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Samples for the analysis of dissolved nutrients were collected during the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) from the water column, sea ice cores and from special events/locations (e.g., leads, melt ponds, brine, incubation experiments). Samples for dissolved inorganic nutrients (NO3 +NO2 , NO2 , PO4 , Si(OH)4, NH4 ) were analysed onboard during PS122 legs 1 to 3, with duplicate samples collected from CTD casts for later analysis of total dissolved nitrogen (TDN) and total dissolved phosphorus (TDP). From leg 4, all samples collected were stored frozen at -20°C for later analysis. Analyses of stored samples were carried out at the AWI Nutrient Facility between January and March 2021. Nutrient analyses onboard and on land were carried out using a Seal Analytical AA3 continuous flow autoanalyser, controlled by the AACE software version 7.09. Best practice procedures for the measurement of nutrients were adopted following GO-SHIP recommendations (Hydes et al., 2010; Becker et al., 2019). Descriptions of sample collection and handling can be found in the various cruise reports (Haas & Rabe, 2023; Kanzow & Damm, 2023; Rex & Metfies, 2023; Rex & Nicolaus, 2023; Rex & Shupe, 2023). Here we provide data from the water column, obtained from the analysis of discrete samples collected from CTD-Rosette casts from Polarstern (https://sensor.awi.de/?site=search&q=vessel:polarstern:ctd_sbe9plus_321) and Ocean City (https://sensor.awi.de/?site=search&q=vessel:polarstern:ctd_sbe9plus_935). Data from sea ice cores and special events are presented elsewhere. Data from sea ice cores and special events are presented elsewhere. For reference, here we included data from CTD-BTL files associated with nutrient samples. These data are presented by Tippenhauer et al. (2023) Polarstern CTD and Tippenhauer et al. (2023) Ocean City CTD. 

Samples for the analysis of dissolved nutrients were collected during the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) from the water column, sea ice cores and from special events/locations (e.g., leads, melt ponds, brine, incubation experiments). Samples for dissolved inorganic nutrients (NO3 +NO2 , NO2 , PO4 , Si(OH)4, NH4 ) were analysed onboard during PS122 legs 1 to 3, with duplicate samples collected from CTD casts for later analysis of total dissolved nitrogen (TDN) and total dissolved phosphorus (TDP). From leg 4, all samples collected were stored frozen at -20°C for later analysis. Analyses of stored samples were carried out at the AWI Nutrient Facility between January and March 2021. Nutrient analyses onboard and on land were carried out using a Seal Analytical AA3 continuous flow autoanalyser, controlled by the AACE software version 7.09. Best practice procedures for the measurement of nutrients were adopted following GO-SHIP recommendations (Hydes et al., 2010; Becker et al., 2019). Descriptions of sample collection and handling can be found in the various cruise reports (Haas & Rabe, 2023; Kanzow & Damm, 2023; Rex & Metfies, 2023; Rex & Nicolaus, 2023; Rex & Shupe, 2023). Here we provide data from the water column, obtained from the analysis of discrete samples collected from CTD-Rosette casts from Polarstern (https://sensor.awi.de/?site=search&q=vessel:polarstern:ctd_sbe9plus_321) and Ocean City (https://sensor.awi.de/?site=search&q=vessel:polarstern:ctd_sbe9plus_935). Data from sea ice cores and special events are presented elsewhere. Data from sea ice cores and special events are presented elsewhere. For reference, here we included data from CTD-BTL files associated with nutrient samples. These data are presented by Tippenhauer et al. (2023) Polarstern CTD and Tippenhauer et al. (2023) Ocean City CTD. 

