Footnote:
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description:
"This book describes a chemical perspective on the science of oceanography. The goal is to understand the mechanisms that control the distributions of chemical compounds in the sea. The "chemical perspective" uses measured chemical distributions to infer oceanic biological, physical, chemical, and geological processes. This method has enormous information potential because of the variety of chemical compounds and the diversity of their chemical behaviors and distributions. It is complicated by the requirement that one must understand something about the reactions and time scales that control chemical distributions. Chemical concentrations in the sea "remember" the mechanisms that shape them over their whole oceanic lifetime. The time-scales of important mechanisms range from seconds or less for very rapid photochemical reactions to more than 100 million years for the mineral forming reactions that control relatively unreactive elements in seawater. The great range in time scales is associated with an equally large range in space scales: from chemical fluxes associated with individual microorganisms to globally distributed processes like river inflow and hydrothermal circulation"