| Summary | The short surface ocean residence times of 1-2 days over Palmer Deep is in conflict with the prevailing hypotheses that local growth support phytoplankton at the base of the food web in these biological hotspots. Instead, the implication is that horizontal dynamics are likely more important to maintaining these biological hotspots than local upwelling. However, coincident measures of phytoplankton, prey fields, and predator locations in their advective context have not been made to establish the ecological importance of horizontal flow. In this project, we will simultaneously sample across the entire food web from the phytoplankton and prey fields to the top predators to understand the ocean features that support life in these polar systems. For the first time in this region, we will integrate these glider deployed sensors with moored, remote sensed and small boat platforms to simultaneously map phytoplankton blooms, krill aggregations, and top predator foraging relative to dynamic ocean features. This real-time low-resolution dataset contains temperature, salinity, chlorophyll_a, CDOM, beta_700nm and oxygen profiles. |
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