Upwelling Systems Of The World

Upwelling systems are special places in the oceans where nutrient-enriched water is brought into the euphotic zone to fuel phytoplankton blooms that, via marine food-web interactions, create the world’s richest fish resources. This book introduces the reader to the interdisciplinary science of upwelling and provides a comprehensive overview of the world’s most productive marine ecosystems in the context of climate variability, climate change and human exploitation. This material presented is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate study or just for anyone interested to learn about the creation of life in the oceans and how this is compromised by human activities.

Upwelling is one of the major physical processes driving the biogeochemistry of the ocean system. It dominates primary productivity in the world?s oceans, accounting for 80?90% of new production. However, because of the physical conditions that have to be met to generate upwelling, this production is concentrated in just a few places, e.g., in the coastal waters of major eastern boundary currents off California, Peru, Mauritania, and Namibia, where productivity leads to major fishing grounds. These areas account for about 50% of the world?s fish catch, underlining the importance of upwelling to humankind. Source rocks for oil formed in ancient coastal upwelling environments, making their study useful for improving oil exploration models. Upwelling also occurs in the open ocean, especially along the equator and beneath the westerly winds in the subarctic Pacific and the Southern Ocean, where the ocean?s silica budget is transformed by the deposition of the remains of siliceous phytoplankton. Because phytoplankton, the grass of the sea, can extract CO2 from the atmosphere, changes in the intensity of upwelling and associated biological productivity through time may have influenced climate. This volume uses an interdisciplinary approach to establish how upwelling systems work, how they vary through time, and whether or not they have a significant influence on the global carbon cycle. An understanding of how these largely wind-driven biogeochemical systems work today, and how they responded to past fluctuations in climate, is essential in predicting how they and their associated living resources may change in the future. One conclusion is that these systems exert a major influence on the global cycle of nutrients, a factor that contributes to making the coastal regions major sinks for organic carbon. This book recommends new strategies for observation, sampling, monitoring, experimentation, and modeling as the basis for improving forecasts of the behavior of upwelling systems. It will be of interest to physical oceanographers, marine biologists, fisheries scientists, marine organic and inorganic chemists, marine geologists, petroleum explorers, paleoceanographers, and paleoclimatologists.

This book aims at providing students and researchers an advanced integrative overview on zooplankton ecology, covering marine and freshwater organisms, from microscopic phagotrophic protists, to macro-jellyfishes and active fish larvae. The first book section addresses zooplanktonic organisms and processes, the second section is devoted to zooplankton spatial and temporal distribution patterns and trophic dynamics, and the final section is dedicated to emergent methodological approaches (e.g., omics). Book chapters include comprehensive synthesis, observational and manipulative studies, and sediment-based analysis, a vibrant imprint of benthic-pelagic coupling and ecosystem connectivity. Most chapters also address the impacts of anticipated environmental changes (e.g., warming, acidification).

Covers the traditional range of topics in regional oceanography. An important aspect of work is its novel approach to a description of the features which give each ocean region its character. The two core principles are the use of the most modern database for all maps of regional distributions of properties and a discussion of all observed features within a frame of reference developed from ocean dynamics, rather than based on the simple geographical approach. The ocean's role in climate variability and climate change is described in detail. The book also includes an evaluation of all major international research projects such as FGGE, IIOE and TOGA. The SI system is used throughout. The use of modern data and inclusion of the oceanographic literature up to 1992 and early 1993 make it a useful reference text.

Studies of the history of upwelling from sedimentary information can offer a clearer view of local and global changes in climate through time than might be seen in other areas of the ocean where the variations in oceanography induced by climate change are more subtle. The authors focus on results from deep ocean drilling expeditions, particularly those off NW and SW Africa, Peru and Saudi Arabia. These have allowed more advanced models to be developed of the temporal and spatial palaeoenvironmental patterns associated with upwelling systems since the Early Miocene.