Project: U.S. GEOTRACES Pacific Meridional Transect: Tracing Basin-scale Nutrient Cycling and Carbon Export with Dissolved and Particulate Barium-isotopic Distributions

NSF Award Abstract:
The goal of the international GEOTRACES program is to understand the distributions of trace chemical elements and their isotopes in the oceans. This project would measure stable isotopes of barium on a 2018 U.S. GEOTRACES expedition in the Pacific Ocean. Barium is a trace element whose distribution is relevant to all three themes of the GEOTRACES program, as barium can be used to: study chemical cycling within the oceans; trace exchanges of elements at ocean boundaries; and infer past environmental conditions. The data collected here will be the first of their kind for barium isotopes and will illuminate the geochemical cycle of this element. Moreover, conducting this work as part of the GEOTRACES program will maximize the return on investment in the barium isotope data by providing a rich interpretative framework.

This project seeks to understand how the interplay between internal cycling and boundary processes sets basin-scale barium concentration and isotopic distributions in the Pacific Ocean. Despite possessing a nutrient-like dissolved profile, marine barium cycling has a fundamentally different boundary condition to the major algal nutrients: barium cycling is not driven by production of organic matter but rather by its remineralization. Respiration of sinking organic matter in the ocean's 'twilight zone' releases carbon dioxide, mineralizes nutrients, and promotes precipitation of micron-size crystals of barite. Since barite is the major vector of particulate barium in seawater, the abundance and isotopic composition of barium in the oceans is tied to global carbon and nutrient cycling at the 'dark end' of the biological carbon pump. The data collected here will be used to test hypotheses across an unprecedented range of oceanographic conditions regarding: the formation, export, and regeneration of particulate material and the connection to seafloor processes; the importance of boundary sources to regional and global trace element and isotope budgets; the formation of putative soft-metal sulfides in oxygen-minimum zones; and the origin of enigmatic suspended particles in the deep open ocean. This proposal will contribute to education by training undergraduate research fellows and through presentation of seminars and guest lectures to regional science educators through collaboration with a regional conservation organization.