Toward tracing routes of bottom waters in the Eastern Mediterranean basin using a multidisciplinary approach

We use near-bottom measurements of total mercury, biopolymeric carbon and its constituents, microbial activities, and bacterial diversity to attempt tracing routes of convectively generated bottom waters toward the abyss of the Eastern Mediterranean basin. The advantage of employing these parameters -which are often linked to persistent biological activities rather than to episodic flow phenomena- to complement the traditionally used ones (temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen) is twofold: they can yield valuable information even when the values of temperature and salinity in competing sources are virtually indistinguishable and they can allow also for a spatial and temporal integration of the export of newly formed deep waters. In our case study -the Eastern Mediterranean basin, which can be considered as a miniature global ocean - the proposed method seems to be able to capture two different exporting routes from the northern convective source and one exporting route from the eastern convective source, thus elucidating further aspects of the structure and variability of the local deep stratification....