Nitrogen forms and decomposition of organic carbon in the southern Bohai Sea core sediments

Study on form characteristics of nitrogen in marine sediments is the primary method to research its biogeochemical cycling and nitrogen form characteristics in core sediments can reflect the process and results of early diagenesis in a certain degree. In this paper, Sequential extraction process in natural grain size was used for studying the existent forms of nitrogen in five core sediments of the southern Bohai Sea for the first time. Nitrogen was divided into two parts - transferable and fixed based on whether it could be extracted by the reagent. Distributions and early diagenesis of transferable nitrogen forms in the southern Bohai Sea were researched integratedly. Results indicate that IEF- N and OSFN are predominant forms in transferable part in the studied core sediments. Contents of different nitrogen forms vary differently with depth, and have different diagenesis process. Decomposition constant of organic nitrogen (ON) and OC are about 15.51 × 10-3a-1and 4.79 × 10-3a-1 respectively, and the decomposition content of biogenic elements C, N, P, Si has the sequence N＞P＞C＞Si. OC/TN (simplified as C/N in the following) ratio is much lower than OC/ON, which indicates that sediment preserves plenty of inorganic nitrogen (IN) and/or fixed nitrogen, and the decrease of OC/ON ratio with depth is due to ON reservation in sediments. Generally, transferable nitrogen accounts for more proportion of TN in the surface layer than in the deep layer of core sediments, whereas, some stable forms of nitrogen can activate and become transferable under appropriate environment, which induces the proportion of transferable nitrogen in TN in the deep layer to be almost the same as that in the surface layer.