http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset/1002805
eng; USA
utf8
dataset
Highest level of data collection, from a common set of sensors or instrumentation, usually within the same research project
Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO)
Unavailable
508-289-2009
WHOI MS#36
Woods Hole
MA
02543
USA
info@bco-dmo.org
http://www.bco-dmo.org
Monday - Friday 8:00am - 5:00pm
For questions regarding this resource, please contact BCO-DMO via the email address provided.
pointOfContact
2026-07-23
ISO 19115-2 Geographic Information - Metadata - Part 2: Extensions for Imagery and Gridded Data
ISO 19115-2:2009(E)
Radiocarbon, stable carbon isotope and C/N composition of Amazon River particulate organic carbon (POC) from samples collected aboard the R/V Mirage in May of 2023
2026-07-23
publication
2026-07-23
revision
BCO-DMO Linked Data URI
2026-07-23
creation
http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset/1002805
Valier Galy
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
principalInvestigator
Brad Rosenheim
University of South Florida
principalInvestigator
Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO)
Unavailable
508-289-2009
WHOI MS#36
Woods Hole
MA
02543
USA
info@bco-dmo.org
http://www.bco-dmo.org
Monday - Friday 8:00am - 5:00pm
For questions regarding this resource, please contact BCO-DMO via the email address provided.
publisher
Cite this dataset as: Galy, V., Rosenheim, B. (2026) Radiocarbon, stable carbon isotope and C/N composition of Amazon River particulate organic carbon (POC) from samples collected aboard the R/V Mirage in May of 2023. Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO). (Version 1) Version Date 2026-07-23 [if applicable, indicate subset used]. http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset/1002805 [access date]
Dataset Description: <p>Acronyms:<br />
IRMS = Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometer<br />
MICADAS = MIni CArbon DAting System<br />
NIST = National Institute of Standards and Technology<br />
ETH = Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich)<br />
POC = Particulate Organic Carbon<br />
Fm = Fraction Modern radiocarbon<br />
PES = Polyethersulfone (filter material)</p> Methods and Sampling: <p>Riverine suspended sediment was collected in a 2023 sampling campaign aboard the R/V Mirage, via a depth-specific horizontal isokinetic sampler as in Rosengard et al. (2024), and buckets for surface sample collection. 9.5-95 L samples were collected and stored &lt;24 hours in 9.5 L polyethylene bags before filtering through filtration units through PES filters (120mm; 0.2μm pore size) and frozen at -20 °C. Bed sediments were retrieved via bottom grab sampling.&nbsp; Bank sediments and flood deposits were scooped using a clean small metal shovel. Samples were stored in clean plastic bags and kept frozen at -20 °C.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Bed sediments were freeze-dried and homogenized, and suspended sediments were recovered from PES filters with MilliQ and freeze-dried. Sub-samples were taken for bulk organic carbon and nitrogen analyses, and 14C measurements. After decarbonation over HCl fumes (12N HCl) at 60°C for 72h, samples were measured on a Fisons elemental analyzer coupled to a Finnigan Delta-Plus isotope ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS) as described in Whiteside et al. (2011). All analyses were conducted in triplicate. The results only report the averages of the triplicate measurements. Analytical precision obtained by replicate measurements of NIST 2702 (Inorganics in Marine Sediment) was ±0.20‰ for d13C. 14C measurement was completed at ETH Zurich on a MIni CArbon DAting System (MICADAS).&nbsp;</p>
Funding provided by NSF Division of Ocean Sciences (NSF OCE) Award Number: OCE-1851309 Award URL: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award?AWD_ID=1851309
onGoing
Valier Galy
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
508-289-2340
266 Woods Hole Rd. FYE 107D, Mail Stop 04
Woods Hole
MA
02543
USA
vgaly@whoi.edu
pointOfContact
Brad Rosenheim
University of South Florida
727-553-3354
140 7th Avenue S
Saint Petersburg
FL
33701
US
brosenheim@usf.edu
pointOfContact
asNeeded
Dataset Version: 1
Unknown
sample_number
date
latitude
longitude
sample_type
depth
Fm
D14C
d13C
C_N
Fisons elemental analyzer
Finnigan Delta-Plus isotope ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS)
Depth-specific horizontal isokinetic sampler (Rosengard et al., 2024)
theme
None, User defined
sample identification
No BCO-DMO term
latitude
longitude
sample type
depth
Fraction modern
radioactive isotope concentration
d13C
Carbon to Nitrogen ratio (C:N)
featureType
BCO-DMO Standard Parameters
Elemental Analyzer
Isotope-ratio Mass Spectrometer
no_bcodmo_term
instrument
BCO-DMO Standard Instruments
otherRestrictions
otherRestrictions
Access Constraints: none. Use Constraints: Please follow guidelines at: http://www.bco-dmo.org/terms-use Distribution liability: Under no circumstances shall BCO-DMO be liable for any direct, incidental, special, consequential, indirect, or punitive damages that result from the use of, or the inability to use, the materials in this data submission. If you are dissatisfied with any materials in this data submission your sole and exclusive remedy is to discontinue use.
