Call for Abstracts
Special Session
SS22 Polar Shelf-basin Exchange: Physical Forcing, Biogeochemical Fluxes,
and Food Web Dynamics
American Society of Limnology and Oceanography 2005 Summer Meeting
Santiago de Compostela, Spain
19-24 June 2005
Abstract Submission Deadline: Tuesday, 1 February 2005
For further information, please go to:
http://aslo.org/santiago2005
A special session will be held at the ASLO 2005 Summer
Meeting in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 19-24 June 2005.
Implementing the plans for the International Polar Year (2007-2008),
which is based on a suite of national and international initiatives that
bring together synoptic sets of multidisciplinary observations, obtains
key data sets necessary to understand factors controlling change,
establishes a legacy of observational networks, and launches
internationally coordinated multi-disciplinary expeditions into new
scientific frontiers, entails rigorous examination of the present status
quo of polar research. On our pilgrimage into some of last unexplored
regions of the ocean, the engirdling shelves have to be crossed and
knowledge obtained here used as a proxy for those regions still to be
investigated. Scenarios of future climatic development, in essence based
upon global circulation models, predict significant warming in the
Arctic, but far less so in Antarctica. Changes in the marginal ice zone
extent, ice thickness and changes in the extent and eventual of
polynyas, will result in significant alterations of the C flux,
biodiversity and changes of mans living conditions. How these changes
will influence the polar shelf-basin exchange of biogenic matter is the
main focus this session. Based on these considerations, we pose three
comprehensive questions:
(1) How will physical forcing and biological alterations affect the
dissolution and biological C pump on and off the shelves fringing the
Polar Ocean and Antarctica?
(2) What are the food web dynamics and the C flux in the various polar
shelf regions?
(3) How do the shelves "work" to produce and concentrate food, and how
will such mechanisms be altered under scenarios of climate variability?
To address these questions, we invite contributions focusing on the
physical oceanography, ice cover, primary production, pelagic food web
dynamics, pelagic-benthic coupling and benthic mineralization of Polar
shelf regions, with the aim to sum up the present state-of-the art,
contribute to a pan-polar understanding of C cycling and climate change,
and get ready for the implementation of one of the greatest challenges
in oceanographic research, i.e. the IPY.
Session Organizers:
Jackie M. Grebmeier, University of Tennessee Knoxville
E-mail: jgrebmei [at] utk.edu
Louis Fortier, University of Quebec
E-mail: louis.fortier [at] bio.ulaval.ca
Further information, including online forms for registration and
abstracts, is available at:
http://aslo.org/santiago2005