Water-mass tracer

Broecker, W. 1974. "NO" a conservative water-mass tracer. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 23 100-107. 

A second method used to calculate nitrate deficit takes advantage of the semiconservative water-mass tracer NO (Broecker, 1974). StoichiometricaUy, every mole of O2 respired wiU remineralize approximately 1/9 of a mole of NOJ so that NO, defined as... 

NUTRIENT WATER MASS TRACERS 6.16.2.1 Carbon Isotopes... 

The water mass tracers discussed above can be used to assess the sources of subsurface water masses and the mixture of waters from different sources. However, this information can be used only to assess the relative rates of renewal of these deep-water masses from the various source regions (e.g., LeGrand and Wunsch, 1995). There are several geochemical techniques that can be used to assess the rates of ocean circulation. 

Neodymium Isotopes as Water-mass Tracers The Nd Paradox ... 

As apparent from the properties listed in Table 1, ocean chemists have a variety of tracers at hand, covering a range of residence times and chemical behaviors. Those tracers varying due to radioactive decay have distinct isotopic compositions in their various source materials (Table 2). This makes them particularly useful both as water mass tracers, and to reconstruct the flux from these various sources into the oceans. It may be surprising to And the cosmogenic nuclide °Be in this list of otherwise radiogenic tracers. The reason is that Be behaves very similarly to the other tracers in that the ratio °Be/ Be is distinct in different water masses. Given that °Be is the only tracer of which the flux into the oceans is known, t can be calculated precisely from its water column concentration. Further, the continent-derived isotope Be is the only tracer of which the flux into the oceans can be calculated from the °Be/ Be ratio. 

---