B. Chemical Oceanography Program 

 Long-Range Planning 



I. The Core Program 



The Chemical Oceanography Program is directed toward providing an understanding of how 

 oceans, estuaries, and large lakes function as chemical systems and how they respond when 

 perturbed by nature or man. These efforts address such global problems as sea-air exchanges 

 and particulate fluxes. They provide the scientific underpinning for dealing effectively with 

 socioeconomic problems including pollution, deep-sea mining, agriculture, and open-ocean 

 waste disposal and with other scientific problems requiring marine chemical input such as 

 sediment diagenesis, climate, ocean circulation, and biological productivity. Broad goals of these 

 activities are: 



(1) To describe quantitatively the types of reactions (i.e., processes and mechanisms) 



that occur between the various phases and chemical species existing in the marine 

 environment; and 



(2) To determine routes and rates of supply to and removal of substances from the ocean, and 



the alterations which occur during transit. 



For descriptive purposes, the program is divided into five components. These are: 



(1) Seawater chemical equilibria and physicochemical properties; 



(2) Material transfers and transformations at the land/sea boundary; 



(3) Fluxes of material to, transport through, and alteration in ocean basins; 



(4) The role and influence of biochemical processes on the chemical nature of seawater; and 



(5) Development and use of chemical tracers to study large-scale temporal processes 



in the oceans. 



Because boundaries between these components are somewhat diffuse, their interrelations are 

 discussed below. Budgetary history and projections in the core program are shown in the tables. 



1. Seawater Chemical Equilibria and Physicochemical Properties. This component 

 includes studies on equilibria of chemical species and compounds in seawater and their 

 availability for reacting with other chemical phases in the marine environment. 



Through efforts of a diverse group of physical chemists and physical oceanographers, a 

 universal equation of state for seawater has been recently adopted, and new insights on 

 dissociation constants of major seawater equilibria (e.g., the carbonate system) have been 

 developed. Future research will be directed towards further developing speciation and ionic 

 interaction models in seawater, including microbially mediated reactions and thermodynamic 

 and kinetic investigations on marine photochemical reactions. The relative level of effort, 

 however, is projected to decrease slightly to allow other areas of the program to increase. 



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