I have temporarily shifted my focus on iodine in air to iodine in water. The reason for this is that we have got two sets of water samples that are very interesting. The first is samples from the Arctic Ocean. They have been collected by various ships over several years and stored in Norway awaiting analysis. Because of the changing climate the Arctic Ocean water circulation may be affected and possibly we may see indications of this by analyzing I-129 and combining with other tracers. The other set of samples comes from Japan, outside Fukoshima where the reactor disaster occurred following the earthquake. The samples were collected only a month after the accident and were stored by scientists until they could send us. We have been asked to analyze them for I-129 but also other isotopes. Possibly large amounts of I-129 were released at this accident. The good in this entire sad thing is that the iodine may provide us with a tool to trace the water that was outside Fukoshima at that time. It will work as a tracer and we can follow this for many years, hopefully get a better understanding of the Pacific Ocean currents. For instance how fast the mixing to larger depths happens. This is important to know since this mixing helps pumping away the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, reducing global warming.

I will also continue with the atmospheric iodine. We got some interesting results although the analytical part suffers from problems. We have expected that iodate is the major specie in water leachate of air filters, however, iodide constitutes of more than 30% of iodine in the aerosol based on 127I concentrations. Whereas, we haven’t observed variations of 129I in all fractions, but we are looking forward into it and see some difference from 127I values, which will indicate transport of 129I in the atmosphere.