Benthic foraminifera minor element to calcium ratios for core-tops from the eastern Tropical Atlantic

This dataset contains element to calcium ratios (Mg/Ca, Sr/Ca, Mn/Ca, Fe/Ca, Ba/Ca and Al/Ca in mmol/mol) of benthic foraminifera picked from 29 MUC core-tops collected from the eastern Tropical Atlantic off NW Africa, at bottom waters between 2 and 14°C. Data is presented for 73 samples consisting of Globobulima affinis /turgida (13 samples), Melonis barleeanus (34 samples) Uvigerina mediterranea (17 samples), and Uvigerina peregrina (9 samples). 8 duplicate samples (indicated in column 15 "Duplicates") are included. These were picked from the same sample but crushed and cleaned separately. Sediment samples came from both previously washed, and fresh, mud. Fresh samples were washed using deionized water through a 63 µm sieve, dried at 45°C for less than 24 hours, and dry sieved. Benthic foraminifera were picked from the >150 µm fraction. Before analysis, foraminifera samples were crushed and cleaned with water, methanol and hot buffered hydrogen peroxide with no reductive cleaning step (Johnstone et al., 2016). Samples were measured using an Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometer (ICP-OES)—Agilent Technologies 700 Series with Cetac ASX-520 autosampler at the following spectral lines: Ca (315.9 nm), Mg (279.6 nm), Sr (421.6), Fe (238.2 nm), and Mn (257.6 nm), Ba (455.4 nm) and Al (167.0 nm) calibrated using linear regressions. Calibration standards consisted of a blank and five multi-element standards of between 20 and 100 ppm Ca. Instrumental precision was monitored by using a commercial multi-element standard solution (SCP, France), and commercial powder sample ECRM752-1. Theoretical value (measured value, σ standard deviation, standard error) in mmol/mol for the SCP standard during these runs were: Mg/Ca, 2.955 (2.959, σ 0.030, 0.0029), Sr/Ca, 1.402 (1.402, 0. σ 016, 0.0015), Mn/Ca 0.3234 (0.3291, σ 0.0019, 0.00019), Fe/Ca, 0.3312 (0.3228,  0.0034, 0.00033), Ba/Ca, 0.00832 (0.00840,  0.00034, 0.000033) and Al/Ca 0.678 (0.695, σ 0.018, 0.0018), n=108. Mg/Ca of dissolved, centrifuged, ECRM 752-1 (measured at 3.750 σ 0.015, 0.0014 by Greaves et al. (2005)) was 3.735 σ 0.031, 0.0057. Bottom water parameters were obtained from the GLODAP database version 2 (Lauvset et al., 2022) using Ocen Data View (Schlitzer, Reiner, Ocean Data View, https://odv.awi.de, 2022). The average bottom water temperature, salinity, oxygenation, alkalinity, and pH were extracted from specific nearby sections of 200 km width. Diva gridding was used to exclude outliners and hide bad estimates with maximum interpolation of 15X and 10Y. The extracted data was used to estimate the carbonate ion saturation state for each site using version 1.3.0 of CO2calc (Robbins et al., 2010), the total alkalinity and the pH total scale, with K1 and K2 constants (Luecker et al., 2020).