Chemical perspective oceanography

This book describes a chemical perspective on the science of oceanography. The goal is to understand the mechanisms that control the distributions of chemical compounds in the sea. The chemical perspective uses measured chemical distributions to infer the biological, physical, chemical and geological processes in the sea. This method has enormous information potential because of the variety of chemical compounds and the diversity of their chemical behaviors and distributions. It is complicated by the requirement that one must... 

Classification of the chemical constituents of seawater into conservative, bioactive and adsorbed (Chapter 1) revealed much about the processes that control concentration distributions in seawater of the latter two categories, but little about the conservative elements. Concentrations of the elements that make up most of the salinity of the oceans provide clues to the mechanisms that control their sources and sinks. Thus, the chemical perspective of oceanography revealed by conservative element concentrations is about processes that occur at the ocean boundaries weathering reactions on land, authigenic mineral formation in marine sediments and reactions with the crust at hydrothermal areas. The amount of time some of the dissolved constituents remain in solution before they are removed chemically is very long, suggesting the possibility for chemical equilibrium between seawater and the minerals in the ocean... 

One of the most important components of the chemical perspective of oceanography is the carbonate system, primarily because it controls the acidity of seawater and acts as a governor for the carbon cycle. Within the mix of adds and bases in the Earth-surface environment, the carbonate system is the primary buffer for the aridity of water, which determines the reactivity of most chemical compoimds and solids. The carbonate system of the ocean plays a key role in controlling the pressure of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which helps to regulate the temperature of the planet. The formation rate of the most prevalent authigenic mineral in the environment, CaCOs, is also the major sink for dissolved carbon in the long-term global carbon balance. 

The most important contribution of sediment trap studies to the chemical perspective of oceanography is the vast amount that has... 

Chemical kinetics is the study of the rate and mechanism of reaction. At ocean boundaries chemical fluxes are often determined hy the interplay of molecular diffusion and reaction rates. Both of these topics are important to the chemical perspective of oceanography because they provide the necessary mechanistic and mathematical background for the study of chemical fluxes. 

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