Survey of CO₂ in the oceans reveals clues about global carbon cycle

January 1996 marked the completion of the most ambitious and successful high-precision inorganic carbon survey of a major ocean basin to date: a 14-month, 92 000-km-long research cruise in the Indian Ocean. This survey, conducted in close collaboration with the international World Ocean Circulation Experiment-Hydrographic Program (WOCE-HP), is part of a project involving 10 U.S. universities and national laboratories that have been working together since 1990 to acquire a high-quality inorganic carbon data set for all of the world's oceans. One of the primary goals of the survey is to develop a better understanding of the oceanic carbon cycle and the role of the oceans in the uptake of anthropogenic CO₂ that is released to the atmosphere.