Abstracts
SEARCH Open Science Meeting
October 27, 2003
Seattle, Washington, USA
Basin-Scale Arctic Ocean Transient Tracer Data Sets
Robert Newton1, Peter Schlosser2, Bill Smethie3, Brenda Ekwurzel4, Samar Khatiwala5
1Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, PO Box 1000, Palisades, NY, 10964-8000, USA, Phone 845-365-8686, Fax 845-365-8155, bnewton@ldeo.columbia.edu
2Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, PO Box 1000, Palisades, NY, 10964-8000, USA, Phone 845-365-8707, Fax 845-365-8155, peters@ldeo.columbia.edu
3Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, PO Box 1000, Palisades, NY, 10964-8000, USA, Phone 845-365-8566, Fax 845-365-8176, bsmeth@ldeo.columbia.edu
4University of Arizona, 1133 East North Campus, Tucson, AZ, 85721-0011, USA, Phone 520-626-5945, Fax 520-621-1422, ekwurzel@hwr.arizona.edu
5Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, PO Box 1000, Palisades, NY, 10964-8000, USA, Phone 845-365-8756, spk@ldeo.columbia.edu
Beginning in about 1987 an international effort has been mounted to gather a baseline of Arctic Ocean hydrography. The LDEO Environmental Tracers Laboratory has participated in the collection, measurement and analysis of samples for measurement of the tracers 16O/18O, 3H/3He, 14C, 39Ar/40Ar, and CFCs. These tracers yield information on water mass transformations and transit times that cannot be derived from salinity and heat content by themselves. They have been very useful in documenting the changes that are the subject of the oceanic component of SEARCH. We have started to merge the tracer data from many cruises into a single, quality controlled database.
In this poster, we exhibit some of the most interesting features of the basin-wide data, including: spreading rates for Atlantic-derived boundary currents from "age" tracers; laterally extensive lenses of relatively old water at the base of the halocline; apparent regions of upwelling on the southern flank of the Mendeleyev Ridge, and a sharp discontinuity in diapycnal mixing that correlates to bathymetry, but not to any apparent density structure.
Abstract Categories: Changes in the Sea
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