ADVANCES IN MARINE BIOGEOCHEMISTRY:
CELEBRATING THE CAREER OF BOB ANDERSON
ADVANCES IN MARINE BIOGEOCHEMISTRY: CELEBRATING THE CAREER OF BOB ANDERSON
Bob Anderson graduated summa cum laude from the University of Washington in 1975 with a double major in chemistry and oceanography. He received his PhD in Chemical Oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography in 1981. Since 1981, he has been at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, reaching his current position of Ewing-Lamont Research Professor in 2010. Along the way, he has taught chemistry of the ocean and continental waters, supervised and mentored generations of graduate students and postdocs, served as president of the Oceans Section of the American Geophysical Union, and served as Associate Director for the Observatory, when he oversaw the construction of the Comer building for the Geochemistry Division.
As a student, Bob was convinced that naturally occurring radionuclides could be used to quantify the rates of key processes in marine biogeochemical cycles. Some of the essential principles were defined initially in the paper by Bacon and Anderson (1982). At the time, the Geochemical Ocean Sections Study (GEOSECS) was underway - the first program to systematically study the chemistry of the ocean at a global scale and demonstrate the value of synthesizing results from diverse sources. In the late 1990s, Bob became the program co-coordinator of the US Southern Ocean Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS-AESOPS), a program encompassing eleven research cruises aimed at understanding processes influencing primary productivity and the past and present fluxes of carbon in the Southern Ocean. Several research outcomes of this program demonstrated the value of using naturally occurring radionuclides in quantifying these marine biogeochemical processes.
The value of using radionuclides to establish rates is shown in Anderson et al. (2009), where rapid changes in the circulation of the ocean around Antarctica were demonstrated to be responsible for the release of CO2 to the atmosphere as Earth emerged from the last ice age. By elucidating the important role of ocean circulation, it was possible to determine that the low atmospheric CO2 levels of the Pleistocene ice ages was due to increased storage of CO2 in the deep ocean (Anderson et al., 2019).
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In 2000, Bob teamed with international scientists to design a new program (GEOTRACES) to study the marine biogeochemistry of trace elements and their isotopes. Now, a growing number of synthesis papers from the GEOTRACES program (Anderson, 2020) are exploiting naturally occurring radionuclides to establish rates of processes that regulate the chemistry of the ocean, such as the delivery of dust from the continents, the sinking flux of biogenic material exported from the surface ocean, and the accumulation of sediments worldwide, bringing to fruition Bob’s dream in graduate school.
Bob has been honored with several awards (AGU Fellow, Geochemistry Society Fellow, A.G. Huntsman Award in the Marine Sciences, C.C. Patterson Medal), but Bob’s influence as a scientist goes beyond his many research accomplishments and accolades. Bob has helped guide the careers of many students and early career researchers, both those counted as his students and within the broader community. We invite you to join us in celebrating Bob’s career and his contributions to the field of marine biogeochemistry and ocean sciences.
PLANNING COMMITTEE: Zanna Chase (University of Tasmania, AUSTRALIA), Marty Fleisher (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory), Chris Hayes (The University of Southern Mississippi, USA), Gideon Henderson (Oxford University, UK), Karen Kohfeld (Simon Fraser University, CANADA), Annie Leal (Columbia University, USA), Jerry McManus (Columbia University, USA), Yan Zheng (Southern University of Science and Technology, CHINA).
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