Existing Samples in Storage 



Samples of marine animals collected for measurement of traces of 

 radionuclides over the past 20 years are available in cold storage. Other 

 samples of organisms, sediments, and water collected and stored under 

 conditions favorable for this work are being sought in the established 

 collections on this coast. 



GLOBAL BASELINE-DATA PROJECT (GEOSECS) 



>, A global baseline data-acquisition project, significant to both the 



Environmental Quality and the Environmental Prediction programs of 

 the U.S. IDOE, is the Geochemical Ocean Sections Study. GEOSECS 

 is a multiyear project involving geochemists from 10 U.S. universities 

 and participation from Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, and Japan. 

 The U.S. portion of the program will operate from the Woods Hole 

 _0£eanographic Institut ion, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in the Atlantic 

 Ocean, and from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Cali- 

 fornia, in the Pacific. 



Eventually man's use of the planet will depend on detailed under- 

 standing of oceanic processes. These processes now are understood in 

 only the vaguest and most qualitative way. These processes include the 

 stirring and mixing in the deep sea, the interchange of energy and ma- 

 terial between deep and surface water and gases with the atmosphere. 



The rapid expansion of science and technology in recent years has 

 made available many sophisticated and powerful tools for the study of 

 the sea. At laboratories on shore, mass spectrometers, low-level radio- 

 activity counters, atomic reactors for neutron-activation, gas and liquid 

 chromatographs and autoanalyzers have been used for the analysis of 

 individual constituents of ocean water, and some of these instruments 

 have been successfully used at sea. However, well-trained geochemical 

 oceanographers are few, and development of shipboard laboratories has 

 lagged far behind the analytical techniques. Consequently, the potential 

 of these new methods for studying the sea has only begun to be realized. 



The basic task of the Geochemical Ocean Sections Study is the de- 

 tailed measurement of the oceanic constituents along Arctic to Antarctic 

 sections, as shown in Figure 7, at all depths, to provide, for the first time, 

 a set of physical and chemical data measured on the same water samples. 

 In addition to establishing geochemical baselines these data will provide 

 input for quantitative studies of oceanic mixing, and for descriptive 

 models of ocean circulation. 



Exploration of the temperature and salinity patterns in the oceans, 

 together with theoretical work in fluid dynamics, has provided a quali- 

 tative understanding of the large-scale processes in the sea. The ocean 

 resembles a great convective cell' in which the upper layers are heated by 

 the sun and stirred by wind-driven waves and currents. The mechanism 

 which drives this circulation is thought to be provided by cold water 

 sinking in the polar regions, where surface waters lose their heat and in- 

 crease in salinity by the formation of sea ice. New bottom water, thus 

 formed, flows as abyssal currents to the deep basins of the oceans. 

 Oceanographic and geochemical studies have identified two areas where 