First-year sea-ice thickness, draft, salinity, temperature, and density were measured during near-weekly surveys at the main first-year ice coring site (MCS-FYI) during the MOSAiC expedition (legs 1 to 4). The ice cores were extracted either with a 9-cm (Mark II) or 7.25-cm (Mark III) internal diameter ice corers (Kovacs Enterprise, US). This data set includes data from 23 coring site visits and were performed from 28 October 2019 to 29 July 2020 at coring locations within 130 m to each other in the MOSAiC Central Observatory. During each coring event, ice temperature was measured in situ from a separate temperature core, using Testo 720 thermometers in drill holes with a length of half-core-diameter at 5-cm vertical resolution. Ice bulk practical salinity was measured from melted core sections at 5-cm resolution using a YSI 30 conductivity meter. Ice density was measured using the hydrostatic weighing method (Pustogvar and Kulyakhtin, 2016) from a density core in the freezer laboratory onboard Polarstern at the temperature of –15°C. Relative volumes of brine and gas were estimated from ice salinity, temperature and density using Cox and Weeks (1983) for cold ice and Leppäranta and Manninen (1988) for ice warmer than –2°C.The data contains the event label (1), time (2), and global coordinates (3,4) of each coring measurement and sample IDs (13, 15). Each salinity core has its manually measured ice thickness (5), ice draft (6), core length (7), and mean snow height (22). Each core section has the total length of its top (8) and bottom (9) measured in situ, as well estimated depth of section top (10), bottom (11), and middle (12). The depth estimates assume that the total length of all core sections is equal to the measured ice thickness. Each core section has the value of its practical salinity (14), isotopic values (16, 17, 18) (Meyer et al., 2000), as well as sea ice temperature (19) and ice density (20) interpolated to the depth of salinity measurements. The global coordinates of coring sites were measured directly. When it was not possible, coordinates of the nearby temperature buoy 2019T66 were used. Ice mass balance buoy 2019T66 installation is described in doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.938134. Brine volume (21) fraction estimates are presented only for fraction values from 0 to 30%. Each core section also has comments (23) describing if the sample is from a false bottom, from rafted ice or has any other special characteristics.Macronutrients from the salinity core, and more isotope data will be published in a subsequent version of this data set. 

Abstract A 15-yr duration record of mooring observations from the eastern (>70°E) Eurasian Basin (EB) of the Arctic Ocean is used to show and quantify the recently increased oceanic heat flux from intermediate-depth (~150–900 m) warm Atlantic Water (AW) to the surface mixed layer and sea ice. The upward release of AW heat is regulated by the stability of the overlying halocline, which we show has weakened substantially in recent years. Shoaling of the AW has also contributed, with observations in winter 2017–18 showing AW at only 80 m depth, just below the wintertime surface mixed layer, the shallowest in our mooring records. The weakening of the halocline for several months at this time implies that AW heat was linked to winter convection associated with brine rejection during sea ice formation. This resulted in a substantial increase of upward oceanic heat flux during the winter season, from an average of 3–4 W m −2 in 2007–08 to >10 W m −2 in 2016–18. This seasonal AW heat loss in the eastern EB is equivalent to a more than a twofold reduction of winter ice growth. These changes imply a positive feedback as reduced sea ice cover permits increased mixing, augmenting the summer-dominated ice-albedo feedback. 

We present sea ice temperature and salinity data from first-year ice (FYI) and second-year ice (SYI) relevant to the temporal development of sea ice permeability and brine drainage efficiency from the early growth phase in October 2019 to the onset of spring warming in May 2020. Our dataset was collected in the central Arctic Ocean during the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) Expedition in 2019 to 2020. MOSAiC was an international transpolar drift expedition in which the German icebreaker RV Polarstern anchored into an ice floe to gain new insights into Arctic climate over a full annual cycle. In October 2019, RV Polarstern moored to an ice floe in the Siberian sector of the Arctic at 85 degrees north and 137 degrees east to begin the drift towards the North Pole and the Fram Strait via the Transpolar Drift Stream. The data presented here were collected during the first three legs of the expedition, so all the coring activities took place on the same floe. The end dates of legs 1, 2, and 3 were 13 December, 24 February, and 4 June, respectively. The dataset contributed to a baseline study entitled, Deciphering the properties of different Arctic ice types during the growth phase of the MOSAiC floes: Implications for future studies. The study highlights downward directed gas pathways in FYI and SYI by inferring sea ice permeability and potential brine release from several time series of temperature and salinity measurements. The physical properties presented in this paper lay the foundation for subsequent analyses on actual gas contents measured in the ice cores, as well as air-ice and ice-ocean gas fluxes. Sea ice cores were collected with a Kovacs Mark II 9 cm diameter corer. To measure ice temperatures, about 4.5 cm deep holes were drilled into the core (intervals varied by site and leg) . The temperatures were measured by a digital thermometer within minutes after the cores were retrieved. The ice cores were placed into pre-labelled plastic sleeves sealed at the bottom end. The ice cores were transported to RV Polarstern and stored in a -20 degrees Celsius freezer. Each of the cores was sub-sampled, melted at room temperature, and processed for salinity within one or two days. The practical salinity was estimated by measuring the electrical conductivity and temperature of the melted samples using a WTW Cond 3151 salinometer equipped with a Tetra-Con 325 four-electrode conductivity cell. The practical salinity represents the the salinity estimated from the electrical conductivity of the solution. The dataset also contains derived variables, including sea ice density, brine volume fraction, and the Rayleigh number. 

