The Circum-Arctic Sediment Carbon Database — CASCADE

Jannik Martens, Evgeny Romankevich, Igor Semiletov, Birgit Wild, Bart van Dongen, Jorien Vonk, Tommaso Tesi, Natalia Shakhova, Oleg V. Dudarev, Denis Kosmach, Alexander Vetrov, Leopold Lobkovsky, Nikolay Belyaev, Robie Macdonald, Anna J. Pieńkowski, Timothy I. Eglinton, Negar Haghipour, Salve Dahle, Michael L. Carroll, Emmelie K.L. Åström, Jacqueline M. Grebmeier, Lee W. Cooper, Göran Possnert, and Örjan Gustafsson

The Circum-Arctic Sediment CArbon DatabasE (CASCADE) was established to curate data on concentrations of organic carbon (OC) and total nitrogen (TN), OC isotopes (δ¹³C, Δ¹⁴C), as well as of terrigenous biomarkers and other sediment geochemical and physical properties of surface sediments and sediment cores in the Arctic Ocean. For surface sediments, this first public version of CASCADE includes more than 4000 oceanographic stations with OC concentrations, 2300 records with TN concentrations, 1500 stations with δ¹³C ratios, about 270 stations with Δ¹⁴C values and over 650 records with quantified terrigenous biomarkers (high molecular weight n-alkanes, n-alkanoic acids and lignin phenols). Over 300 sediment cores complement the dataset of surface sediments across the Arctic Ocean by adding another 10500 observations of OC concentrations, over 4700 TN concentrations and over 2100 δ¹³C values to CASCADE.

CASCADE enables synoptic analysis of OC biogeochemical cycling in the Arctic Ocean and facilitates a wide array of future empirical and modelling studies of the Arctic carbon cycle, which is tightly linked to the climate system and vulnerable to climate change. Among others, CASCADE permits studies of OC sources to Arctic Ocean sediments and thus provides insight in land-ocean transport of terrestrial OC from thawing Arctic soils and permafrost systems.

CASCADE is drawn both from the published literature and from yet unpublished records through an extensive international community collaboration. The database is openly and freely available in this repository and will be managed and continuously updated with newly published and contributed data over the foreseeable future at the Bolin Centre for Climate Research at Stockholm University.

Datasets

Surface sediments

Sediment cores

Interpolated carbon data

Citation

Jannik Martens, Evgeny Romankevich, Igor Semiletov, Birgit Wild, Bart van Dongen, Jorien Vonk, Tommaso Tesi, Natalia Shakhova, Oleg V. Dudarev, Denis Kosmach, Alexander Vetrov, Leopold Lobkovsky, Nikolay Belyaev, Robie Macdonald, Anna J. Pieńkowski, Timothy I. Eglinton, Negar Haghipour, Salve Dahle, Michael L. Carroll, Emmelie K.L. Åström, Jacqueline M. Grebmeier, Lee W. Cooper, Göran Possnert, and Örjan Gustafsson (2020) The Circum-Arctic Sediment Carbon Database — CASCADE. Dataset version 1. Bolin Centre Database. https://doi.org/10.17043/cascade-1

References

Jannik Martens, Evgeny Romankevich, Igor Semiletov, Birgit Wild, Bart van Dongen, Jorien Vonk, Tommaso Tesi, Natalia Shakhova, Oleg V. Dudarev, Denis Kosmach, Alexander Vetrov, Leopold Lobkovsky, Nikolay Belyaev, Robie Macdonald, Anna J. Pieńkowski, Timothy I. Eglinton, Negar Haghipour, Salve Dahle, Michael L. Carroll, Emmelie K.L. Åström, Jacqueline M. Grebmeier, Lee W. Cooper, Göran Possnert, and Örjan Gustafsson. CASCADE - The Circum-Arctic Sediment Carbon Database, Submitted to Earth System Science Data, 2021.

Data description

CASCADE includes three different datasets (surface sediments, sediment cores, interpolated surface sediments), which are available as various machine-readable data formats (table format, GIS shapefile, interpolated GeoTIFF).

Comments

Please cite the companion paper in ESSD and the database when using the CASCADE.

The CASCADE is guided and continuously curated by scientists at the Bolin Centre for Climate Change

• Örjan Gustafsson
• Jannik Martens
• Matthias Brakebusch

Contributing Data

If you are interested in contributing your published or unpublished data to CASCADE, please contact Örjan Gustafsson.