Tritium biological, chemical, and physical paths throughout the world oceans because of its evolving distribution. Tritium has thus been used as a tool to examine ocean circulation and ventilation and, for such purposes, is usually measured in Tritium Units where 1 TU is defined as the ratio of 1 tritium atom to 10 hydrogen atoms. As noted earlier, nuclear weapons testing, primarily in the high-latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere, throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s introduced large amounts of tritium into the atmosphere, especially the stratosphere. Before these nuclear tests, there were only about 3 to 4 kilograms of
Tritium period), the tritium interacted with and oxidized to water molecules and was present in much of the rapidly produced rainfall, making tritium a prognostic tool for studying the evolution and structure of the hydrologic cycle as well as the ventilation and formation of water masses in the North Atlantic Ocean. Bomb-tritium data were used from the Transient Tracers in the Ocean (TTO) program in order to quantify the replenishment and overturning rates for deep water located in the North Atlantic. Bomb-tritium also enters the deep ocean around the Antarctic. Most of the bomb tritiated water (HTO) throughout the atmosphere can