🌊🧪 The approximate ratios of these same elements dissolved in deep sea water are 15 atoms of N and 1000 atoms of C for every atom of P. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 After 1000 years of continuous habitation with a steady population of 10,000, their resident archeologist, out of shear boredom, digs a deep trench in an attempt to find relics of their arrival. Finally, when his trench has reached a depth of 300 meters, he succeeds. - Broecker and Peng

🌊🧪 The high oxygen content of deep water found in the Antarctic adjacent to the Weddell Sea is a consequence of the input of new bottom water in this area. The absence of corresponding anomalies in NO₃ and H₄SiO₄ is, however, unexpected. The new deep water formed during the dark winter

🌊🧪 The approach might be termed 'inverse chemical engineering'. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 For the purposes of our search let us divide the sea floor into three regions: that above the present day lysocline for calcite, that lying in the transition zone beneath the lysocline and that beneath the transition zone. The areas of these zones are given in Table 9-3. - Broecker and

🌊🧪 Much of this book was written during a sabbatical leave in Germany. I (WSB) would like to thank the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation for providing fellowship support for a nine month visit to Heidelberg and to Karl Otto Munnich and Wolfgang Roether and their colleagues in the Umweltphysik

🌊🧪 The composition of sea salt reflects not only the relative abundance of the dissolved substances in river water but also the ease with which a given substance becomes entrapped in the sediments. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 An analogy will help to clarify this situation. A botanist receives a grant to study the process of 'leaf detachment.' He hires a research assistant and takes him off to a nearby experimental forest where he has marked off several study plots. The assistant is instructed to begin each day

🌊🧪 As chemical oceanographers, we wander through the plant measuring inputs, outputs, and internal compositions - trying to reconstruct the missing design. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 Sodium, for example, is both abundant in the dissolved matter in rivers and sparingly reactive in the sea. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 INTERNAL CYCLING AND THROUGHPUT.- PATHWAYS FROM RIVER MOUTH TO SEA FLOOR. The sea is a way station for the products of continental erosion. All substances received by the sea are ultimately passed along to the sediment and rock lining its floor. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the

🌊🧪 Of great interest to us are those substances that dissolve during erosion and are carried to the sea in ionic form. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 Plants live only in surface water, where there is enough light to permit photosynthesis. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 Many microscopic plants and animals also produce hard parts consisting of CaCO3 or SiO2. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 DISTRIBUTION OF OPAL PRODUCTION - The abundance pattern of opal in deep-sea sediments is closely related to the pattern of productivity of diatoms and radiolarians in the overlying waters. As shown in Figure 2-2, high opal contents are found around the perimeter of the Antarctic continent,

🌊🧪 INTERNAL CYCLING AND THROUGHPUT.- PATHWAYS FROM RIVER MOUTH TO SEA FLOOR. The sea is a way station for the products of continental erosion. All substances received by the sea are ultimately passed along to the sediment and rock lining its floor. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the

🌊🧪 SEDIMENT TYPES - Deep-sea sediments consist of three major components. The most voluminous of these is detrital material derived from the mechanical and chemical fragmentation of the materials which make up the continents (see Table 2-1). Most of this material is in the form of

🌊🧪 While we have no intention of making our own prediction, a few paragraphs about the ingredients of such scenarios is in order. The amount of energy used must be related to the number of people who inhabit our planet. Currently the population of the globe rises by 2% per year. At this rate

🌊🧪 An analogy will help to clarify this situation. A botanist receives a grant to study the process of 'leaf detachment.' He hires a research assistant and takes him off to a nearby experimental forest where he has marked off several study plots. The assistant is instructed to begin each day

🌊🧪 The belts and escalators represent the organized flow of water, and the wandering of the people is the turbulent mixing superimposed on this organized flow. Although not perfect, this analogy does capture the important factors influencing the distribution of nutrients in the sea. -

🌊🧪 As we have already seen, the total dissolved carbon content of seawater varies because plants extract carbon from surface seawater and because the remains of these plants (or of the animals they support) sink into deep parts of the oceans where they are largely destroyed. Two processes are

🌊🧪 Removal of CaCO₃ from the water changes both the concentration of total dissolved carbon and the alkalinity. Organisms use carbon to form CaCO₃ and thus remove it from the water. The alkalinity of the water changes because when CaCO₃ is formed, the Ca²⁺ ion (one of the

