Chemical Oceanography of the Arctic Ocean

Abstract

The American GEOSECS program followed by the Transient Tracers in Oceanography (TTO) program has supplied oceanography with a vast amount of high-quality chemical data and stressed the importance of the use of tracers. Ostlund’s measurements of Н bomb-produced tritium (HTO) have given us two “snapshots” (1972 and 1981) of how the deep Atlantic water is formed in the Greenland and Norwegian seas and penetrates toward the south Atlantic (Ostlund, 1985). During the Ymer-80 expedition an attempt was made to obtain similar high-quality data for the eastern Arctic Ocean (Anderson and Dyrssen, 1981; Carmack and Rudels, 1983), but in spite of the ice camp work by the Canadians and Russians more work needs to be carried out before we have a good picture of the Arctic Ocean. The main objectives of future research were discussed at a meeting on the ventilation of the Arctic Ocean (Melling, 1985). Before this meeting a symposium in Reykjavik on the use of chemical tracers in chemical oceanography (Stefansson, 1985) stressed the advantage of these tools in the understanding of the transport of chemical constituents in the oceans, the main goal being the role of the oceans (not least the Arctic Ocean) in the circulation of carbon dioxide.