NoSE_North Sea Atlantic Exchange

The biologically productive North Sea impacts the global climate through exchange of carbon and nutrients with the Atlantic Ocean. The North Sea is a very productive coastal sea. A lot of carbon dioxide (CO₂) could be taken up through physical, biological, and sedimentological processes. But much is still unknown about the exact fate of the carbon. Dutch scientists will investigate how big the role of the North Sea really is in the uptake of carbon.

Continental shelf seas represent a small fraction of the ocean’s surface area (<10%), but as they connect the land to the open ocean, they are disproportionally important in global carbon and nutrient cycles. The North Sea is a very productive coastal sea and a lot of carbon dioxide (CO₂) is taken up and buried through physical, biological, and sedimentological processes, however the long‐term fate of this carbon is largely unknown. In the NoSE project, a multidisciplinary consortium will determine the past, present, and future role of the North Sea in the uptake of carbon, by constraining the exchange of carbon and other essential nutrients between the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

This exchange will be studied in the Norwegian Trench, the main outflow route to the Atlantic Ocean and the main area where sediments accumulate in the North Sea. In the Norwegian Trench, we will quantify the transport and transformation processes that control carbon and nutrient exchange between the land, shelf sea and the open ocean. Combining new, state‐of‐the‐art observations with process studies and reconstructions from sediment archives, we will provide an improved understanding of carbon and nutrient fluxes and the drivers of their variability across timescales from weeks to millennia. Observational results will feed into small‐scale, regional and global ocean models to investigate how environmental and climate change may affect the future cycling of carbon and nutrients within the North Sea. Currently, the North Sea experiences pressures such as overfishing, acidification, warming, eutrophication and deoxygenation. Understanding how these pressures affect carbon and nutrient cycling is crucial to assess the wider implications of environmental change in the coming decades for the North Sea and wider Atlantic Ocean and will also help to determine the changing biogeochemical interactions between other shelf seas and the global ocean.