Articles | Volume 12, issue 4
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-3367-2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-3367-2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Deep-sea sediments of the global ocean
Geological Survey of Norway (NGU), P.O. Box 6315, Torgarden, 7491
Trondheim, Norway
Related authors
Markus Diesing, Marija Sciberras, Terje Thorsnes, Lilja Bjarnadottir, and Øyvind Moe
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-2159, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-2159, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
Dragging fishing nets across the seafloor might lead to the release of carbon dioxide, potentially leading to negative consequences such as the ocean turning sour and the planet heating up even more quickly. Protecting areas of the seabed from such human activities could help reduce negative consequences, but which places should be protected? We present a new method to map areas of the seabed offshore Norway which are most at risk and could be considered for protection.
Mark Chatting, Markus Diesing, William Ross Hunter, Anthony Grey, Brian P. Kelleher, and Mark Coughlan
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-661, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-661, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
Marine sediments store carbon and are critical in the global carbon cycle, but data gaps reduce the accuracy of carbon stock estimates. This study improves estimates in the Irish Sea by refining key data inputs. Using machine learning and bias adjustments, the new model suggests previous estimates overestimated carbon stocks by 31.4 %. The findings highlight the need for more accurate sediment measurements to guide environmental policies and better protect carbon storage in marine ecosystems.
Markus Diesing, Terje Thorsnes, and Lilja Rún Bjarnadóttir
Biogeosciences, 18, 2139–2160, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-2139-2021, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-2139-2021, 2021
Short summary
Short summary
The upper 10 cm of the seafloor of the North Sea and Skagerrak contain 231×106 t of carbon in organic form. The Norwegian Trough, the deepest sedimentary basin in the studied area, stands out as a zone of strong organic carbon accumulation with rates on par with neighbouring fjords. Conversely, large parts of the North Sea are characterised by rapid organic carbon degradation and negligible accumulation. This dual character is likely typical for continental shelf sediments worldwide.
Markus Diesing, Marija Sciberras, Terje Thorsnes, Lilja Bjarnadottir, and Øyvind Moe
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-2159, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-2159, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
Dragging fishing nets across the seafloor might lead to the release of carbon dioxide, potentially leading to negative consequences such as the ocean turning sour and the planet heating up even more quickly. Protecting areas of the seabed from such human activities could help reduce negative consequences, but which places should be protected? We present a new method to map areas of the seabed offshore Norway which are most at risk and could be considered for protection.
Mark Chatting, Markus Diesing, William Ross Hunter, Anthony Grey, Brian P. Kelleher, and Mark Coughlan
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-661, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-661, 2025
Short summary
Short summary
Marine sediments store carbon and are critical in the global carbon cycle, but data gaps reduce the accuracy of carbon stock estimates. This study improves estimates in the Irish Sea by refining key data inputs. Using machine learning and bias adjustments, the new model suggests previous estimates overestimated carbon stocks by 31.4 %. The findings highlight the need for more accurate sediment measurements to guide environmental policies and better protect carbon storage in marine ecosystems.
Markus Diesing, Terje Thorsnes, and Lilja Rún Bjarnadóttir
Biogeosciences, 18, 2139–2160, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-2139-2021, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-2139-2021, 2021
Short summary
Short summary
The upper 10 cm of the seafloor of the North Sea and Skagerrak contain 231×106 t of carbon in organic form. The Norwegian Trough, the deepest sedimentary basin in the studied area, stands out as a zone of strong organic carbon accumulation with rates on par with neighbouring fjords. Conversely, large parts of the North Sea are characterised by rapid organic carbon degradation and negligible accumulation. This dual character is likely typical for continental shelf sediments worldwide.
Cited articles
Assis, J., Tyberghein, L., Bosch, S., Verbruggen, H., Serrão, E. A., and
De Clerck, O.: Bio-ORACLE v2.0: Extending marine data layers for bioclimatic
modelling, Glob. Ecol. Biogeogr., 27, 277–284, https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.12693,
2018.
Berger, W. H.: Deep-Sea Sedimentation, in: The Geology of Continental
Margins, edited by: Burk, C. A. and Drake, C. L., Springer Berlin and
Heidelberg, Germany, 213–241, 1974.
Breiman, L.: Classification And Regression Trees, Routledge, New York, USA,
1984.
Breiman, L.: Random Forests, Mach. Learn., 45, 5–32, 2001.
Che Hasan, R., Ierodiaconou, D., and Monk, J.: Evaluation of Four Supervised
Learning Methods for Benthic Habitat Mapping Using Backscatter from
Multi-Beam Sonar, Remote Sens., 4, 3427–3443, 2012.
Chen, C., Liaw, A., and Breiman, L.: Using Random Forest to Learn Imbalanced
Data, available at:
https://statistics.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/tech-reports/666.pdf (last access: 7 December 2020),
2004.
Congalton, R. G.: A review of assessing the accuracy of classifications of
remotely sensed data, Remote Sens. Environ., 37, 35–46, 1991.
Cortes, C. and Vapnik, V.: Support-vector networks, Mach. Learn., 20,
273–297, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00994018, 1995.