Collaborative Research: What Happens to Terrestrial Organic Matter in the Ocean? Solving the Mystery Behind an Iconic Question
https://osprey.bco-dmo.org/project/907917
Collaborative Research: What Happens to Terrestrial Organic Matter in the Ocean? Solving the Mystery Behind an Iconic Question
<p><strong>NSF Award Abstract:</strong><br />
The Amazon River is one of the largest and most important rivers in the world. It not only carries water through the Amazon rain forests, it also carries mud - lots of mud. This mud settles when the river joins the ocean, forming the Amazon delta. Waves and wind re-suspend some of this mud, which forms mud banks that slowly move from the coast of Brazil, to French Guiana, Suriname, and Guyana. Not only do these mud banks shape the coastlines of these areas, but they also serve as a storage for carbon that had been removed from the atmosphere by the Amazon rainforest, dropped to the forest floor and washed into the river, ultimately transported on particles of mud into the Amazon delta. Normally, this represents a transfer of carbon from the atmosphere to the sediment and rock record, hiding it away for thousands to millions of years and participating in the natural regulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. However, the Amazon's special case of mud banks that travel hundreds of miles along the coast has long been believed to stir up this carbon and release most of it back to the atmosphere. This idea has held for decades, but if wrong, may have a large impact on our understanding of the ocean's carbon cycle. This research will use new science and technology to change the way we look at river carbon cycling in the ocean by sampling the mud banks, ocean waters, and Amazon River waters more thoroughly than has been previously done, with the aim to understand and quantify the storage of land-derived carbon in marine mudbank sediments offshore the Amazon River. This research will serve as the core of two Ph.D. dissertations and will interface with the Woods Hole Partnership Educational Program (PEP) to provide under-represented minority college students an opportunity to gain practical experience in marine and environmental sciences. The project will also be incorporated into the Saint Petersburg Science Fest, an event that brings several thousand school children to University of South Florida campus during one weekend every autumn to showcase different research projects and initiatives.</p>
<p>Twenty years ago, John Hedges posed a seminal question pertaining to the role of the ocean in the carbon cycle: "what happens to terrestrial organic matter in the oceans?" That question was set upon a conundrum - because riverine organic matter is highly degraded, it should be expected to suffer minimal respiration in the ocean, yet by most accounts continental margins seem to be incinerators of terrestrial organic matter. However, much of this paradigm was originally built upon biogeochemical studies of the Amazon sub-aqueous delta and the mobile fluidized mudbanks along the Guianas coast. However, preliminary state of the art characterizations of organic carbon in Amazon River and mudbank sediments suggest that a fraction of terrestrial organic carbon is actually not refractory and as such is rapidly and efficiently oxidized in the ocean, whereas another fraction is refractory and is in fact quantitatively preserved in marine sediments. Overall, the data suggest an underestimation of burial efficiency in the realm of 50-100%. This proposal focuses on gaining a transformative mechanistic and quantitative understanding of the fate of terrestrial organic carbon in the coastal ocean offshore of the Amazon River. This will be done through i) sampling the marine province offshore of the Guianas coast (the Guianas mudbanks) as well as the Amazon River delta, using a shallow-draft research vessel and ii) using novel state of the art geochemical analysis of organic carbon - in particular ramped oxidation and compound specific radiocarbon analysis - and elemental composition to demonstrate the selective nature of terrestrial organic carbon oxidation and provide new estimates of burial efficiency of this system - with implications for the global inventory of terrestrial organic carbon in the ocean.</p>
<p>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.</p>
MUDBENCS
largerWorkCitation
project
eng; USA
oceans
-51.019
-49.8506
-0.2933
0.767
2023-05-01
2023-05-12
Atlantic Ocean coastal waters, Brazil, French Guiana, Suriname
0
BCO-DMO catalogue of parameters from Radiocarbon, stable carbon isotope and C/N composition of Amazon River particulate organic carbon (POC) from samples collected aboard the R/V Mirage in May of 2023
Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO)
Unavailable
508-289-2009
WHOI MS#36
Woods Hole
MA
02543
USA
info@bco-dmo.org
http://www.bco-dmo.org
Monday - Friday 8:00am - 5:00pm
For questions regarding this resource, please contact BCO-DMO via the email address provided.
