Articles | Volume 21, issue 5
https://doi.org/10.5194/os-21-2179-2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.The coupled oxygen and carbon dynamics in the subsurface waters of the Gulf and Lower St. Lawrence Estuary and implications for artificial oxygenation
Download
- Final revised paper (published on 02 Oct 2025)
- Supplement to the final revised paper
- Preprint (discussion started on 30 May 2025)
- Supplement to the preprint
Interactive discussion
Status: closed
Comment types: AC – author | RC – referee | CC – community | EC – editor | CEC – chief editor
| : Report abuse
-
RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-2400', Anders Stigebrandt, 27 Jun 2025
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', William Nesbitt, 23 Jul 2025
-
RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-2400', Xianghui Guo, 06 Jul 2025
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', William Nesbitt, 23 Jul 2025
-
RC3: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-2400', Anonymous Referee #3, 23 Jul 2025
- AC3: 'Reply on RC3', William Nesbitt, 26 Jul 2025
Peer review completion
AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload
AR by William Nesbitt on behalf of the Authors (29 Jul 2025)
Author's response
Author's tracked changes
Manuscript
ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (06 Aug 2025) by Xinping Hu
RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (11 Aug 2025)

RR by Anders Stigebrandt (21 Aug 2025)
ED: Publish as is (22 Aug 2025) by Xinping Hu

AR by William Nesbitt on behalf of the Authors (28 Aug 2025)
Manuscript
The oxygen concentration DO has decreased in the subsurface waters of the Gulf and Lower St. Lawrence Estuary where the latter has developed hypoxic conditions. The reason for the deteriorated oxygen conditions seems to be an increase of remineralization of organic matter OM and a reduction of DO in the inflowing deepwater. The latter was earlier determined by an about 40/60 mixture of cold oxygen rich Labrador Current Water and warmer, oxygen poor NADW but this ratio of mixture has changed to about 0/100.
The idea is to supply oxygen gas to the inflowing deepwater in the Cabot Strait for artificial re-oxygenation of the Laurentian Channel bottom waters. For this one must know the response in DO in the Laurentian Channel bottom waters to a specified supply of oxygen gas in the Cabot Strait. To this end, a one-dimensional (1D) advection – diffusion model has been applied. To get confidence in applying any model, model results must be verified using observations from the area where it is applied.
The rate of change of DO along the flow path depends on (i) the rate of oxygen consumption OUR by mineralization of OM, (ii) the rate of oxygen supply by inflow through Cabot Strait, which is determined by the advective flow speed u and the concentration of DO of the inflowing water (boundary concentration), and (iii) the rate of supply of oxygen by turbulent vertical diffusion from the oxygen rich Cold Intermediate Layer overlying the deepwater. Turbulent vertical diffusion is known to take place essentially at the bottom boundary, where most of the vertical mixing occurs due to breaking internal waves, often driven by internal tides generated at sloping bottoms and steps in the bottom. Vertical mixing at bottom boundaries creates horizontal buoyancy gradients that drive transversal circulation, not described by a 1D model, that distributes the effects of mixing to the whole water body. Changes of DO due to changes in the rate of change of turbulent vertical mixing are hard to show. If the turbulent mixing is driven by the internal tide, it may change if the vertical stratification changes. This could be discussed in the manuscript.
The 1D model is tuned using historical data, and data from the large-scale tracer experiment TReX in the Bay of St Lawrence. It is required that the model can describe the distribution of DO along its path. If it can, one may have confidence in model results when changing the boundary concentration of DO at Cabot Strait.
Horizontal diffusion, but not vertical diffusion, is included in the model. The argument for discarding vertical diffusion is that is has a time scale of 30 years while the horizontal time scale is 5 years. However, the vertical time scale is estimated using the vertical diffusivity Kz = 1x10-5 m2s-1. The horizontal mean Kz is maybe larger because one may expect high values at the boundaries (hot mixing spots). With Kz = 1x10-4 m2s-1, the vertical time scale would be only 3 years. This should be discussed in the manuscript because vertical diffusion possibly may provide a significant contribution to the DO budget of the deepwater.
The model describes quite well the observed year to year changes in DO in the deepwater using only known changes of the DO concentration in the Cabot Strait. The model uses a constant UOR. One would expect that UOR might be greater in the inner part of the St. Lawrence River Estuary due to possibly greater production of OM here due to nutrient supply by the river. It would be interesting if the authors could discuss the sensitivity of model results to the assumption of a constant UOR. It would also be interesting to know if there are large variations in the annual supply of nutrients from the St. Lawrence River, and the expected annual supply of OM to the deepwater.
The physics of the model, i.e. the current speed u and the horizontal diffusivity KH, has been calibrated using results from the transient plume of the tracer experiment TReX. Since the duration of the tracer experiment was shorter than the residence time of the deepwater it was necessary to include horizontal diffusivity to describe the observed spreading of the tracer. For a quasi-steady description of DO it might possibly be more important to include vertical diffusion since vertical diffusion might contribute to the DO budget of the deepwater. The authors should discuss this and estimate the uncertainty of model results due to the explicit ignorance of vertical diffusion.
I am sorry for the delayed review, which is due to personal circumstances. I really enjoyed reading this manuscript.
Anders Stigebrandt