Scientists have discovered a previously undiscovered body of water in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This is a huge body of water that stretches across the Atlantic Ocean from the tip of Brazil to the Gulf of Guinea near West Africa.
This body of water, named Atlantic Equatorial Water, is formed along the equator when ocean currents mix separate bodies of water to the north and south.
Before the discovery of Atlantic equatorial water, scientists had observed water mixing along the equator in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but never in the Atlantic Ocean. The researchers published their findings in the journal Oct. 28. Geophysical Research Letters.
Related: There is a 99% certainty that the Gulf Stream will weaken, and its effects will be global.
“It seemed controversial that equatorial water masses exist in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but not in the Atlantic Ocean, because equatorial circulation and mixing in all three oceans seem to have common features. It’s from.” victor djourbasphysicist and oceanographer at Moscow’s Shirshov Institute of Oceanography told LiveScience in an email. “The identified new water masses allowed us to complete (or at least describe more accurately) the phenomenological pattern of the fundamental water masses of the world’s oceans.”
Far from being the same everywhere, ocean water is a vast patchwork of interconnected masses and layers that mix and separate again due to currents, eddies, and changes in temperature and salinity.
Water bodies are a distinctive part of this miscellaneous arrangement. Each body of water has a common geography, formation history, and common physical characteristics such as oxygen, nitrate, and phosphate densities and dissolved isotopes.
To distinguish between water masses, oceanographers graph the relationship between temperature and salinity across the ocean. These two measurements are combined to determine the density of seawater.
In 1942, this graph of temperature and salinity led to the discovery of equatorial waters in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Formed by the mixing of northern and southern waters, both the Indian and Pacific equatorial waters curve along a line of constant temperature and salinity density, making them easily distinguishable from the surrounding water. However, no such relationship was found in the Atlantic Ocean.
To search for the missing water mass, scientists combed through data collected by Project Argo, an international array of robotic self-diving floats dotting the world’s oceans.
After analyzing data collected by this floating array, the researchers discovered that unnoticed temperature and salinity patterns lie parallel to the curve that separates the North Atlantic and South Mid-Atlantic waters north and south, the curve that separates the Atlantic equatorial waters. I discovered the concentration curve.
“It was easy to confuse equatorial Atlantic waters and mid-South Atlantic waters, and distinguishing them required a fairly dense network of vertical temperature and salinity profiles covering the entire Atlantic Ocean,” Zurbas said. Stated.
Identification of the water mass will allow scientists to better understand the ocean mixing processes that are essential for the ocean to transport heat, oxygen and nutrients around the world, Zurbas said.