Changing pH in the Surface Ocean

In 1896, Arrhenius provided the first roughly quantitative sense of the plausible magnitude of human-induced changes in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Since then, all chemists could be aware that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere must lead to increasing amounts in the ocean and a corresponding increase in acidity. For a long time, however, no one appears to have thought much about this latter consequence, probably because the likely effects were small and were, in any case, rather troublesome to calculate. It was only in 1909 that Sørensen proposed the concept of the pH scale. The negligible level of concern about the effect of CO2 on Earth\u27s heat balance was not much affected by the work of Callendar (1938), who argued that the increasing concentrations in the atmosphere could be observed and would be significant. The radiative balance calculations of Plass (1956), published in Tellus, began to influence those who read such journals, and the beginnings of the Keeling curve brought widespread attention to the increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration

Concentrations of particulate iron in Atlantic open-ocean water

Measurements of particulate iron concentrations have been carried out on samples from the western Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Water samples were collected in 30-l Niskin bottles; iron analyses were done by atomic absorption spectroscopy. The average of 184 iron determinations on shallow open-ocean water (0-300 m) was 0.177 µg/l; the average of 112 determinations on deep water (500-7535 m) was 0.255 µg/l...

Arsenate in the western North Atlantic and adjacent regions

The concentration of arsenate was measured at 25 stations in the North Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico…

The determination of the apparent dissociation constants of arsenic acid in water

The apparent dissociation constants for arsenic acid in seawater, based on a free molal hydrogen scale, were determined in artificial seawater over a range of salinities and temperatures. A comparison between constants determined in a sodium chloride solution and artificial seawater of the same ionic strength suggests that a significant amount of the reactive arsenate in seawater is ion paired with cations other than sodium...

A Study of the Sediments of Narragansett Bay, Volume 1: The Surface Sediments of Narragansett Bay

This report is divided into two volumes. The focus of Volume I is the surface sediments of Narragansett Bay. Volume I contains a study of the surface sediments of Narragansett Bay (Chapter 1), a study of suspended sediments in the northwestern section of the Narragansett Bay System (Chapter 2), a study of the relationship between contaminant concentrations in the surface sediments and soft tissues of the hard clam, Mercenaria mercenaria in Narragansett Bay (Chapter 3), and the results of a side-scan sonar survey of the Providence River dredged channel (Chapter 4). The focus of Volume II is a study of sediment cores from the Narragansett Bay System. Chapter 5 contains the results of geophysical (side-scan and sub-bottom sonar) that support the core studies. The results of studies of sediment cores from Narragansett Bay are contained in Chapter 6, and the results of sediment core studies from its freshwater tributaries (i.e., the Blackstone and Pawtuxet Rivers) are contained in Chapter 7. (Text taken from report preface

Arsenate uptake and reduction by Pocillopora verrucosa

This article is in Free Access Publication and may be downloaded using the “Download Full Text PDF” link at right. © 1974, by the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, Inc

On the residence time of water in Narragansett Bay

For Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, newly calculated and archival data for the area, mean depth, total volume, mean salinity and fresh water input are presented. Estimates of the residence time of the water, derived from 22 sets of monthly mean values, were related to estimates of the fresh water input according to the empirical relationship T=41.8 e-0.00435(FW), where T is the flushing time in days, and FW is the fresh water input in m3 per s; the r2 value is 0.841. Adding estimates of the mean wind speed into a multiple regression increased the correlation coefficient only to 0.864. At the long-term mean rate of fresh water input (105 m3 per s) the flushing time is 26 days. At the lowest mean monthly input rate observed the flushing time was nearly 40 days, while at the highest mean monthly input rate in the data set (325 m3 per s) the flushing time was about 10 days. Known sources of random error appear sufficient to account for most of the deviations from the relationship. The evidence suggests that variation in the flushing time is largely determined by variation in the fresh water input. © 1985 Estuarine Research Federation

We are evaporating our coal mines into the air

The title sentence was not written by Svante Arrhenius. Furthermore, the context within which he was working would not have led naturally to the creation of such a sentence. The sentence was the work of four separate individuals. Lotka introduced the word evaporating in a paragraph where he was discussing Arrhenius views as presented in 1908. Ausubel copied a sentence from Lotka, still with only the word evaporating in quotation marks, but without a qualifying phrase, in a paragraph where he was discussing Arrhenius contributions, probably believing that the word was from Arrhenius. Revelle included the whole fragment of a sentence from Ausubel (probably believing that this fragment was from Arrhenius), along with nine direct quotations from Arrhenius (1908), while not saying exactly where they came from. Weiner added the first two words and ascribed the whole sentence to Arrhenius (1896). Subsequent authors have sequentially quoted each other, generally without attribution. © Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 2006