Table of Contents

• Coverage
• Dataset Description
  • Methods & Sampling
  • Data Processing Description
  • BCO-DMO Processing Description
• Data Files
• Supplemental Files
• Parameters
• Instruments
• Deployments
• Project Information
• Program Information
• Funding

For GP17-OCE, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) STS 36-place yellow rosette and bottles were used. The rosette was loaded on Revelle in early November 2022. The rosette and bottles were built before P06 2017, making this the fifteenth time this package has been deployed. A steel bridle was added to the top of the rosette to adapt to the winch head. The bottles were made with new PVC, with new non-baked o-rings and electro-polished steel springs. Springs within the Bullister-style Niskin bottles were electropolished stainless steel. Bottle lanyards were made from 300-pound monofilament. In addition to the standard CTDO package on GO-SHIP cruises, a UVP, oxidation reduction potential (ORP), and turbidity sensor were mounted on the rosette. During the cruise, a handful of problems were encountered. These are described in the cruise report prepared by the Ocean Data Facility (ODF) (see Supplemental Files).

ODF rosette casts were performed with a package consisting of a 36-bottle rosette frame, a 36-place carousel, and 36 Bullister style Niskin bottles with an absolute volume of 10.6 liters (L). Underwater electronic components primarily consisted of a SeaBird Electronics housing unit with Paroscientific pressure sensor with dual plumbed lines where each line has a pump, temperature sensor, conductivity sensor, and exhaust line. A SeaBird Electronics membrane oxygen sensor was mounted on the "primary" line. A reference thermometer, RINKO oxygen optode, transmissometer, chlorophyll-a fluorometer, and altimeter were also mounted on the rosette. UVP, ORP, and turbidity instruments were deployed with the CTD/rosette package and their use is outlined further in the cruise report.

Calculation of nutrient concentrations: For nutrients and oxygen, seawater density was calculated using TEOS-10. ODF used the bottle salinity if available, if not they used the CTD trip value. The temperature used for the nutrient density conversions are the lab temperatures measured during analysis. For oxygen, the draw temperature was used for the density conversions. The pressure used was the surface pressure (0 dbar).

Quality Flags: Quality flags are assigned using the WOCE/WHP codes, described at http://cchdo.ucsd.edu/WHP_Exchange_Description.pdf and as follows:

WOCE Bottle Quality Codes
1: Bottle information unavailable.
2: No problems noted.
3: Leaking.
4: Did not trip correctly.
5: Not reported.
6: Significant discrepancy in measured values between Gerard and Niskin bottles.
7: Unknown problem.
8: Pair did not trip correctly. Note that the Niskin bottle can trip at an unplanned depth while the Gerard trips correctly and vice versa.
9: Samples not drawn from this bottle.

WOCE Water Sample Quality Codes
1: Sample for this measurement was drawn from water bottle but analysis not received.
2: Acceptable measurement.
3: Questionable measurement.
4: Bad measurement.
5: Not reported.
6: Mean of replicate measurements.
7: Manual chromatographic peak measurement.
8: Irregular digital chromatographic peak integration.
9: Sample not drawn for this measurement from this bottle.

- Imported original file "33RR20221201_odf_only_hy1.csv" into the BCO-DMO system.
- Flagged "-999" as a missing data value (missing data are empty/blank in the final CSV file).
- Renamed fields to comply with BCO-DMO naming conventions.
- Created date-time field in ISO 8601 format.
- Removed the UWAY columns (not used).
- Saved the final file as "933861_v1_gp17-oce_odf_nutrients.csv".

The U.S. GEOTRACES GP17-OCE expedition departed Papeete, Tahiti (French Polynesia) on December 1st, 2022 and arrived in Punta Arenas, Chile on January 25th, 2023. The cruise took place in the South Pacific and Southern Oceans aboard the R/V Roger Revelle (cruise ID RR2214) with a team of 34 scientists lead by Ben Twining (Chief Scientist), Jessica Fitzsimmons and Greg Cutter (Co-Chief Scientists). GP17 was planned as a two-leg expedition, with its first leg (GP17-OCE) as a southward extension of the 2018 GP15 Alaska-Tahiti expedition and a second leg (GP17-ANT; December 2023-January 2024) into coastal and shelf waters of Antarctica's Amundsen Sea.

The South Pacific and Southern Oceans sampled by GP17-OCE play critical roles in global water mass circulation and associated global transfer of heat, carbon, and nutrients. Specific oceanographic regions of interest for GP17-OCE included: the most oligotrophic gyre in the global ocean, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) frontal region, the previously unexplored Pacific- Antarctic Ridge, the Pacific Deep Water (PDW) flow along the continental slope of South America, and the continental margin inputs potentially emanating from South America.

Further information is available on the US GEOTRACES website and in the cruise report (PDF).

