Kremer 9317380 Models and estimates of primary production and biogeochemical cycling in the Southern Ocean must account for processes occurring in at least four distinct regions: the open ocean, the marginal ice edge zones, the pack ice zone, and the coastal regions. Of these regions, the least studied is the pack ice zone, where rates of primary production and nutrient cycling remain unknown. This is due to it's relative inaccessibility and the present lack of remote sensing technology to evaluate the potential for primary production in ice or ice covered waters. Therefore, assessing primary production and nutrient cycling in pack ice requires either ice breaking capabilities and/or the establishment of temporary remote facilities. During 1992, the first drifting ice station in Antarctic waters, Ice station Weddell #1 (ISW-1) was established in the perennial pack ice of the Western Weddell Sea. ISW-1 provided a platform for conducting the first time-series investigations assessing primary production, nutrient cycling and net accumulation of biogenic particulate matter in Antarctic pack ice. During ISW-1 operation, additional ice cores were obtained by the ice physics group and are now archived at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratories (CRREL). Processing these cores for the determination of biomass (as pigments, particulate organic carbon and nitrogen) and biogenic silica will compliment the existing ISW- 1 biological data set, and extend the assessment of the new production/accumulation of biogenic particulate matter to include additional study sites and ice types that were not analyzed during routine ISW-1 operations. Additionally, studies of primary production, biomass distributions and nutrients in pack ice will be extended to the Bellingshausen and Amundsen seas through a cruise in August and September 1993. This project will provide the resources and time necessary for processing samples collected at CRREL and from the Bellingshau sen-Amundsen seas and for the interpretation of the results. The data sets generated from ISW-1 operations and the Bellingshausen-Amundsen cruise will extend the knowledge of the relative contribution of biogenic particulate matter in the Southern Ocean and will be utilized in the construction of or as verification of pack ice primary production and nutrient cycling models presently under development. ***
