Life of all sizes is creating fresh organic matter every day (0 years old), but nearly all organic matter in the ocean is very small (<0.000001 m) and really old (4,000 to 6,000 years)! This sea of organic molecules is analogous to a world populated with babies and retirees, but somehow devoid of toddlers, teenagers, or thirty-somethings. How can this be? Is this simply a coincidence based on how we observe the sea? In our latest paper, we re-examined this unusual age distribution with a simple model of the processes that transport and transform small (“dissolved”) organic molecules at Station M in the eastern North Pacific Ocean.
Beaupré, S. R., B. D. Walker, and E. R. M. Druffel (2020), The two-component model coincidence: Evaluating the validity of marine dissolved organic radiocarbon as a stable-conservative tracer at Station M, Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography, doi:10.1016/j.dsr2.2020.104737.
This work is part of a special issue of Deep-Sea Research II commemorating 30 years of time-series observations at Station M (34°50′N, 123°00′W).