Determination of the Prebomb Southern (Antartic) Ocean Radiocarbon in Organic Matter

• Main Author: Guilderson, T. P.
• Other Authors: United States. Department of Energy.
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 2001
• Subjects: Carbon Dioxide; Carbon 14; 58 Geosciences; Climatic Change; 54 Environmental Sciences; Organic Matter; Corals; Atmospheric Explosions; Distribution; Nuclear Weapons; Antarctic Ocean; Antarctic; Southern Ocean; Antarc*; antartic*
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.2172/15013549; https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1415336/

The Southern Hemisphere is an important and unique region of the world's oceans for water-mass formation and mixing, upwelling, nutrient utilization, and carbon export. In fact, one of the primary interests of the oceanographic community is to decipher the climatic record of these processes in the source or sink terms for Southern Ocean surface waters in the CO{sub 2} balance of the atmosphere. Current coupled ocean-atmosphere modeling efforts to trace the input of CO{sub 2} into the ocean imply a strong sink of anthropogenic CO{sub 2} in the southern ocean. However, because of its relative inaccessibility and the difficulty in directly measuring CO{sub 2} fluxes in the Southern Ocean, these results are controversial at best. An accepted diagnostic of the exchange of CO{sub 2} between the atmosphere and ocean is the prebomb distribution of radiocarbon in the ocean and its time-history since atmospheric nuclear testing. Such histories of {sup 14}C in the surface waters of the Southern Ocean do not currently exist, primarily because there are few continuous biological archives (e.g., in corals) such as those that have been used to monitor the {sup 14}C history of the tropics and subtropics. One of the possible long-term archives is the scallop Adamussium collbecki. Although not independently confirmed, relatively crude growth rate estimates of A. collbecki indicate that it has the potential to provide continuous 100 year time-series. We are exploring the suitability of this potential archive.