The FOODBANCS project: Introduction and sinking fluxes of organic carbon, chlorophyll-a and phytodetritus on the western Antarctic Peninsula continental shelf

The impact of the highly seasonal Antarctic primary production cycle on shelf benthic ecosystems remains poorly evaluated. Here we describe a times-series research project on the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) shelf designed to evaluate the seafloor deposition, and subsequent ecological and biogeochemical impacts, of the summer phytoplankton bloom along a transect crossing the Antarctic shelf near Anvers Island. During this project, entitled Food for Benthos on the Antarctic Continental Shelf (FOODBANCS), we deployed replicate sediment traps 150–170 m above the seafloor (total water-column depth of 590 m) on the central shelf from December 1999 to March 2001, recovering trap samples every 3–4 months. In addition, we used a seafloor time-lapse camera system, as well as video surveys conducted at 3–4 months intervals, to monitor the presence and accumulation of phytodetritus at the sediment–water interface. The fluxes of particulate organic carbon and chlorophyll-a into sediment traps (binned over 3–4 month intervals) showed patterns consistent with seasonal variability, with average summer fluxes during the first year exceeding winter fluxes by a factor of ∼2–3. However, inter-annual variability in summer fluxes was even greater than seasonal variability, with 4–10-fold differences in the flux of organic carbon and chlorophyll-a between the summer seasons of 1999–2000 and 2000–2001. Phytodetrital accumulation at the shelf floor also exhibited intense inter-annual variability, with no visible phytodetritus from essentially December 1999 to November 2000, followed by pulsed accumulation of 1–2 cm of phytodetritus over a ∼30,000 km2 shelf area by March 2001. Comparisons with other studies suggest that the levels of inter-annual variability we observed are typical of the Antarctic shelf over decadal time scales. We conclude that fluxes of particulate organic carbon, chlorophyll-a and phytodetritus to WAP-shelf sediments vary intensely on seasonal to inter-annual time scales, yielding dramatic temporal variability in the flux of food for detritivores to the Antarctic shelf floor.