Scientists have confirmed that every event leaves traces in the water, and found a way to identify them.

"Water forgets nothing", says Professor Boris Koch, a chemist from the Institute for polar and marine research Alfred Wegener in the Helmholtz. Regardless of what happens in the sea - sunshine, blooming algae or floating flock of dolphins - all leaves its biomolecular track. Using new technologies Boris Koch and his colleagues are now able to identify some traces left in the memory of water, and to follow them.

In a special volume of the journal Biogeosciences scientists report how the Maritime events were discovered by researchers and how were their analysis.

The concentration of so-called biomolecules in the oceans lower than in any roadside ditch or peat pit. However, if you could sift through the porous biomolecular sieve sea water, in this sieve would be 25 billion tons of carbon. Basically it is made from the remains of the dead sea organisms, and biomass of living whales, fish, algae, bacteria. On the other hand, even 662 billion tons of dissolved organic carbon will remain under the sieve, there will be about 10 000 of organic substances.

Dissolved organic matter is the world's largest active organic carbon sink on the planet. And it leads to high interest among scientists. "Our work with dissolved organic substances is accompanied by two major difficulties. First, we still don't know how much organic matter reaches the sea, which part is there, and why it is not fully decomposed. Secondly, the concentration of individual biomolecules so low that we have to constantly enrich the water samples to be able to see anything even under chuvstvitelnosti spectrometer Helmholtz", explains Koch. Using this spectrometer team of scientists led by Boris Koch was the first to identify thousands of individual components of dissolved organic matter. This information is necessary to determine the origin of individual molecules. At the end of the analysis in the mass spectrograph identifies the unique chemical ingerprint", which allow to identify what happened in the water. Research is just beginning, however, scientists can already be proud of the fact that when using this method, discovered new ways of using chemical water memory. For example, they can say how many years ago matter dissolved in the water that was exposed to the sunlight, traveling across the oceans, and which bacteria and plankton species lived in the same pond.