Upwelling systems are special places in the oceans where nutrient-enriched water is brought into the euphotic zone to fuel phytoplankton blooms that, via marine food-web interactions, create the world’s richest fish resources. This book introduces the reader to the interdisciplinary science of upwelling and provides a comprehensive overview of the world’s most productive marine ecosystems in the context of climate variability, climate change and human exploitation. This material presented is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate study or just for anyone interested to learn about the creation of life in the oceans and how this is compromised by human activities.

Upwelling is one of the major physical processes driving the biogeochemistry of the ocean system. It dominates primary productivity in the world?s oceans, accounting for 80?90% of new production. However, because of the physical conditions that have to be met to generate upwelling, this production is concentrated in just a few places, e.g., in the coastal waters of major eastern boundary currents off California, Peru, Mauritania, and Namibia, where productivity leads to major fishing grounds. These areas account for about 50% of the world?s fish catch, underlining the importance of upwelling to humankind. Source rocks for oil formed in ancient coastal upwelling environments, making their study useful for improving oil exploration models. Upwelling also occurs in the open ocean, especially along the equator and beneath the westerly winds in the subarctic Pacific and the Southern Ocean, where the ocean?s silica budget is transformed by the deposition of the remains of siliceous phytoplankton. Because phytoplankton, the grass of the sea, can extract CO2 from the atmosphere, changes in the intensity of upwelling and associated biological productivity through time may have influenced climate. This volume uses an interdisciplinary approach to establish how upwelling systems work, how they vary through time, and whether or not they have a significant influence on the global carbon cycle. An understanding of how these largely wind-driven biogeochemical systems work today, and how they responded to past fluctuations in climate, is essential in predicting how they and their associated living resources may change in the future. One conclusion is that these systems exert a major influence on the global cycle of nutrients, a factor that contributes to making the coastal regions major sinks for organic carbon. This book recommends new strategies for observation, sampling, monitoring, experimentation, and modeling as the basis for improving forecasts of the behavior of upwelling systems. It will be of interest to physical oceanographers, marine biologists, fisheries scientists, marine organic and inorganic chemists, marine geologists, petroleum explorers, paleoceanographers, and paleoclimatologists.

The Gulf of Guinea volume is part of a series on the Large Marine Ecosystems. This volume combines the latest research on the Gulf of Guinea from scientists working primarily in the region and from Europe. It covers the dynamics of the oceanic and coastal waters of the region, the major biological resources, pollution in the marine environment and the socio-economics and governance of marine fisheries. A significant number of new data sets, including some which have been repatriated from outside the region, are now made available through this publication.The combination of the various chapters underlines the interlinkages that exist between the interannual and seasonal dynamical behaviour of the oceanic offshore waters and the living marine resources along the coast, and the direct effect they have on the livelihoods of the populations living throughout the Gulf of Guinea.The volume is intended for those who have a general interest in the region as well as those who work professionally in the field. It will also be of immense value to resource managers and policy-makers as a demonstration project on how research can help solve the pressing problems of economic and food security in coastal regions.

In the process of building and using models to comprehend the dynamics of the atmosphere, ocean and climate, the reader will learn how the different components of climate systems function, interact with each other, and vary over time. Topics include the stability of climate, Earths energy balance, parcel dynamics in the atmosphere, the mechanisms of heat transport in the climate system, and mechanisms of climate variability. Special attention is given to the effects of climate change.

Marine phosphorites, the principal raw material for phosphatic fertilizers, do not occur uniformly through time and space. The origin of these unusual sedimentary rocks appears to be related mainly to marine biological productivity, often associated with upwelling currents during certain intervals of geological time. This book examines the environmental setting and resulting phosphorites which formed during the Miocene, one of the major and most recent phosphogenic periods throughout the geologic record. In addition, an oceanographic perspective is given by investigations of modern oceanic environments where phosphorites are presently forming. Together, the geologic and marine approaches provide a complete outlook on this important mineral resource. This book is the third of four reference volumes which together cover the achievements of the International Geological Correlation Programme Project 156 (Phosphorites) during the ten years of the project's existence.