What Lies Beneath the Weddell Sea
Linde Gas (www.lindegas.com), a division of The Linde Group, has an agreement with the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the United Kingdom to support ANDREX (Antarctic Deep Water Rates of Export), a project that will research the role of the Southern Ocean in the global climate system. Linde Gas will help scientists look at CO2 in the Antarctica region by supplying a technologically complex and rare reference gas required for the expedition.
On the ship that is bringing the research team from the university’s School of Environmental Sciences to the Weddell Sea in Antarctica, is a cylinder containing Linde’s HiQ® calibration gas mixture with 30 parts per trillion (ppt) of sulphur hexafluoride (SF6).
Since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s oceans have absorbed approximately 30 percent of all anthropogenic — human created — carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted into the atmosphere. Of all the anthropogenic CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, approximately half stay there; the remainder are absorbed by the oceans and the land (through organic matter storage). The oceans and land act together to slow the accumulation of additional CO2 in the atmosphere. While CO2 is more soluble in freshwater than in seawater, freshwater represents only about three percent of the world’s water and therefore is not as significant a collector of CO2 as are the oceans.
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