GEOTRACES is sponsored by SCOR; funding for the construction and maintenance of the GEOTRACES website is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
( Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this website's material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.)
GEOTRACES is an international study of the global marine biogeochemical cycles of trace elements and their isotopes. Its mission is:
To identify processes and quantify fluxes that control the distributions of key trace elements and isotopes in the ocean, and to establish the sensitivity of these distributions to changing environmental conditions.
The GEOTRACES mission can be expressed as three overriding goals:
• To determine full water column distributions of selected trace elements and isotopes, including their concentration, chemical speciation, and physical form, along a sufficient number of sections in each ocean basin to establish the principal relationships between these distributions and with more traditional hydrographic parameters;
• To evaluate the sources, sinks, and internal cycling of these species and thereby characterize more completely the physical, chemical and biological processes regulating their distributions, and the sensitivity of these processes to global change; and
• To understand the processes that control the concentrations of geochemical species used for proxies of the past environment, both in the water column and in the substrates that reflect the water column.
GEOTRACES will be global in scope, consisting of ocean sections complemented by regional process studies. Sections and process studies will combine fieldwork, laboratory experiments and modelling. Beyond realizing the scientific objectives identified above, a natural outcome of this work will be to build a community of marine scientists who understand the processes regulating trace element cycles sufficiently well to exploit this knowledge reliably in future interdisciplinary studies.
| CONTACT
INFORMATION |
| Ed Urban, Ph.D. Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research College of Marine and Earth Studies Robinson Hall University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 USA Tel: +1-302-831-7011/7013 Fax: +1-302-831-7012 E-mail: Ed.Urban at scor-int.org Web: www.scor-int.org |
| Robert
Anderson USA Fax: (845) 365-8155 Email: boba at ldeo.columbia.edu Web: www.ldeo.columbia.edu |
| Gideon M. Henderson Department
of Earth Sciences Direct
line: +44 (0)1865 282123 Email:
Gideon.Henderson at earth.ox.ac.uk |