High-frequency, year-round time series of the carbonate chemistry in a high-Arctic fjord (Svalbard)

Abstract

The Arctic Ocean is subject to high rates of ocean warming and acidification, with critical implications for marine organisms as well as ecosystems and the services they provide. Carbonate system data in the Arctic realm are spotty in space and time, and, until recently, there was no time-series station measuring the carbonate chemistry at high frequency in this region, particularly in coastal waters. We report here on the first high-frequency (1 h), multi-year (5 years) dataset of salinity, temperature, CO2 partial pressure (pCO2) and pH at a coastal site (bottom depth of 12 m) in a high-Arctic fjord (Kongsfjorden, Svalbard). Discrete measurements of dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity were also performed. We show that (1) the choice of formulations for calculating the dissociation constants of the carbonic acid remains unsettled for polar waters, (2) the water column is generally somewhat stratified despite the shallow depth, (3) the saturation state of calcium carbonate is subject to large seasonal changes but never reaches undersaturation (Ωa ranges between 1.4 and 3.0) and (4) pCO2 is lower than atmospheric CO2 at all seasons, making this site a sink for atmospheric CO2 (−9 to −16.8 molCO2m-2yr-1, depending on the parameterisation of the gas transfer velocity). Data are available on PANGAEA: https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.960131 (Gattuso et al., 2023a).