Thursday, October 05, 2023, 16:00
WHGA Auditorium
Núria Casacuberta Arola, ETHZ
Abstract:
Releases of anthropogenic radionuclides from European nuclear fuel
reprocessing plants enter the surface circulation of the high-latitude
North Atlantic and are transported northward into the Arctic Ocean and
southward from the Nordic Seas into the deep North Atlantic, thereby
providing tracers of water circulation, mixing, ventilation, and
deep-water formation. Recent work has benefited from advances in
accelerator mass spectrometry to enable the measurement of the
conservative, long-lived radionuclide tracers 129I and
236U, that added to the former use of 137Cs.
Latest studies of these tracers include the use of transit time
distributions (TTDs) to accommodate circulation timescales and mixing,
providing a rich inventory of transport data for circulation in the
Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans that are of great importance to global
thermohaline circulation and climate.
In this talk I will present a summary of the work we have been doing in
the last decade at ETH Zürich, and the future plans within the
TITANICA project. In particular, results of 129I and
236U from three expeditions that took place under the Arctic
GEOTRACES programme in 2015 and 2016. Distribution of these two
radionuclides in the three sections offered an unprecedented snap-shot
of the pathways of Atlantic waters flowing into the Arctic Ocean during
an atmospheric anti-cyclonic regime (Figure 1). The combination of the
two tracers, having different input functions but same sources, allowed
us to constrain tracer ages at the surface, and transit time
distributions at the Atlantic layer, updating the previous dataset that
was built a decade ago using 137Cs instead of 236U
[1]. Existing time series at Labrador Sea and deep North Atlantic (Line
W) from 1990s and 2000s show the penetration of 129I at the
deep Labrador Sea and downstream at the Deep Western Boundary Current
thus proving the connectivity between the Arctic and the Atlanic Oceans.
Future work at ETH will cover several sections in the Arctic and
subpolar North Atlantic Ocean, and will make use of the newly developed
129I — 236U tracer pair to understand flow
features and timescales of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.