pointOfContact
http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset-parameter/1003222.rdf
Name: sample_number
Units: unitless
Description: <p>sample ID</p>
http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset-parameter/1003223.rdf
Name: date
Units: units
Description: <p>description</p>
http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset-parameter/1003224.rdf
Name: latitude
Units: decimal degrees
Description: <p>sampling location latitude</p>
http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset-parameter/1003226.rdf
Name: longitude
Units: decimal degrees
Description: <p>sampling location longitude</p>
http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset-parameter/1003228.rdf
Name: sample_type
Units: unitless
Description: <p>sample type description (e.g. 'POC_SS'). Label suffixes: SS = suspended sediment; BL = bedload; bank = bank flood deposits</p>
http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset-parameter/1003229.rdf
Name: depth
Units: meters (m)
Description: <p>sample depth</p>
http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset-parameter/1003231.rdf
Name: Fm
Units: unitless
Description: <p>radiocarbon activity expressed as fraction modern</p>
http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset-parameter/1003232.rdf
Name: D14C
Units: per mil (‰)
Description: <p>radiocarbon activity expressed as capital delta</p>
http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset-parameter/1003233.rdf
Name: d13C
Units: per mil (‰)
Description: <p>stable C isotope composition (relative to VPDB).</p>
http://lod.bco-dmo.org/id/dataset-parameter/1003234.rdf
Name: C_N
Units: unitless
Description: <p>carbon to nitrogen ratio (mol/mol)</p>
GB/NERC/BODC > British Oceanographic Data Centre, Natural Environment Research Council, United Kingdom
Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO)
Unavailable
508-289-2009
WHOI MS#36
Woods Hole
MA
02543
USA
info@bco-dmo.org
http://www.bco-dmo.org
Monday - Friday 8:00am - 5:00pm
For questions regarding this resource, please contact BCO-DMO via the email address provided.
pointOfContact
https://osprey.bco-dmo.org/dataset/1002805/data/download
download
onLine
dataset
<p>Riverine suspended sediment was collected in a 2023 sampling campaign aboard the R/V Mirage, via a depth-specific horizontal isokinetic sampler as in Rosengard et al. (2024), and buckets for surface sample collection. 9.5-95 L samples were collected and stored &lt;24 hours in 9.5 L polyethylene bags before filtering through filtration units through PES filters (120mm; 0.2μm pore size) and frozen at -20 °C. Bed sediments were retrieved via bottom grab sampling.&nbsp; Bank sediments and flood deposits were scooped using a clean small metal shovel. Samples were stored in clean plastic bags and kept frozen at -20 °C.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Bed sediments were freeze-dried and homogenized, and suspended sediments were recovered from PES filters with MilliQ and freeze-dried. Sub-samples were taken for bulk organic carbon and nitrogen analyses, and 14C measurements. After decarbonation over HCl fumes (12N HCl) at 60°C for 72h, samples were measured on a Fisons elemental analyzer coupled to a Finnigan Delta-Plus isotope ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS) as described in Whiteside et al. (2011). All analyses were conducted in triplicate. The results only report the averages of the triplicate measurements. Analytical precision obtained by replicate measurements of NIST 2702 (Inorganics in Marine Sediment) was ±0.20‰ for d13C. 14C measurement was completed at ETH Zurich on a MIni CArbon DAting System (MICADAS).&nbsp;</p>
Specified by the Principal Investigator(s)
Draft data:
- Loaded data from "BCO DMO upload_1.xlsx" (sheet "Table 1"), using row 1 as header, skipping row 2 with additional unit information. Loaded with "" and "nd" treated as missing values; table named "1002805_v1_amazon_isotopes_poc_cn".
* Note: the skipped row 2 contained additional units information for the columns which is provided structurally in the BCO-DMO dataset under "parameters"
- Applied BCO-DMO metadata (descriptions, standard name IDs, supplied units) to columns: sample number, Date, Latitude, Longidude, sample type, C/N, d13C, D14C, Fm, and C_N; latitude and longitude flagged as primary parameters
- Renamed columns: "sample number" to sample_number, "Date" to date, "Latitude" to latitude, "Longidude" to longitude, "sample type" to sample_type, "C/N" to C_N
- Metadata comment lines in the data file were added to structured metadata fields. The loaded table was filtered so only column names and rows were imported from the source file.
