The ANTARES Neutrino Telescope was completed in May 2008 and is the first operational Neutrino Telescope in the Mediterranean Sea. The main purpose of the detector is to perform neutrino astronomy and the apparatus also offers facilities for marine and Earth sciences. This paper describes the design, the construction and the installation of the telescope in the deep sea, offshore from Toulon in France. An illustration of the detector performance is given. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Viruses are the most abundant biological organisms of the world's oceans. Viral infections are a substantial source of mortality in a range of organisms-including autotrophic and heterotrophic plankton-but their impact on the deep ocean and benthic biosphere is completely unknown. Here we report that viral production in deep-sea benthic ecosystems worldwide is extremely high, and that viral infections are responsible for the abatement of 80% of prokaryotic heterotrophic production. Virus-induced prokaryotic mortality increases with increasing water depth, and beneath a depth of 1,000 m nearly all of the prokaryotic heterotrophic production is transformed into organic detritus. The viral shunt, releasing on a global scale approximately 0.37-0.63 gigatonnes of carbon per year, is an essential source of labile organic detritus in the deep-sea ecosystems. This process sustains a high prokaryotic biomass and provides an important contribution to prokaryotic metabolism, allowing the system to cope with the severe organic resource limitation of deep-sea ecosystems. Our results indicate that viruses have an important role in global biogeochemical cycles, in deep-sea metabolism and the overall functioning of the largest ecosystem of our biosphere.
The global carbon cycle is affected by biological processes in the oceans, which export carbon from surface waters in form of organic matter and store it at depth; a process called the 'biological carbon pump'. Most of the exported organic carbon is processed by the water column biota, which ultimately converts it into CO2 via respiration (remineralization). Variations in the resulting decrease in organic flux with depth 9 can, according to models, lead to changes in atmospheric CO 2 of up to 200 ppm 3 , indicating a strong coupling between biological activity in the ocean interior and oceanic storage of CO 2 .A key constraint in the analysis of carbon fluxes in the twilight zone is that, at steady state, the attenuation of particulate organic carbon (POC) flux with depth should be balanced by community metabolism. Published estimates of POC flux attenuation with depth are, however, up to 2 orders of magnitude lower than corresponding estimates of heterotrophic metabolism [4][5][6][7] . This discrepancy indicates that either estimates of POC flux and/or community metabolism are unreliable, or that additional, unaccounted for, sources of organic carbon to the twilight zone exist 8 .We compiled a comprehensive carbon budget of the twilight zone based on an based on the ratio between DOC concentrations and apparent oxygen utilization 15 , and on DOC gradients coupled to turbulent diffusivity measured from previous work at the study site 16 (Methods; Extended Data Fig. 2). DOC was estimated to supply 17% of total export in agreement with previous estimates of 9-20% across the North Atlantic basin 17 . Organic matter input via lateral advection was assumed to be negligible based on analyses of back-trajectories (derived from satellite-derived near-surface velocities over 3 months) of the water masses arriving at the PAP site during the study period, which suggested that the water had not passed over the continental slope (Extended Data Fig. 1b). The final source of DOC, excretion at depth by active flux, was estimated using net samples of zooplankton biomass and allometric equations 6,18 , giving a supply of 3 mg C m -2 d -1 . Defecation and mortality at depth present further sources of organic carbon to the twilight zone, but these were excluded from the budget due to large uncertainties associated with their estimation. Finally, chemolithoautotrophy has been suggested to be a significant source of organic matter in the deep ocean 19 , but without strong evidence that this poorly understood process could provide a major contribution at our study site, we chose to exclude it from our carbon budget.The remineralization of organic carbon by zooplankton and prokaryotes was estimated from zooplankton biomass and prokaryotic activity. It is crucial to note that in a steady state system, such as we assume this to be, organic carbon is lost from the system only by export or by remineralization. We focus entirely on community respiration as a measure of remineralization, a fundamental advance over previous methods to derive...
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