Affiliated programs: GEOTRACES, OCB
Acronym: U.S. GEOTRACES
Url: Program Web Site
Start date: 2003
End date:
Geolocation: Global

Description:

GEOTRACES is a SCOR sponsored program; and funding for program infrastructure development is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

GEOTRACES gained momentum following a special symposium, S02: Biogeochemical cycling of trace elements and isotopes in the ocean and applications to constrain contemporary marine processes (GEOSECS II), at a 2003 Goldschmidt meeting convened in Japan. The GEOSECS II acronym referred to the Geochemical Ocean Section Studies program of the 1970s, but the program was subsequently named Geotraces. An April 2003 workshop in Toulouse, France, supported by the NSF’s Chemical Oceanography Program, the CNRS, the Observatoire Midi-Pyrenees and the Universite Paul Sabatier, led to a successful proposal to form a SCOR working group (http://www.jhu.edu/scor/GEOTRACES.PDF).

Discussions among members of the SCOR Working Group led to formation of the GEOTRACES program, with a focus on 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.

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