Oceanic North Pacific Ocean

Although the relationship of sediment adsorption to water concentration appears to be a controlling feature of shallow water systems such as lakes and coastal shelf water, the open ocean is more likely to contain soluble plutonium which seems to be unaffected by particulate matter. This is particularly evident in two oceanographic studies. Bowen et al have discovered a stratum of plutonium in the North Pacific at about 500m that has not changed depth appreciably from 1973 to 1980. How it arrived at this depth is subject to conjecture but it appears to be soluble plutonium which is not settling(17). Fukai et al have delineated plutonium maxima in the Mediterranean Sea which seem to be due to soluble species(18). Comparison of americium to plutonium ratios in this... 

Because temperature (T) and salinity (S) are the main factors controlling density, oceanographers use T-S diagrams to describe the features of the different water masses. The average temperature and salinity of the world ocean and various parts of the ocean are given in Fig. 10-3 and Table 10-3. The North Atlantic contains the warmest and saltiest water of the major oceans. The Southern Ocean (the region around Antarctica) is the coldest and the North Pacific has the lowest average salinity. 

As shown in Fig. 10-13, there is also a flux of O2 produced during net photosynthesis from the ocean to the atmosphere and an export flux of particulate and dissolved organic matter out of the euphotic zone. For a steady-state system, new production should equal the flux of O2 to the atmosphere and the export of organic carbon (Eppley and Peterson, 1979) (when all are expressed in the same units, e.g., moles of carbon). Such an ideal state probably rarely exists because the euphotic zone is a dynamic place. Unfortunately, there have been no studies where all three fluxes were measured at the same time. Part of the difficulty is that each flux needs to be integrated over different time scales. The oxygen flux approach has been applied in the subarctic north Pacific (Emerson et al, 1991) and subtropical Pacific (Emerson et al, 1995, 1997) and Atlantic (Jenkins and Goldman, 1985). The organic carbon export approach has... 

Over 20% of the world s open ocean surface waters are replete in light and major nutrients (nitrate, phosphate, and silicate), yet chlorophyll and productivity values remain low. These so-called "high-nitrate low-chlorophyll" or HNLC regimes (Chisholm and Morel, 1991) include the sub-arctic North Pacific (Martin and Fitzwater, 1988 Martin et al, 1989 Miller et al, 1991), the equatorial Pacific (Murray et al, 1994 Fitzwater et al, 1996) and the southern Ocean (Martin et al.,... 

DOC in the deep ocean gradually decreases from 48 /iM in the North Atlantic to 34 /rM in the North Pacific (Hansell and Carlson, 1998). 

Deep ocean concentrations increase progressively as the abyssal water flows (ages) from the North Atlantic, through the Indian Ocean to the North Pacific. 

Karl, D., Letelier, R., Tupas, L. et al. (1997). The role of nitrogen fixation in biogeochemical cycling in the subtropical North Pacific Ocean. Nature 388, 533-538. 

Perry, M. J. (1976). Phosphate utilization by an oceanic diatom in phosphorus-limited chemostat culture and in the oligotrophic waters of the central North Pacific. Limnol. Oceanogr. 21,88-107. 

Fig. 11-9 (a) The vertical distributions of alkalinity (Aik) and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) in the world oceans. Ocean regions shown are the North Atlantic (NA), South Atlantic (SA), Antarctic (AA), South Indian (SI), North Indian (NI), South Pacific (SP), and North Pacific (NP) oceans. (Modified with permission from T. Takahashi et ah, The alkalinity and total carbon dioxide concentration in the world oceans, in B. Bolin (1981). Carbon Cycle Modelling," pp. 276-277, John Wiley, Chichester.)... 

Nakazawa, T., Murayama, S., Miyashita, K., Aoki, S. and Tanaka, M. (1992). Longitudinally different variations of lower tropospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the North Pacific Ocean, Tellus, Ser. B, 44,161-172. 

Karl, D. M. and Yanagi, K. (1997). Partial characterization of the dissolved organic phosphorus pool in the oligotrophic North Pacific Ocean. Limnol. Oceanogr. 42,1398-1405. 

Ra is soluble and therefore tends to be released to deep waters when it is formed by °Th decay in marine sediments. Substrates which capture the resulting excess of Ra found in seawater can potentially be dated using the decay of this Ra excess ( Raxs). Unfortunately there is no stable isotope of Ra with which to normalize measured Ra values but the marine chemistry of Ba is sufficiently close to that of Ra that it can be used as a surrogate for a stable Ra isotope and seawater Ra/Ba ratios are constant throughout the oceans, except in the deep North Pacific (Chan et al. 1976). The half life of Ra is only 1600 years so Raxs/Ba chronology is limited to the Holocene but it nevertheless has potential for use in several regions. 

DDT and DDE observations Iwataetal(1993)determinedconcentratonsofDDT in in the air and surface water from various oceans in 1989-1990. The routes of the ship cruises among others covered the Chukchi Sea, Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska, North Pacific, East China Sea, South China Sea, North Atlantic ocean, Bay of Bengal, and the Southern ocean. 

Ultraviolet spectroscopy has been applied to the determination of lead and lead speciation studies [407]. Scaule and Patterson [408] used isotope dilution-mass spectrometry to determine the lead profile in the open North Pacific Ocean. 

Feather, adults Seabirds, 19 species pelagic North Pacific Ocean 1982-87 Max. 7.43 DW 74... 

Honda, K., J.E. Marcovecchio, S. Kan, R. Tatsukawa, and H. Ogi. 1990. Metal concentrations in pelagic seabirds from the north Pacific Ocean. Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol. 19 704-711. 

Eight-armed squid, Gonatopsis borealis, North Pacific Ocean, 1980-82, whole ... 

Liver vs. kidney, total chlordanes Dali s porpoise, Phocoenoides dalli North Pacific Ocean 1980-82 blubber Max. 38 FW vs. Max. 25 FW 109... 

Klasson-Wehler, E., A. Bergman, M. Athanasiodou, J.P. Ludwig, H.J. Auman, K. Kannan, M. Van Den Berg, A.J. Murk, L.A. Feyk, and J.P. Giesy. 1998. Hydroxylated and methylsulfonyl polychlorinated biphenyl metabolites in albatrosses from Midway Atoll, north Pacific Ocean. Environ. Toxicol. Chem. 17 1620-1625. 

Nozaki, Y. 1997. A fresh look at element distribution in the North Pacific Ocean. Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union, 78, 221-221. 

Bruland, K. W. (1989). Oceanic zinc speciation complexation of zinc by natural organic ligands in the central North Pacific, Limnol. Oceanogr., 34, 267-283. 

Lee [2] using a hydride generation atomic absorption spectrometric method has investigated the bioaccumulation of bismuth on marine sediment samples collected in Narragensett Bay and the North Pacific Ocean. 

Table 4.6 (opal, carbonate and aluminosilicate) were chosen to provide end members for matrix analysis. These samples also could be blended to produce any mixture desired. Sampling sediments from well-studied depositional regions such as MANOP Site R in the North Pacific (for open-ocean red clay) and Florida Bay (for carbonate sediments) would offer a variety of supplemental information that is already available. In addition, the (Atchafalaya) river sediment would provide a useful link between those studying terrestrial and marine processes. 

Wakeham, S.G., and E.A. Canuel. 1988. Organic geochemistry of particulate matter in the eastern tropical North Pacific Ocean Implications for particle dynamics. Journal of Marine Research 46 183-213. 

---