On the use of O2/Ar and O2/N2 to estimate the biological carbon uptake in landfast sea ice

Sea ice is one of the largest biomes on Earth. The net community production (NCP) of the microorganisms living in sea ice impacts the dynamics of pCO2 in sea ice, and therefore the CO2 exchanges at the air-ice-sea interfaces. As oxygen O2 and carbon C are both involved in the photosynthetic and respiration processes, one can theoretically assess NCP (in terms of C uptake) from O2 measurements. However, the concentration of O2 in sea ice depends not only on biological processes (i.e., NCP) but also on physical processes. We present a technique for assessing NCP in sea ice, based on the use of the O2/Ar ratio, which should correct for the physical contribution in O2 variations. We also compare the use of O2/Ar and O2/N2 for deriving NCP, and demonstrate that O2/Ar is more suitable, as it is more sensitive and less affected by gas diffusion and gas bubble formation during sea ice growth and decay than O2/N2. Using O2/Ar, we then provide conservative estimates of NCP in landfast sea ice, from ice cores collected in Barrow, from January through June 2009. The minimum estimate of the NCP in the whole ice cover reached 229 mg C.m-².d-1 in late spring. This is about 20 times higher than the atmospheric C uptake at that time identified from CO2 fluxes measurements at the ice-air interface, and therefore indicates that the main source of C used in the NCP was from the under-ice water.