Iron Sources and Transport in the Southern Drake Passage

The goal of the project is to build a high-resolution regional ocean model of the Scotia Sea that includes simple biology and dissolved iron advecting from the shelf near the South Shetland Islands. The model will incorporate data from two summer cruises and one winter cruise to the area, in which measurements were made of winds, temperature, salinity, acoustic Doppler current profiles, drifter tracks, chlorophyll, nutrients, dissolved iron, radium and thorium isotopes, primary productions and zooplankton biomass. The model physics will be based on the Regional Ocean Modeling System and model development appears well underway. The innovative component of model chemistry will be the inclusion of decaying radium isotopes as a time-sensitive tracer for sediments mixed into water interacting with bottom topography. The goal of the modeling effort is to estimate fluxes of iron into the Scotia Sea from interactions with shelf sediments and then to assess the sensitivity of iron fluxes and transport pathways in the Southern Drake Passage under climate change scenarios.