Development and Application of Geochemical and Isotopic Tracers to Investigate Environmental Processes

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Human activities are increasingly altering climate and the environment and we must improve our predictive capabilities to decide on optimal societal responses to mitigate their negative impacts. Foremost among these concerns is the rise in atmospheric CO2, resulting in global warming and ocean acidification, and multiple feedbacks that can further affect the evolution of climate and marine ecosystem services. The ocean has played a key role in past changes in atmospheric CO2 and climate, and today it is a major sink for anthropogenic CO2. The main oceanic processes that affect atmospheric CO2 are circulation and the sinking flux of organic matter produced by marine ecosystems, which both control the sequestration of carbon to the deep sea and the chemistry of surface water in contact with the atmosphere. Predicting the trajectory of future environmental and climate changes thus requires a detailed documentation of the evolution of these processes in response to past climate changes and their quantification in the modern ocean. One approach towards achieving such predictive capability is to use the inherent integrative power of multiple geochemical tracers, which are either recorded in marine archives and provide information on changes in oceanic processes in relation to past climate variability, or which are imprinted in the water column and provides information on modern oceanic processes. A wide array of geochemical tracers is being developed to provide information on multiple oceanic processes in a multi-proxy, cross-checking context. The present proposal applies this general approach and builds on results obtained in the past five years. It combines sediment and water column study of (1) natural radioisotopes (230Th, 234Th, 231Pa) to constrain particle sinking flux in the ocean and deep water circulation, (2) neodymium isotopes which trace oceanic water masses and provide information on oceanic input of essential elements from partial dissolution of minerals brought to the sea from continents (a process recently coined as “Boundary Exchange”), and (3) chromium isotopes , which provide complementary information on boundary exchange, carbon sequestration, and the redox state of modern and past oceans. In addition to addressing these broad environmental questions, I have started and will continue to address questions pertaining more directly to environmental monitoring. I am investigating the use silver and cadmium isotopes to establish the source and dispersion of these toxic metals in coastal waters, and my group has developed a novel flow-through dissolution module to measure the kinetics of dissolution of minerals (which is also relevant to the questions of boundary exchange mentioned above), to estimate the release of toxic metals from mine wastes, and to evaluate the potential of mine waste for carbon sequestration.