The Serendipity of Discovery: Life of a Geochemist

Author(s)

Willard S. Moore, University of South CarolinaFollow

ORCID iD

Moore

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5930-5325

Document Type

Article

Abstract

My strategy for writing this autobiography is to use examples of how working on seemingly different projects can often lead to outcomes more important than originally envisioned. Serendipity is a "happy accident"; specifically, the accident of discovering something useful without directly looking for it. This often occurs when two research projects converge unexpectedly. The main text contains examples of how serendipity has led me to important discoveries including: (a) finding surprisingly high ²²⁸Ra activities in the ocean, (b) developing a means of rapidly and quantitatively extracting radium from seawater, (c) devising a rapid, sensitive method of measuring ²²⁴Ra and ²²³Ra, (d) realizing the scale and biogeochemical importance of submarine groundwater discharge (SGD), and (e) conceiving a method to estimate the total flux of SGD to the Atlantic Ocean. The supplementary materials help flesh out details of these discoveries and place them in the context of my other investigations.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-marine-050823-103645

Publication Info

Published in Annual Review of Marine Science, Volume 17, Winter 2025, pages 1-22.

Rights

© 2025 by the author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

APA Citation

Moore, W. S. (2024). The Serendipity of Discovery: Life of a Geochemist. Annual Review of Marine Science. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-marine-050823-103645