the PP estimation. We found that the inclusion of dark DIC fixation would increase PP estimates by 5–22 %. This represents ca. 1.2 to 11 Pg C yr⁻¹ of newly synthesized organic carbon available for the marine food web.