The authors are grateful to the EXPORTS science team for the collaborative effort, data and ideas exchange and scientific production that acted as a baseline for the present work. We would like to acknowledge support from the NASA Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry program. Thanks go to the captain and crew of the R/VsRevelle and to the Ship Operations staff of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. We also thank Stuart Halewood and Nils Haëntjens who provided support at sea and Marianne Pelletier who helped with the analysis of the silica samples. Finally, we thank Dr. Margaret Estapa, Dr. Montserrat Roca Martí and Dr. Carolina Cisternas-Novoa for their valuable feedback on the preliminary draft of the manuscript.