MOSAIC - Modern Ocean Sediment Archive and Inventory of Carbon
Our global oceans play a crucial role in the long-term carbon sequestration and stabilisation of the climate. The D-ERDW Biogeoscience group has recently released a landmark publication of the MOSAIC (Modern Ocean Sediment Archive and Inventory of Carbon) database, which holds a unique data collection of surficial ocean sediments.
The website is accessible in a user-friendly and intuitive format at mosaic.ethz.ch, and will serve as a valuable tool to the geosciences communities to improve their understanding of the global carbon cycle.
Scientists know more about the surface of Mars than they do about the ocean floor. This, despite the key role ocean sediments play in the long-term sequestration of carbon and the regulation of our global climate.
Understanding of ocean sediments is impeded by significant spatial heterogeneity and scattered, inaccessible data. In a cross-departmental collaboration between the D-ERDW (Prof. Timothy Eglinton) and D-USYS (Prof. Nicolas Gruber), a solution was devised: the creation of an accessible surficial sediment data collection for the global scientific community. This was funded by the ETH Project “Elucidating processes that govern carbon burial in the global ocean”.
The result has already been hailed as valuable and indispensable tool for the global oceanographic community: the MOSAIC database, recently published in Earth System Science Data by external pageVan der Voort et al.
Following the ETH open-access guidelines, only open-source programming tools were used (e.g. SQL, Python and R), enabling a wide uptake of the work, as well as access to the code. The MOSAIC database is a collaborative initiative, and researchers and scientists can contribute to the database by sending their data using the template provided in the website (van der Voort et al., 2021). Try out the MOSAIC database
This database will provide the necessary data to understand the spatial patterns in the distribution of organic carbon in marine sediments (e.g. Van der Voort et al., 2018), as well as refine the quantification of carbon stock of maritime nations (Avelar et al., 2017; Luisetti et al., 2020; Smeaton et al., 2021) and in marine protected areas (Atwood et al., 2020), all of which are needed to quantify carbon that is potentially released by anthropogenic disturbance (Sala et al., 2021). These are just a few of the many studies that will arise from the harmonisation of the sparsely distributed data.
The MOSAIC database is in continuous expansion, and future work will be spearheaded by Postdoc Dr. Sarah Paradis (CAPS LOCK 3, SNF 184865).
References
Atwood, T. B., Witt, A. W., Mayorga, J., Hammill, E. and Sala, E.: Global Patterns in Marine Sediment Carbon Stocks, Front. Mar. Sci., 7(165), external pagedoi:10.3389/fmars.2020.00165, 2020
Avelar, S., van der Voort, T. S. and Eglinton, T. I.: Relevance of carbon stocks of marine sediments for national greenhouse gas inventories of maritime nations, Carbon Balance Manag., 12(1), 10, external pagedoi:10.1186/s13021-017-0077-x, 2017
Luisetti, T., Ferrini, S., Grilli, G., Jickells, T. D., Kennedy, H., Kröger, S., Lorenzoni, I., Milligan, B., van der Molen, J., Parker, R., Pryce, T., Turner, R. K. and Tyllianakis, E.: Climate action requires new accounting guidance and governance frameworks to manage carbon in shelf seas, Nat. Commun., 11(1), 1–10, external pagedoi:10.1038/s41467-020-18242-w, 2020
Sala, E., Mayorga, J., Bradley, D., Cabral, R. B., Atwood, T. B., Auber, A., Cheung, W., Costello, C., Ferretti, F., Friedlander, A. M., Gaines, S. D., Garilao, C., Goodell, W., Halpern, B. S., Hinson, A., Kaschner, K., Kesner-Reyes, K., Leprieur, F., McGowan, J., Morgan, L. E., Mouillot, D., Palacios-Abrantes, J., Possingham, H. P., Rechberger, K. D., Worm, B. and Lubchenco, J.: Protecting the global ocean for biodiversity, food and climate, Nature, (December 2019), external pagedoi:10.1038/s41586-021-03371-z, 2021
Smeaton, C., Hunt, C. A., Turrell, W. R. and Austin, W. E. N.: Marine Sedimentary Carbon Stocks of the United Kingdom’s Exclusive Economic Zone, Front. Earth Sci., 9, 50, external pagedoi:10.3389/feart.2021.593324, 2021
van der Voort, T. S., Blattmann, T. M., Usman, M., Montluçon, D., Loeffler, T., Tavagna, M. L., Gruber, N. and Eglinton, T. I.: MOSAIC (Modern Ocean Sediment Archive and Inventory of Carbon): a (radio)carbon-centric database for seafloor surficial sediments, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 13(5), 2135–2146, external pagedoi:10.5194/essd-13-2135-2021, 2021
Van der Voort, T. S., Mannu, U., Blattmann, T. M., Bao, R., Zhao, M. and Eglinton, T. I.: Deconvolving the fate of carbon in coastal sediments, Geophys. Res. Lett., external pagedoi:10.1029/2018GL077009, 2018