PIs: Géraldine Sarthou (LEMAR, France) and Pascale Lherminier (LPO, France)

Trace elements and their isotopes (TEIs) play a crucial role in the ocean and can provide fantastic tools for paleoceanography. Their cycles have direct implications in climate change, carbon cycling, ocean ecosystems and environmental contamination. Within the framework of the international GEOTRACES program, the collaborative program GEOVIDE proposes to undertake an integrated oceanographic transect in the North Atlantic. This area is crucial for the Earth climate and the TEI distributions are poorly constrained there. GEOVIDE aims at better constraining the uncertainties on ocean circulation and providing new information on chemical element fluxes. The strength of the project resides in its interdisciplinarity: physical oceanography and biogeochemistry will be coupled, merging observation and modeling. We will use a series of novel techniques and state-of-the-art instrumentation, gathering highly qualified scientific teams from nine countries.