Noble gas contents of marine waters

Abstract

Noble gas analyses of sea waters collected in the North Pacific, North Atlantic and Antarctic Oceans have confirmed our previous observations that measureable deviations from saturation occur. The deep waters of the North Atlantic appear to be supersaturated in argon to an upper limit of around 3% while their counterparts in the North Pacific are undersaturated to a similar figure. Individual stations show supersaturation in the thermocline region for argon and krypton, a phenomenon related to mixing processes. Excess helium levels in the Atlantic deep waters are less than those for the Pacific, a result explainable by the relative ages of these two water masses. Unexpected are the similar excess helium values for the North and South Pacific deep waters.