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The Mackenzie Estuary of the Arctic Ocean

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Estuaries

Part of the book series: The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry ((HEC5,volume 5H))

Abstract

The Mackenzie Estuary is a seasonally ice covered, deltaic estuary. It receives over 300 km3 of freshwater and 125 × 106 t of sediment annually in a strongly modulated seasonal cycle. Ice cover plays a crucial role in the physical setting by limiting air--sea interaction (energy and gas exchange), reducing mixing, and withdrawing freshwater from the estuary while leaving behind the bulk of the dissolved components. Few studies have been conducted on estuarine processes occurring in this estuary and, although we can project from temperate estuaries what the important conservative and nonconservative processes are likely to be, the winter encroachment by ice sufficiently alters the physical, chemical, and biological processes that projections from other estuaries will likely be wrong. Here we discuss how the estuary evolves through the seasonal cycles of temperature, ice cover, river inflow, particle loadings, and winds, and review what is known of the biogeochemical cycling within the estuary. Given that the Arctic is exceptionally vulnerable to change, especially in the marginal seas, it is safe to predict that remote, pristine estuaries of the Arctic are as much at risk in the future as estuaries more directly impacted by human encroachment.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Tom Weingartner and Mike Schmidt for providing the SeaWiFS satellite images and Patricia Kimber for producing the drawings. Tom Weingartner contributed numerous helpful suggestions to improve an earlier version of the paper. This work was supported by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Strategic Science Fund (RWM) and the National Foundation through Grant OPP-0229473 (YU). We are grateful to numerous colleagues, many of whom are cited here, who have spent hard-fought time collecting data and who have produced the foundation for writing this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Institute of Ocean Sciences, PO Box 6000, V8L 4B2, Sidney, BC, Canada

    Robie W. Macdonald

  2. Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, 1013 NE 40th St., 98105-6698, Seattle, WA, USA

    Yanling Yu

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  1. Robie W. Macdonald
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  2. Yanling Yu
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Correspondence to Robie W. Macdonald .

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Peter J. Wangersky

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Macdonald, R.W., Yu, Y. The Mackenzie Estuary of the Arctic Ocean. In: Wangersky, P.J. (eds) Estuaries. The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry, vol 5H. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/698_5_027

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