Biogeochemistry description

I expand treatment of sorption, ion exchange, and surface complexation, in terms of the various descriptions in use today in environmental chemistry. And I integrate all the above with the principals of mass transport, to produce reactive transport models of the geochemistry and biogeochemistry of the Earth s shallow crust. As in the first edition, I try to juxtapose derivation of modeling principles with fully worked examples that illustrate how the principles can be applied in practice. 

Interrelations of Biogeochemistry to Other Scientific Disciplines Biogeochemistry originated at the beginning of the 20 century as a typical interdisciplinary merger. The appearance of such borderline, synthetic disciplines has provided the impetus for wider scientific research and finally enabled more detailed studies both of separate natural compounds and their interactions. The schematic description of various natural sciences closely related to biogeochemistry is shown in Figure 2. 

Using the above-mentioned approaches, we may describe the main global ecosystems in various continents. This description is as follows. Many details of biogeochemical cycling of various elements are shown also in Chapter 6 Regional Biogeochemistry . 

The study of biogeochemistry involves the descriptions of the distribution of material throughout our system and the rates at which material moves from region to region. The organization of the book is divided into three major sections. The first section, consisting of Chapters 1-5, describes the processes and characteristics that are important in all parts of the system the mix of elements present on the Earth and processes important on a cosmological scale ... 

The final section examines the biogeochemistry of selected chemical elements. Each of these chapters builds on earlier sections. Thus, the description of carbon will make use of the characteristics of biological systems, definitions of time-scales, and properties of the oceans described in earlier chapters. Five groups of substances are considered in Chapters 11 through 15. Chapter 16 brings us back to some of the questions important to society. 

This handbook article combines an up-to-date tabulation of the lanthanide composition of the ocean with a description of lanthanide distributions in the context of physical, chemical and biogeochemical processes controlling these distributions. The focus of this chapter is water column biogeochemistry. While pore waters and hydrothermal waters will be considered in this article, the extensive literature on the lanthanide geochemistry of minerals and marine sediments will not be discussed. 

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