The large-scale circulation patterns in the deep ocean are difficult to measure directly, and much of what is known about deep ocean flow has been deduced from the distributions of hydrographic tracers (e.g. salinity, oxygen, nutrients). Hydrographic tracers, however, tell us little about the rates of the processes involved, and over the last 25 years, oceanographers have increasingly turned to transient tracers—radiocarbon, tritium, and more recently the chlorofluorocarbons—in an attempt to estimate the time-scales of circulation in the deep ocean. As part of my thesis research, I have used bomb-tritium data from the Transient Tracers in the Ocean (TTO) program to quantify the ventilation or replenishment rates for deep water in the North Atlantic.

Doney, S.C. 1992. Bomb tritium in the deep North Atlantic. Oceanography 5(3):169–170, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.1992.11.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.