Dissolved inorganic carbon and alkalinity of discrete water column samples, collected aboard Palmer LTER annual cruises of the Western Antarctic Peninsula, 1993 - present.

There is a temporal uncoupling between Antarctic phytoplankton and bacterial processes. This affects the coastal ecosystem carbon cycle. Our sampling strategy and experiments are designed to evaluate the hypotheses that this uncoupling is caused by:1) dissolved organic carbon - bacterial interactions,2) temperature effects, and 3) direct competition and chemical antagonism.