Ocean, Past, Present, and Future Chapter 1 - Introduction
Preface
This is ones more a new lecture for which I have highest ambition. It is likely my single most important lecture as I have long ignored my passion for the Ocean. I dedicate this lecture to all my colleagues and friends who have invited me to research cruises and allowed me to see the Ocean the way sailors see since millennia. and I also dedicate this work to all the people who has helped me run research cruises myself. Being days to months out on Sea makes our continents attractive again, but returning leaves the wish to go out again. The endless longing for the unreachable one or the other is established when recognizing that there is a deep beauty in seawater even if it tastes horrible. This lecture is based on previous attempts to describe what I think I understand about the Ocean, its dynamics, its chemistry, and its cycling of energy and matter. Thanks to the French CNRS and the German DFG funding I was able to conduct work on the ships in there fleet, the Navire Oceanographique Thalassa and the Research Vessel Meteor. I have spent certainly most my time on sea on Meteor, but other research vessels are great tools too, such as the French Pourquoi Pas and Marion Dufresne, and the German Maria S. Merian. I am still waiting to join Polarstern, and I hope to sail on the Celtic Explorer next summer. Why mention this, simply because I want you to understand that the science of the ocean may come with unique adventures - for me this was true.
One more thank you and we can start. Dear Matthieu (Prof. Matthieu Roy-Barmann) you have passed away much to early and left me blank for how fast our time may end. We have never been close friends, only colleagues and yet the space you leave empty is as deep as the deepest point in the Ocean. I hope we meet and possibly sail together, when the time has come. Lastly, many thanks to you, Wally (Broecker). You have sadly passed away on the 18$^{th}$ of February 2019 in New York. When I was working in the office next door as young postdoctoral fellow I felt most distant from you and your magic knowledge of the Sea. It has taking me very long to understand your work, as it did for my adviser, but approaching your knowledge has become a source of internal luck as the Ocean appears all of a sudden simple and clear, a truth shared with still only few.
His work and the decades of research trying to prove or reject his ideas was a period of many advances and exciting findings from which my enthusiasm steams in large parts. The lecture contains overall subject matters that are treated in great detail in several excellent text books starting with the one mentioned above - the original work of Wallace Smith Broecker and Tsung-Hung Peng 'Tracers in the Sea'. An update with further new insights was written by Jorge Sarmiento and Nicolas Gruber entitled 'Marine Biogeochemical Cycles' and/or another great source of examples and applications in a more textbook style is provided by Matthieu Roy-Barmann and Catherine Jeandel 'Marine Geochemistry'. The conclusion is - any script or textbook is outdated the day it appears since the multi-year writing, editing, and publishing cycle cannot keep pace with fast-moving fields and real-world developments. Thus, this web-script is outdated the moment it is written, but it may be updated as time flies. This lecture therefore follows a different path with a focus on the physics theory, data analysis and technology and a direct share to actual literature.