Abstract The diffusive layering (DL) form of double-diffusive convection cools the Atlantic Water (AW) as it circulates around the Arctic Ocean. Large DL steps, with heights of homogeneous layers often greater than 10 m, have been found above the AW core in the Eurasian Basin (EB) of the eastern Arctic. Within these DL staircases, heat and salt fluxes are determined by the mechanisms for vertical transport through the high-gradient regions (HGRs) between the homogeneous layers. These HGRs can be thick (up to 5 m and more) and are frequently complex, being composed of multiple small steps or continuous stratification. Microstructure data collected in the EB in 2007 and 2008 are used to estimate heat fluxes through large steps in three ways: using the measured dissipation rate in the large homogeneous layers; utilizing empirical flux laws based on the density ratio and temperature step across HGRs after scaling to account for the presence of multiple small DL interfaces within each HGR; and averaging estimates of heat fluxes computed separately for individual small interfaces (as laminar conductive fluxes), small convective layers (via dissipation rates within small DL layers), and turbulent patches (using dissipation rate and buoyancy) within each HGR. Diapycnal heat fluxes through HGRs evaluated by each method agree with each other and range from ~2 to ~8 W m−2, with an average flux of ~3–4 W m−2. These large fluxes confirm a critical role for the DL instability in cooling and thickening the AW layer as it circulates around the eastern Arctic Ocean. 

Fronts in the NO parameter, a semiconservative tracer combining nitrate and dissolved oxygen, and dynamic height were observed in the central East Siberian Sea that distinguished Atlantic and Pacific contributions to the upper halocline of the Amerasian Basin during the summer of 2015. The NO front was aligned with the Transpolar Drift, and its position over the Mendeleyev Ridge indicates that Pacific waters were generally restricted to the Canada Basin and did not spread to the central Arctic. This interpretation lies in contrast to the distribution of Pacific water fractions, calculated using established relationships between nitrate and phosphate, and indicates that traditional tracers used to quantify Pacific water contributions to the Arctic Ocean are no longer accurate.

 

The surface waters of the Arctic Ocean include an important inventory of freshwater from rivers, sea ice melt, and glacial meltwaters. While some freshwaters are mixed directly into the surface ocean, cryospheric reservoirs, such as snow, sea ice, and melt ponds act as incubators for trace metals, as well as potential sources to the surface ocean upon melting. The availability and reactivity of these metals depends on their speciation, which may vary across each pool or undergo transformation upon mixing. We present here baseline measurements of colloidal (∼0.003–0.200 μm) iron (Fe), zinc (Zn), nickel (Ni), copper (Cu), cadmium (Cd), and manganese (Mn) in snow, sea ice, melt ponds, and the underlying seawater. We consider both the total concentration of colloidal metals ([cMe]) in each cryospheric reservoir and the contribution of cMe to the overall dissolved metal phase (%cMe). Notably, snow contained higher (cMe) as well as higher %cMe relative to seawater for metals such as Fe and Zn across most stations. Stations close to the North Pole had relatively high aerosol deposition, imparting high (cFe) and (cZn), as well as high %cFe, %cZn, %cMn, and %cCd (>80%). In contrast, surface seawater concentrations of Cd, Cu, Mn, and Ni were dominated by the soluble phase (<0.003 μm), suggesting little impact of cMe from the melting cryosphere, or rapid aggregation/disaggregation dynamics within surface waters leading to the loss of cMe. This has important implications for how trace metal biogeochemistry speciation and thus fluxes may change in a future ice‐free Arctic Ocean.

 

Early studies revealed relationships between barium (Ba), particulate organic carbon and silicate, suggesting applications for Ba as a paleoproductivity tracer and as a tracer of modern ocean circulation.But, what controls the distribution of barium (Ba) in the oceans?Here, we investigated the Arctic Ocean Ba cycle through a one‐of‐a‐kind data set containing dissolved (dBa), particulate (pBa), and stable isotope Ba ratio (δ¹³⁸Ba) data from four Arctic GEOTRACES expeditions conducted in 2015. We hypothesized that margins would be a substantial source of Ba to the Arctic Ocean water column. The dBa, pBa, and δ¹³⁸Ba distributions all suggest significant modification of inflowing Pacific seawater over the shelves, and the dBa mass balance implies that ∼50% of the dBa inventory (upper 500 m of the Arctic water column) was supplied by nonconservative inputs. Calculated areal dBa fluxes are up to 10 μmol m⁻² day⁻¹on the margin, which is comparable to fluxes described in other regions. Applying this approach to dBa data from the 1994 Arctic Ocean Survey yields similar results. The Canadian Arctic Archipelago did not appear to have a similar margin source; rather, the dBa distribution in this section is consistent with mixing of Arctic Ocean‐derived waters and Baffin Bay‐derived waters. Although we lack enough information to identify the specifics of the shelf sediment Ba source, we suspect that a sedimentary remineralization and terrigenous sources (e.g., submarine groundwater discharge or fluvial particles) are contributors.