Our desire to understand the global carbon cycle and its link to the
climate system represents a huge challenge. These overarching questions
have driven a great deal of scientific endeavour in recent years: What
are the basic oceanic mechanisms which control the oceanic carbon
reservoirs and the partitioning of carbon between ocean and atmosphere?
How do these mechanisms depend on the state of the climate system and
how does the carbon cycle feed back on climate? What is the current rate
at which fossil fuel carbon dioxide is absorbed by the oceans and how
might this change in the future? To begin to answer these questions we
must first understand the distribution of carbon in the ocean, its
partitioning between different ocean reservoirs (the "solubility" and
"biological" pumps of carbon), the mechanisms controlling these
reservoirs, and the relationship of the significant physical and
biological processes to the physical environment. The recent surveys
from the JGOFS and WOCE (Joint Global Ocean Flux Study and World Ocean
Circulation Ex- periment) programs have given us a first truly global
survey of the physical and biogeochemical properties of the ocean. These
new, high quality data provide the opportunity to better quantify the
present oceans reservoirs of carbon and the changes due to fossil fuel
burning. In addition, diverse process studies and time-series
observations have clearly revealed the complexity of interactions
between nutrient cycles, ecosystems, the carbon-cycle and the physical
envi- ronment.