Funding from this award will be used to establish a U.S. GEOTRACES Project Office (PO). GEOTRACES is an international program designed to study the global marine biogeochemical cycles of trace elements and their isotopes (TEIs). TEIs play important roles in the ocean as nutrients, as tracers of processes now and in the past, and as contaminants. Their biogeochemical cycling has direct implications for research in such diverse areas as the carbon cycle, climate change, ocean ecosystems, and environmental contamination. GEOTRACES promises clear benefits to each of these areas by significantly advancing knowledge of the marine biogeochemical cycles of TEIs.
GEOTRACES has been planned under the auspices of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR). A Science Plan for GEOTRACES was formally approved by SCOR in January, 2006, creating a point of transition from planning to implementation of the program. Implementation of the global study will be a complex process, the success of which will rely on strong partnerships among the various national efforts. Each nation participating in GEOTRACES will develop its own Implementation Strategy, using the Science Plan as a basis for design of its research efforts. Developing a U.S. Implementation Strategy, and then implementing that strategy will require a more formal level of organization, management and general administrative support than has heretofore been in place. The proposed PO will provide that support.
The PO will serve as a command center for day-to-day operations and logistical matters. The PO will assist a Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) and its standing committees with all aspects of their work. The PO will facilitate communications among the various components of GEOTRACES (e.g., the international SSC, various national committees, standing committees) and will serve as the primary interface for communications with the broader oceanographic community and with the general public. Toward that end, the PO will maintain a Web site to post information about GEOTRACES activities and to convey results from the program in a format that can be understood by nonspecialists. The PO will produce a GEOTRACES Newsletter and will maintain a metadatabase for GEOTRACES cruises. Information will be disseminated, as well, through brochures and in newsletters produced by related programs and organizations.
A number of broader impacts should be evident. A natural outcome of fulfilling the GEOTRACES objectives will be to build and maintain a core community of marine scientists, and to train a new generation of marine scientists, who understand the chemical, physical and biological processes regulating the distribution and properties of TEIs well enough to exploit this knowledge reliably in future interdisciplinary studies. GEOTRACES anticipates serving as a resource to policy makers. Communication with policy makers is one of the defined functions of the PO. Where appropriate, the PO will call upon members of the SSC, or other scientists participating in GEOTRACES activities, to provide expert testimony concerning topics broadly related to the GEOTRACES mission (e.g., the transport and fate of contaminants; the implications of purposeful ocean fertilization with biologically limiting TEI micronutrients).