🌊🧪 The chemical composition of the organic soft tissue formed by plants is thought to be relatively constant: for every atom of P in this tissue there are on the average about 15 atoms of N and on the average 105 atoms of C. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 The only major exception is dissolved oxygen. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 While we have no intention of making our own prediction, a few paragraphs about the ingredients of such scenarios is in order. The amount of energy used must be related to the number of people who inhabit our planet. Currently the population of the globe rises by 2% per year. At this rate

🌊🧪 Sodium, for example, is both abundant in the dissolved matter in rivers and sparingly reactive in the sea. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 Many of the chemical reactions are catalyzed by the enzymes in living organisms. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 THE SEDIMENTARY SINK - FACTORS INFLUENCING THE DISTRIBUTION OF SEDIMENTARY CONSTITUENTS - INTRODUCTION - On average, the opal and calcite generated by the organisms living in the sea make up about 50% of the sediment accumulating on the sea floor. The geographic distributions of these

🌊🧪 This is not true for the other gases. Since over 95 percent of the total of the inventory of these gases is found in the atmosphere, the atmosphere dictates the ocean's gas content. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 Plants live only in surface waters, from which they extract certain constituents needed to construct their tissues. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 In the discussion that follows, we neglect the element boron. The presence of boron in seawater requires a small correction in all the calculations outlined here, for it also exists in two forms (B(OH)₃ and B(OH)₄⁻). In this first look at carbonate chemistry, we keep things simpler

🌊🧪 On the average, for every four C atoms that fall from the surface sea in the form of organic tissue, one C atom falls in the form of CaCO3. Thus for every P atom in the composite of the organic and CaCO3 debris that fall toward the deep sea there are 131 C atoms, 105 of which are part of

🌊🧪 Carbon is also used by organisms to construct their calcium carbonate hard parts. In CaCO3 there is one C atom for every Ca atom. In sea water there are 20 C atoms for every 100 Ca atoms. Thus, the generation of CaCO3 depletes carbon about five times more rapidly than it does calcium. -

🌊🧪 Unlike the situation for opal, not all parts of the sea floor are bathed in water undersaturated with respect to calcite. While the deepest waters in the ocean are corrosive toward calcite, the waters which bathe the crests of the mid-ocean ridges are supersaturated with respect to

🌊🧪 This explains why calcium is almost but not quite constant in the sea salt of the world ocean. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 Except for copper, whose distribution shows definite evidence for scavenging from the deep water column, these elements appear to be involved mainly wi th the biological cycles of the sea. While these studies give us some clues regarding the processes responsible for the enrichment of the

🌊🧪 At any particular point in the ocean, their proportion may vary significantly from this average because of local ecologic differences in the overlying surface water and because the hard parts (CaCO3 and SiO2) fall to greater depths before destruction than does the organic tissue. -

🌊🧪 OPAL SOLUTION ON THE SEA FLOOR - The ocean is everywhere undersaturated with respect to the mineral phase opal. Thus, once formed, the hard parts of diatoms are immediately subject to solution. As can be seen from the sediment trap data in Table 1-3, there is no marked decrease in the

🌊🧪 This fact has greatly simplified the task of the physical oceanographer interested in mapping water density patterns within the sea. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 Roughly, 90% of the organic matter eaten by animals is consumed in the production of energy. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 So the life cycle leads to chemical segregation. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 So also do sediments nearly free of both of these phases. The abundance of these phases at any point on the sea floor reflects both their rate of production in the overlying water column and the extent to which they are subjected to solution on the sea floor. Since both the rate of

🌊🧪 Now let us consider the more detailed features seen in the vertical profiles in Figures 1-1 and 1-2 and in the horizontal distributions of properties at 4000 meters in Figures 1-8, 1-9, 1-10, and 1-11. The mid-depth nutrient element maxima seen in the Pacific Ocean are generated by the

🌊🧪 For studies in the open ocean, this relationship can be simplified. The calcium content of seawater is nearly constant; it varies with respect to the salt matrix only by about 0.5 percent and, as a result of salinity differences, by only another percent or two. Since the variations in

🌊🧪 Deep water masses are richer in the constituents utilized by plants than surface water is. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 The approach might be termed 'inverse chemical engineering'. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 Neglecting for the moment the carbon lost to CaCO3, only 105 of the 1000 atoms of C will be used. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 For every 5000 Ca atoms available, organisms consume only 26 (i.e., only 0.5 percent of the available Ca). - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 The temporary entrapments in particulate matter experienced by these wandering ions will prove of particular interest to us. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea

🌊🧪 For every atom of P in the deep ocean there are about 50 atoms of Si. - Broecker and Peng (1982), Tracers in the Sea