Abstract

Sediment traps were moored at three stations in Sechelt Inlet, a fjord in southern British Columbia, Canada, for five one-month deployment periods from late January to late June, 1991. On each mooring were traps at three depths; total and constituent fluxes often increased with depth. We present the flux data and describe an analytical model that is based on a set of simultaneous equations for which two unknowns are the decay rate of material representatively caught by two vertically-separated sediment traps and the composition of material causing observed increases in flux with depth. The unknowns are solved in a least-squares sense and the results indicate that 60–71% of organic carbon, 57–62% of nitrogen and 41–48% of biogenic silica were lost from the particulate phase over a 200 m depth interval during the study. The results also suggest that material contributing additional fluxes to deep traps was compositionally similar to material settling from traps above.

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