Nuclear Reprocessing Tracers Illuminate Flow Features and Connectivity Between the Arctic and Subpolar North Atlantic Oceans

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. Early tracer studies focused on 137Cs, which revealed some of the first significant insights into the Arctic Ocean circulation, while more recent work has benefited from advances in accelerator mass spectrometry to enable the measurement of the conservative, long-lived radionuclide tracers 129I and 236U. The latest studies of these tracers, supported by simulations using the North Atlantic–Arctic Ocean–Sea Ice Model (NAOSIM) and enhanced by the use of transit time distributions to more precisely accommodate mixing, have provided 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.