Exchange Processes Across the Sediment Water Interface

The sediment water interface represents a physical boundary between the water column and the sediment, which thus separates two environments with processes of significantly different intensities and spatial and temporal dimensions. Furthermore, the sediment water interface (SWI) does not only separate the present day environment from the paleoenvironmental record, but is also a layer where pelagic signal s are strongly modified before their final documentation over geological time scales. Thus, the SWI is one of the key areas of the global carbon cycle, where carbon is by burial removed from, or returned by remineralization to the atmosphere ocean system. Therefore, the quantification of fluxes reaching the seafloor and the process oriented understanding of degradation and remineralization pathways are important for a dynamic comprehension of marine geochemical cycles, the coupling between present dayand paleo-processes and the suitability of proxies applied for paleo-reconstructions.