NSF Project Title: Collaborative Research: Management and Implementation of US GEOTRACES GP17 Section: South Pacific and Southern Ocean (GP17-OCE)

NSF Award Abstract:
This award will support the management and implementation of a research expedition from Tahiti to Chile that will enable sampling for a broad suite of trace elements and isotopes (TEI) across oceanographic regions of importance to global nutrient and carbon cycling as part of the U.S. GEOTRACES program. GEOTRACES is a global effort in the field of Chemical Oceanography, the goal of which is to understand the distributions of trace elements and their isotopes in the ocean. Determining the distributions of these elements and isotopes will increase understanding of processes that shape their distributions, such as ocean currents and material fluxes, and also the processes that depend on these elements, such as the growth of phytoplankton and the support of ocean ecosystems. The proposed cruise will cross the South Pacific Gyre, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, iron-limited Antarctic waters, and the Chilean margin. In combination with a proposed companion GEOTRACES expedition on a research icebreaker (GP17-ANT) that will be joined by two overlapping stations, the team of investigators will create an ocean section from the ocean's most nutrient-poor waters to its highly-productive Antarctic polar region - a region that plays an outsized role in modulating the global carbon cycle. The expedition will support and provide management infrastructure for additional participating science projects focused on measuring specific external fluxes and internal cycling of TEIs along this section.

The South Pacific Gyre and Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean play critical roles in global water mass circulation and associated global transfer of heat, carbon, and nutrients, but they are chronically understudied for TEIs due to their remote locale. These are regions of strong, dynamic fronts where sub-surface water masses upwell and subduct, and biological and chemical processes in these zones determine nutrient stoichiometries and tracer concentrations in waters exported to lower latitudes. The Pacific sector represents an end member of extremely low external TEI surface fluxes and thus an important region to constrain inputs from the rapidly-changing Antarctic continent. Compared to other ocean basins, TEI cycling in these regions is thought to be dominated by internal cycling processes such as biological uptake, regeneration, and scavenging, and these are poorly represented in global ocean models. The cruise will enable funded investigators to address research questions such as: 1) what are relative rates of external TEI fluxes to this region, including dust, sediment, hydrothermal, and cryospheric fluxes? 2) What are the (micro) nutrient regimes that support productivity, and what impacts do biomass accumulation, export, and regeneration have on TEI cycling and stoichiometries of exported material? 3) What are TEI and nutrient stoichiometries of subducting water masses, and how do scavenging and regeneration impact these during transport northward? This management project has several objectives: 1) plan and coordinate a 55-day research cruise in 2021-2022; 2) use both conventional and trace-metal 'clean' sampling systems to obtain TEI samples, as well as facilitate sampling for atmospheric aerosols and large volume particles and radionuclides; 3) acquire hydrographic data and samples for salinity, dissolved oxygen, algal pigments, and macro-nutrients; and deliver these data to relevant repositories; 4) ensure that proper QA/QC protocols, as well as GEOTRACES intercalibration protocols, are followed and reported; 5) prepare the final cruise report to be posted with data; 6) coordinate between all funded cruise investigators, as well as with leaders of proposed GP17-ANT cruise; and 7) conduct broader impact efforts that will engage the public in oceanographic research using immersive technology. The motivations for and at-sea challenges of this work will be communicated to the general public through creation of immersive 360/Virtual Reality experiences, via a collaboration with the Texas A&M University Visualization LIVE Lab. Through Virtual Reality, users will experience firsthand what life and TEI data collection at sea entail. Virtual reality/digital games and 360° experiences will be distributed through GEOTRACES outreach websites, through PI engagement with local schools, libraries, STEM summer camps, and adult service organizations, and through a collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences.

GEOTRACES is a SCOR sponsored program; and funding for program infrastructure development is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

GEOTRACES gained momentum following a special symposium, S02: Biogeochemical cycling of trace elements and isotopes in the ocean and applications to constrain contemporary marine processes (GEOSECS II), at a 2003 Goldschmidt meeting convened in Japan. The GEOSECS II acronym referred to the Geochemical Ocean Section Studies To determine full water column distributions of selected trace elements and isotopes, including their concentration, chemical speciation, and physical form, along a sufficient number of sections in each ocean basin to establish the principal relationships between these distributions and with more traditional hydrographic parameters;

* To evaluate the sources, sinks, and internal cycling of these species and thereby characterize more completely the physical, chemical and biological processes regulating their distributions, and the sensitivity of these processes to global change; and

* To understand the processes that control the concentrations of geochemical species used for proxies of the past environment, both in the water column and in the substrates that reflect the water column.

GEOTRACES will be global in scope, consisting of ocean sections complemented by regional process studies. Sections and process studies will combine fieldwork, laboratory experiments and modelling. Beyond realizing the scientific objectives identified above, a natural outcome of this work will be to build a community of marine scientists who understand the processes regulating trace element cycles sufficiently well to exploit this knowledge reliably in future interdisciplinary studies.

Expand "Projects" below for information about and data resulting from individual US GEOTRACES research projects.