Talk:Biological pump

Nice work - it could be submitted for good article review

Epipelagic I see you are making lots of improvements. Suggest you nominate it as a good article Chidgk1 (talk) 06:27, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

A question about the article title

I am wondering if the article title could perhaps be more precise by calling it "Marine biological carbon pump" or "Oceanic biological pump" or "Ocean biological carbon pump". It would be slightly longer but would be clearer perhaps? Or not necessary because there is only ever one meaning for "biological pump"? - I've also asked an ocean expert (Tim Jickells) about the term "biological pump" and this article and here's his response:

• "So yes the biological pump or biological carbon pump is a widely use term in ocean science. I think the use of "pump" is a deliberate attempt to connect to an engineering analogy, perhaps related to ocean geo-engineeering ideas. The term "biological pump" probably should always have something like "ocean" attached to it, to distinguish it from terrestrial biological carbon uptake, but oceanographers tend to forget that I fear.
• The term is in widespread usage and perhaps that is why it has a lot of people look it up on wikipedia, because they hear the term but don't know what it is.
• The overall "marine carbon pump" includes both a physical and biological component. The physical component is related to cold water taking up CO2 and sinking and later returning to the surface being warmed up and rereleasing CO2. In a world of rising atmospheric CO2 and with decades or more between the sinking and rising of water masses, this does create an overall net transfer of CO2 into the ocean now. Then there is a biological component (the biological pump) driven by phytoplankton taking up CO2 in surface waters and the sinking/transport of the products of his photosynthesis into deep water, where it breaks down to CO2 and is eventually returned to the atmosphere or a small amount is buried.
• Looking briefly over the Oceanic carbon cycle and the biological pump wikipedia entries, both look good - the biological pump entry looks really good to me. They do of course overlap a great deal, but merging them or editing them looks a pretty daunting task because they do essentially say the same thing, but in a different way." EMsmile (talk) 23:26, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi EMsmile. I am the main perpetrator of the biological pump article. I agree with you that someone encountering the topic for the first time will find the title lacks precision. The article lead and overview could make a better effort to clarify that issue. In academic literature, biological pump usually refers specifically to biologically mediated processes which result in the sequestering of carbon in the deep ocean away from the atmosphere and the land. So to make sense for someone approaching the topic for the first time, it should be made clear this is something that happens in the ocean (not on land), and that it refers specifically to carbon (not, say, to silicon). If you examine the titles of these academic articles, you can see that academics seem quite settled on using the simple term biological pump. You could incorporate modifiers, so you could have something like "ocean carbon biological pump" or "marine biological carbon pump". But titles like those could bring more problems than the current title.

I don't see an issue with Biological pump and Oceanic carbon cycle being different articles. The ocean or marine carbon cycle is the parent article, and has a much greater scope than the biological pump. For example, it could include considerations such as thermohaline currents and geochemical issues. It could be looking at things like what happens to carbon at the ocean–atmosphere interface, such as carbon dynamics in the ocean surface microlayer. Or at what happens at the ocean–land interfaces, such as carbon cycling in mangroves and salt marshes. At present, the article has too much about the biological pump and not enough about other carbon movements. — Epipelagic (talk) 00:09, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, User:Epipelagic, for these additional explanations which make it clearer for me. I have used them to make some improvements to the lead (please check if you agree with them). I think that by providing those alternative terms in the first sentence, we no longer need to change the article title (so I withdraw my proposal). Especially if there is no "competing" meaning for "biological pump", i.e. no other scientific concept that is also called "biological pump". EMsmile (talk) 11:28, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

Regarding the Oceanic carbon cycle, I also have an interest in improving that one. Could we copy your comments about that article to the article's talk page and discuss it further there? E.g. I didn't understand what you meant with "At present, the article has too much about the biological pump and not enough about other carbon movements.", as the section about the biological pump seems quite short to me in the oceanic carbon cycle article? EMsmile (talk) 11:28, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

Sure, post comments where you want. I haven't seen competition for the term biological pump. I have struck that sentence you queried. I'm not sure what happened there – perhaps I looked at the wrong article. You could look at changing the title of the article. Oceanic tends to point away from coastal areas to the deep sea, the open ocean beyond the continental shelf, which is more the domain of the biological pump. Ocean carbon cycle or Marine carbon cycle would be better alternatives, since part of the article will be concerned with what happens to coastal carbon. — Epipelagic (talk) 05:27, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

Removed text block

I've just removed a text block that had been recently added but was not using the in-line citations properly. Maybe something from it can be salvaged: There are five export pathways that explain how Carbon is able to reach down to the depths of the ocean: (1) sinking particles, (2) vertical migration, (3) aggregation, (4) excreta, and (5) subduction.

(1) Sinking particles may be composed of various constituents such as organisms, detritus, pieces of organisms (molts), fecal matter and aggregates of mixed composition (dead and live cells, mucus material). Smaller organisms such as phytoplankton can be very small and can sink at relatively slow rates (< 1 m/day) due to buoyancy control, while as larger aggregates and fecal pellets can sink quicker reaching tens or hundreds of meters per day. (2) Vertical migration results in the rapid removal of organic matter from the surface. Daily migrations of zooplankton occur at night when they travel from the surface to the depths to feed, which results in respiration and defecation at depth. The distance that is swam by the organism enhances the downward flux and its speed. (3) Particles may stick together or aggregate as they sink. They are mostly composed of dead and living material that can form microhabitats of their own. Some are very small, while some can extend over meters (Precali et al. 2005). The aggregate size and abundance will determine the particle encounter rates and their stickiness. (4) Fecal pellets that are excreted by organisms at the surface are important contributors to carbon removal in the ocean. Depending on the organism that excreted the material, it can be quite large (dense) and can sink fast. Fecal pellets contribute a large portion to total carbon export. It is difficult to observe sinking fecal pellets in real time, more studies need to be done to observe its occurrence. (5) Subduction: Differences in water density impart differences in water mass stability and stratification. Interactions of water masses of different density can result in vertical flows at a range of spatial scales. As water flows vertically, any entrained matter or particle is advected upwards or downwards, which can contribute to C export (Omand et al. 2015).

References

McNair, H., Morison, F., & Menden-Deuer, S. (2023). Week 4: Module 3 The Biological Pump. URI Brightspace. Retrieved February 18, 2023, from https://brightspace.uri.edu/d2l/le/content/212174/viewContent/1660016/View

Omand, M. M., D’Asaro, E. A., Lee, C. M., Perry, M. J., Briggs, N., Cetinić, I., & Mahadevan, A. (2015). Eddy-driven subduction exports particulate organic carbon from the spring bloom. Science, 348(6231), 222–225. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1260062

Precali, R., Giani, M., Marini, M., Grilli, F., Ferrari, C. R., Pečar, O., & Paschini, E. (2005). Mucilaginous aggregates in the northern Adriatic in the period 1999–2002: Typology and distribution. Science of the Total Environment, 353(1–3), 10–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2005.09.066

EMsmile (talk) 13:49, 28 February 2023 (UTC)