The oceans, atmosphere, continents and cryosphere are part of Earth’s tightly connected climate system. The ocean’s role in the climate system involves the transport, sequestration , and exchange of heat, fresh water, and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) between the other components of the system.
When waters descend below the ocean surface, they carry with them dissolved atmospheric gases. The time-dependent tracers in the oceans provide information on which waters have been in contact with the atmosphere on various timescales. They also give information on the ocean circulation and its variability.
The timescale information is needed to understand and to assess the ocean’s role in climate change, and its capacity to take up human-derived constituents, such as CO 2 from the atmosphere. Thus, the advantage to using tracers for ocean circulation studies is the added dimension of time: their time history is fairly well known; they are an integrating quantity; and they provide an independent test for time integration of models and biogeochemical processes. Read more
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