Radium isotopes and 228Th in surface water samples collected on POLARSTERN expedition PS94

DOI

Radium isotopes are produced by decay of an isotope of thorium, a highly particle reactive element. Radium is relatively soluble in seawater such that once a thorium isotope in suspended or bottom sediments decays, a fraction of the produced radium isotope may be released to solution. 224Ra (3.7-day half-life) and 223Ra (11.4-day half-life) are used extensively as tracers for interaction on the shelf and for submarine groundwater discharge (SGD). 228Ra is strongly enriched in shelf waters and in the Transpolar Drift (TPD) and its half-life (5.8 years) is well suited to study the fate of this shelf-derived water in the central Arctic. This dataset collected in the framework of GEOTRACES during PS94 in 2015 shows that the input of 228Ra in the TPD has increased since previous studies in 2007 and 2011. The distribution of 228Ra-daughter 228Th (1.9 y half-life) and the 228Th/228Ra ratio are measured to trace particle fluxes. The accumulation of 226Ra (1620 y half-life) in the deep Makarov Basin can be used as a measure of basin ventilation time.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.936052
Related Identifier References https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JC013888
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.936052
Provenance
Creator Rutgers van der Loeff, Michiel M ORCID logo; Stimac, Ingrid ORCID logo; Bauch, Dorothea ORCID logo; Valk, Ole ORCID logo; Geibert, Walter ORCID logo; Vieira, Lucia Helena (ORCID: 0000-0001-9382-062X)
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2021
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 602 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (-116.830W, 71.000S, 21.200E, 89.930N); Arctic Ocean; Barents Sea
Temporal Coverage Begin 2015-08-26T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2015-10-09T00:00:00Z