Abstract
OCEANOGRAPHERS informally term the extension of Columbia River outflow into the Pacific Ocean as the ‘Columbia River plume’. The plume can be identified by its low salinity even at a distance of several hundred kilometres from the mouth of the river (Fig. 1). The plume distributes dissolved and suspended substances in the river water over a wide surface area of the ocean and introduces annually to the euphotic zone over a billion moles of phosphorus and nitrogen fertilizers, as phosphate and nitrate. Equally significantly, the radionuclides contained in the river water are diffused over a wide region1.
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References
The river-originated 51Cr has been used to investigate the Columbia River plume in 1965 by Osterberg, C., Cutshall, N., and Cronin, J. (in preparation).
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PARK, K., GEORGE, M., MIYAKE, Y. et al. Strontium-90 and Caesium-137 in Columbia River Plume, July 1964. Nature 208, 1084–1085 (1965). https://doi.org/10.1038/2081084a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/2081084a0
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