FSU Chemical Oceanography

Chemical Oceanography

Chemical oceanographers study the mechanisms that control the distribution of elements and compounds in the atmosphere, ocean, coastal waterways, and sediments on the sea floor.

Research programs at FSU are currently being conducted in many areas, including:

application of naturally-occurring uranium and thorium decay-series isotopes to marine geochemical problems (Burnett);
environmental radioactivity (Burnett);
distribution, origin, and geochemistry of offshore minerals (Burnett);
investigations of the discharge of groundwater into the coastal zone (Burnett and Chanton);
food-chain dynamics (Chanton);
the role of wetlands in supplying greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and interactions with carbon cycling (Chanton);
chemical cycling of major elements, carbon, sulfur, oxygen, nitrogen, and iron in the coastal zone and in wetlands (Chanton) and (Kostka);
biogeochemistry of organic matter in the ocean and coastal zones (Dittmar);
identifying the origin of organic matter and tracing its fate in the ocean (Dittmar);
unravelling past changes in ocean and atmospheric chemistry related to global environmental change (Froelich);
paleoceanography and paleoclimatology (Froelich);
developing new analytical techniques and field methods to investigate how the earth's geochemical factory operates today and how to extract clues about its operation in the past (Froelich);
biogeochemistry of saltmarshes, seagrass beds, and mangrove forests (Kostka);
bioremediation of radioactive contaminants in subsurface sediments (Kostka);
studying the chemical, biological, and physical processes that affect trace-element distributions and behavior in marine, freshwater, and atmospheric environments (Landing);
the relative importance of atmospheric deposition to the biogeochemical cycles of elements (and carbon) in the oceans (Landing);
low-temperature aqueous geochemistry, biochemistry of trace elements in marine and fresh waters with emphasis on the effects of biological and inorganic processes on dissolved/particulate fractionation, solution speciation, and redox chemistry (Landing)