Cutler, D., Edwards, T., Beards, K., Cutler, A., Hess, K., Gibson, J., and
Lawler, J.: Random Forests for classification in Ecology, Ecology, 88,
2783–2792, 2007.
Danovaro, R., Snelgrove, P. V. R., and Tyler, P.: Challenging the paradigms
of deep-sea ecology, Trends Ecol. Evol., 29, 465–475,
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.TREE.2014.06.002, 2014.
Diesing, M.: Deep-sea sediments of the global ocean mapped with Random
Forest machine learning algorithm, PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.911692,
2020.
Diesing, M. and Nüst, D.: Global Deep-Sea Sediments, available at: https://o2r.uni-muenster.de/#/erc/GWME2voTDb5oeaQFuTWMCEMveKS1MiXm, last access: 7 December 2020.
Diesing, M. and Thorsnes, T.: Mapping of Cold-Water Coral Carbonate Mounds
Based on Geomorphometric Features: An Object-Based Approach, Geosciences,
8, 34, https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences8020034, 2018.
Diesing, M., Kröger, S., Parker, R., Jenkins, C., Mason, C., and Weston,
K.: Predicting the standing stock of organic carbon in surface sediments of
the North-West European continental shelf, Biogeochemistry, 135,
183–200, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-017-0310-4, 2017.
Dutkiewicz, A., Müller, R. D., O'Callaghan, S., and Jónasson, H.:
Census of seafloor sediments in the world's ocean, Geology, 43, 795–798,
https://doi.org/10.1130/G36883.1, 2015.
Dutkiewicz, A., O'Callaghan, S., and Müller, R. D.: Controls on the
distribution of deep-sea sediments, Geochem. Geophys. Geosy.,
17, 3075–3098, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GC006428, 2016.
ESRI: World Continents, available at:
https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=a3cb207855b348a297ab85261743351d
(last access: 24 August 2017), 2010.
GEBCO: The GEBCO_2014 Grid, version 20150318, availabe at: http://www.gebco.net (last access: 24 January 2019), 2015.
Guisan, A. and Zimmermann, N. E.: Predictive habitat distribution models in
ecology, Ecol. Modell., 135, 147–186,
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-3800(00)00354-9, 2000.
Guyon, I. and Elisseeff, A.: An Introduction to Variable and Feature
Selection, J. Mach. Learn. Res., 3, 1157–1182, 2003.
Harris, P. T., Macmillan-Lawler, M., Rupp, J., and Baker, E. K.:
Geomorphology of the oceans, Mar. Geol., 352, 4–24,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.margeo.2014.01.011, 2014.
Huang, Z., Siwabessy, J., Nichol, S. L., and Brooke, B. P.: Predictive
mapping of seabed substrata using high-resolution multibeam sonar data: A
case study from a shelf with complex geomorphology, Mar. Geol., 357, 37–52,
2014.
James, G., Witten, D., Hastie, T., and Tibshirani, R.: Tree-Based Methods, in:
An Introduction to Statistical Learning, Springer, New York, USA, 303–335,
2013.
Kuhn, M.: Building Predictive Models in R Using the caret Package, J. Stat.
Software, 1, 1–26, https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v028.i05, 2008.
Kursa, M. and Rudnicki, W.: Feature selection with the Boruta Package, J.
Stat. Softw., 36, 1–11, 2010.
Lambeck, K., Rouby, H., Purcell, A., Sun, Y., and Sambridge, M.: Sea level
and global ice volumes from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene, Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci., 111, 15296–15303, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1411762111, 2014.
Liaw, A. and Wiener, M.: Classification and regression by randomForest, R
News, 2, 18–22, https://doi.org/10.1159/000323281, 2002.
Lisitzin, A. P.: Distribution of siliceous microfossils in suspension and in
bottom sediments, in: The Micropaleontology of Oceans, edited by: Funnell, B. M. and Reidel, W. R., Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK, 173–195, 1971.
Luts, J., Ojeda, F., Plas, R., Van De Moor, B., De Huffel, S., and Van
Suykens, J. A. K.: A tutorial on support vector machine-based methods for
classification problems in chemometrics, Anal. Chim. Acta, 665, 129–145,
2010.
Mastrandrea, M. D., Mach, K. J., Plattner, G. K., Edenhofer, O., Stocker, T.
F., Field, C. B., Ebi, K. L., and Matschoss, P. R.: The IPCC AR5 guidance
note on consistent treatment of uncertainties: A common approach across the
working groups, Clim. Change, 108, 675, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0178-6, 2011.
Millard, K. and Richardson, M.: On the importance of training data sample
selection in random forest image classification: A case study in peatland
ecosystem mapping, Remote Sens., 7, 8489–8515, https://doi.org/10.3390/rs70708489,
2015.
Minasny, B. and McBratney, A. B.: A conditioned Latin hypercube method for
sampling in the presence of ancillary information, Comput. Geosci., 32,
1378–1388, https://doi.org/10.1016/J.CAGEO.2005.12.009, 2006.
