One difficulty in dealing with eutrophication is that there is no accepted metric for eutrophication thresholds, but those marine systems are considered eutrophic where organic
carbon fluxes are in excess of 300 g m−2 a−1 (Nixon, 1995). More frequently, eutrophication is qualitatively identified by changes in oxygenation status, in winter water nutrient concentrations, in water transparency, or in biological assemblages as compared to a reference condition Belnacasan in the past. Productivity estimates for the entire Baltic Sea are around 150 gC m−2 a−1 (Wasmund et al., 2001), but it is considered to be one of the most glaring examples of eutrophication in Europe (HELCOM, 2010). Large areas of its seafloor are intermittently anoxic, blooms of nitrogen-fixing bacteria are a recurring nuisance during summer months, and the coincidence of
deteriorating environmental conditions observed with increasing river nutrient loads in the 1970s and 1980s implicated nutrient effluxes from rivers (and reactive N inputs from the atmosphere) as the causal reason (Rosenberg et al., 1990). The Baltic Sea is a silled basin with an excess of precipitation and river runoff over evaporation, and thus is an archetypical estuarine nutrient trap prone to oxygen depletion in dense deep water that is isolated (Seibold, 1970). Investigations of sediment cores suggest that its largest deposition area of fine-grained and organic-rich sediments in the Gotland Basin has been intermittently anoxic AZD2014 for much of its history since 8000 years ago (Sohlenius et al., 2001). Biogeochemical proxies in sediment dated cores imply that cyanobacterial nitrogen fixation has been a characteristic feature
of the pre-industrial Baltic Sea since that time (Bianchi et al., 2000 and Struck et al., 2000). Even though countries bordering the Baltic Sea reduced phosphate and nitrate loads of however rivers to the Baltic Sea by 68% and 60% in the period from 1990 to 2000 (HELCOM, 2010), direct positive responses of winter nitrate and phosphate concentrations in surface water of the central Baltic Sea were not observed. Nutrient concentrations remained high and phosphate concentrations showed no reaction. This is a plausible consequence of phosphate release from anoxic sea floor sediments (Conley et al., 2002, Conley et al., 2009 and Emeis et al., 2000). These anoxic sediments release 2/3 back into the water column (Hille et al., 2005) of the phosphate arriving in sedimented organic matter. The added phosphate in turn promotes blooms of N2-fixing cyanobacteria in the sea surface (Vahtera et al., 2007). Recent model experiments suggest that the residence time of river-borne phosphorus in the Baltic Sea exceeds 35 years.