- Date column imported as date with blank times. Stripped blank times from date column. Converted from Excel-parsed ISO datetime format (%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S) to date-only string format (%Y-%m-%d), following ISO convention and removing blank time values
- Set column types: sample_number and sample_type as string; latitude, longitude, C_N, D14C, Fm, d13C as number; date with format %Y-%m-%d
- Numeric values imported from Excel imported as long decimals. Rounding applied so it matched the supplied format when viewed in Excel. Rounded latitude and longitude to 5 decimal places, Fm to 2 decimal places, d13C and C_N to 1 decimal place, and D14C to 0 decimal places (converted to integer);
- Reset types after rounding: D14C as integer, all other numeric columns unchanged
- Output written to "1002805_v1_amazon_isotopes_poc_cn.csv"
Dataset Version 1:
- The data submitter revised the output from the draft described above "1002805_v1_amazon_isotopes_poc_cn.csv" and provided an updated file "1002805_v1_amazon_isotopes_poc_cn_VG.xlsx" which corrected one sample name and added a column for depth in meters.
- Loaded data from "1002805_v1_amazon_isotopes_poc_cn_VG.xlsx" (sheet 1, header row 1, skipping row 2) with missing values defined as empty string and "nd"
- Applied metadata (descriptions, standard name IDs, units) to columns: sample_number, sample_type, date, latitude, longitude, depth, d13C, D14C, Fm, C_N
- Converted date column from ISO datetime format ("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S") to "%Y-%m-%d" string output, formatted in ISO convention with blank time values removed
- Set column types: C_N, Fm, d13C, latitude, longitude as number; D14C, depth as integer; sample_number, sample_type as string; date as date with format "%Y-%m-%d"
- Updated package-level metadata with field-level statistics (counts, min/max values) for the main table and a unique lat/lon table
- Output written to 1002805_v1_amazon_isotopes_poc_cn.csv
Specified by BCO-DMO Data Managers
asNeeded
7.x-1.1
Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO)
Unavailable
508-289-2009
WHOI MS#36
Woods Hole
MA
02543
USA
info@bco-dmo.org
http://www.bco-dmo.org
Monday - Friday 8:00am - 5:00pm
For questions regarding this resource, please contact BCO-DMO via the email address provided.
pointOfContact
Fisons elemental analyzer
Fisons elemental analyzer
PI Supplied Instrument Name: Fisons elemental analyzer PI Supplied Instrument Description:Fisons elemental analyzer coupled to a Finnigan Delta-Plus isotope ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS). Instrument Name: Elemental Analyzer Instrument Short Name: Instrument Description: Instruments that quantify carbon, nitrogen and sometimes other elements by combusting the sample at very high temperature and assaying the resulting gaseous oxides. Usually used for samples including organic material. Community Standard Description: http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/L05/current/LAB01/
Finnigan Delta-Plus isotope ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS)
Finnigan Delta-Plus isotope ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS)
PI Supplied Instrument Name: Finnigan Delta-Plus isotope ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS) PI Supplied Instrument Description:Fisons elemental analyzer coupled to a Finnigan Delta-Plus isotope ratio mass spectrometer (IRMS). Instrument Name: Isotope-ratio Mass Spectrometer Instrument Short Name:IR Mass Spec; IRMS Instrument Description: The Isotope-ratio Mass Spectrometer is a particular type of mass spectrometer used to measure the relative abundance of isotopes in a given sample (e.g. VG Prism II Isotope Ratio Mass-Spectrometer). Community Standard Description: http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/L05/current/LAB16/
Depth-specific horizontal isokinetic sampler (Rosengard et al., 2024)
Depth-specific horizontal isokinetic sampler (Rosengard et al., 2024)
PI Supplied Instrument Name: Depth-specific horizontal isokinetic sampler (Rosengard et al., 2024) PI Supplied Instrument Description:Riverine suspended sediment was collected in a 2023 sampling campaign aboard the R/V Mirage, via a depth-specific horizontal isokinetic sampler as in Rosengard et al. (2024). Instrument Name: no_bcodmo_term Instrument Short Name: Instrument Description: No relevant match in BCO-DMO instrument vocabulary. Community Standard Description: http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/collection/L05/current/999/