Misiuk, B., Diesing, M., Aitken, A., Brown, C. J., Edinger, E. N., and Bell,
T.: A spatially explicit comparison of quantitative and categorical
modelling approaches for mapping seabed sediments using random forest,
Geosciences, 9, 254, https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences9060254, 2019.
Nilsson, R., Peña, J. M., Björkegren, J., and Tegnér, J.:
Consistent feature selection for pattern recognition in polynomial time, J.
Mach. Learn. Res., 8, 589–612, 2007.
Olofsson, P., Foody, G. M., Herold, M., Stehman, S. V, Woodcock, C. E., and
Wulder, M. A.: Good practices for estimating area and assessing accuracy of
land change, Remote Sens. Environ., 148, 42–57,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2014.02.015, 2014.
Prasad, A. M., Iverson, L. R., and Liaw, A.: Newer classification and
regression tree techniques: Bagging and random forests for ecological
prediction, Ecosystems, 9, 181–199, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-005-0054-1, 2006.
Probst, P.: Performance Measures for Statistical Learning, availabe at:
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/measures/measures.pdf (last access: 7 December 2020), 2018.
R Core Team: R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing, 2018.
Roberts, D. R., Bahn, V., Ciuti, S., Boyce, M. S., Elith, J.,
Guillera-Arroita, G., Hauenstein, S., Lahoz-Monfort, J. J., Schröder,
B., Thuiller, W., Warton, D. I., Wintle, B. A., Hartig, F., and Dormann, C.
F.: Cross-validation strategies for data with temporal, spatial,
hierarchical, or phylogenetic structure, Ecography, 40, 913–929,
https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.02881, 2017.
Sbrocco, E. J. and Barber, P. H.: MARSPEC: ocean climate layers for marine
spatial ecology, Ecology, 94, 979, https://doi.org/10.1890/12-1358.1, 2013.
Seibold, E.: Der Meeresboden Forschungsstand und Zukunftsaufgaben,
Naturwissenschaften, 62, 321–330, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00608892, 1975.
Seibold, E. and Berger, W. H.: The sea floor, An introduction to marine
geology, 3rd edition, Springer, Berlin, Germany, 1996.
Snelgrove, P. V. R., Soetaert, K., Solan, M., Thrush, S., Wei, C.-L.,
Danovaro, R., Fulweiler, R. W., Kitazato, H., Ingole, B., Norkko, A.,
Parkes, R. J., and Volkenborn, N.: Global Carbon Cycling on a Heterogeneous
Seafloor, Trends Ecol. Evol., 33, 96–105,
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.TREE.2017.11.004, 2018.
Stehman, S. V. and Foody, G. M.: Key issues in rigorous accuracy assessment
of land cover products, Remote Sens. Environ., 231, 111199,
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.RSE.2019.05.018, 2019.
Stevens Jr., D. L. and Olsen, A. R.: Variance estimation for spatially
balanced samples of environmental resources, Environmetrics, 14,
593–610, https://doi.org/10.1002/env.606, 2003.
Story, M. and Congalton, R. G.: Accuracy Assessment: A User's Perspective,
Photogramm. Eng. Remote Sens., 52, 397–399, 1986.
Strobl, C. and Zeileis, A.: Danger: High Power! – Exploring the Statistical
Properties of a Test for Random Forest Variable Importance, availabe at:
https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2111/1/techreport.pdf (last access: 7 December 2020), 2008.
Strobl, C., Boulesteix, A.-L., Zeileis, A., and Hothorn, T.: Bias in random
forest variable importance measures: Illustrations, sources and a solution,
BMC Bioinformatics, 8, 25, https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-8-25, 2007.
Thurman, H. V.: Introductory Oceanography, 8th edn., Prentice-Hall, Upper
Saddle River, New Jersey, USA, 1997.
Tyberghein, L., Verbruggen, H., Pauly, K., Troupin, C., Mineur, F., and De
Clerck, O.: Bio-ORACLE: a global environmental dataset for marine species
distribution modelling, Glob. Ecol. Biogeogr., 21, 272–281,
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1466-8238.2011.00656.x, 2012.
Valavi, R., Elith, J., Lahoz-Monfort, J. J., and Guillera-Arroita, G.:
BLOCKCV: An R package for generating spatially or environmentally separated
folds for k-fold cross-validation of species distribution models, Methods
Ecol. Evol., 10, 225–232, https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13107, 2018.
van Heteren, S. and Van Lancker, V.: Collaborative Seabed-Habitat Mapping:
Uncertainty in Sediment Data as an Obstacle in Harmonization, in:
Collaborative Knowledge in Scientific Research Networks, edited by: Diviacco, P., Fox, P., Pshenichy, C., and Leadbetter, A., Information
Science Reference, Hershey PA, USA, 154–176, 2015.
Short summary
A new digital map of the sediment types covering the bottom of the ocean has been created. Direct observations of the seafloor sediments are few and far apart. Therefore, machine learning was used to fill those gaps between observations. This was possible because known relationships between sediment types and the environment in which they form (e.g. water depth, temperature, and salt content) could be exploited. The results are expected to provide important information for marine research.
A new digital map of the sediment types covering the bottom of the ocean has been created....
Altmetrics
Final-revised paper
Preprint