Definition
Two factors are important in the reconstruction of past productivity:
- 1.
The biogenic flux (organic and inorganic biogenic material formed at the surface that sinks to the deep ocean)
- 2.
The availability of nutrients, especially phosphate and nitrogen
Various methods are employed for reconstructing past productivity in the ocean. Paleoproductivity is not directly measureable so it has to be derived from “surrogate data” that are closely related to the environmental parameters. These are thus referred to as proxy variables or, for short, proxies (see Wefer et al., 1999 for a review). A proxy is a measureable parameter for variables that were observable in the past (but no longer are today). As a general rule, paleoproductivity proxies record conditions in the sunlit surface waters. There is, however, another approach for estimating productivity in surface waters from material produced on the seafloor. Herguera and Berger (1994) used the abundance of benthic foraminifera in...
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Wefer, G. (2016). Paleoproductivity. In: White, W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geochemistry. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39193-9_130-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39193-9_130-1
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