First carbon-14 observations in the Great Australian Bight

Abstract

The Great Australian Bight south of Australia is an important link for the flow of surface, intermediate and deep water between the Indian and Pacific Ocean. Carbon-14 is a tracer of this flow and for the first time, water samples for subsequent carbon-14 analysis were collected at several locations within the Bight. We report and discuss the observed carbon-14 distribution in relation to the general hydrography of the area. For all sample depths, a close correlation of the Bight data with previous measurements from the southeast Indian Ocean was found. Our data represent the first successful Australian Accelerator Mass Spectrometry measurements for ocean water samples, and in the future, we plan to use the observations to validate output from computational experiments with a general ocean circulation model of the Southern Ocean.