GEOTRACES GETS GOING

Abstract

NEARLY THREE-QUARTERS of the globe is covered by oceans that humans know very little about. To tease apart the chemistry of these vast waters, marine geochemists and chemical oceanographers typically have gone to sea and collected data to profile individual trace elements and isotopes such as iron (see page 62), zinc, or lead. But these isolated studies make figuring out the interrelated chemical nature of the oceans nearly impossible. Fueled by concerns about how climate change could affect ocean chemistry and armed with several technological advances for conducting oceanographic research, scientists from around the world now hope to address those issues with a concerted project of unprecedented scope called Geotraces. The largest research program ever focused on the chemistry of the oceans, Geotraces aims to understand how the broad array of trace elements and isotopes in the ocean behave and how their behavior ultimately affects the global carbon cycle and climate, says chemical oceanographer Robert ...