For beginners, there is not much need to water.
Indeed, the world’s oceans are full of monsters, wonders, and mysteries, but otherwise they are just vast, singular liquid expanses. right?
mistaken.
Far from being uniform everywhere, seawater is a patchwork of interconnected layers and clumps that mix and separate due to currents, eddies, and changes in temperature and salinity.
It is true that there are waterfalls beneath the surface of our ocean; river Even giant blobs that stretch for thousands of miles manage to avoid detection.
Now, scientists have discovered one of these huge chunks in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It stretches from the tip of Brazil to the Gulf of Guinea.
Until this body of water, named Atlantic Equatorial Water, was discovered, experts had observed water mixing along the equator in the Pacific and Indian oceans, but never in the Atlantic Ocean. did.
“It seems controversial that equatorial water masses exist in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but not in the Atlantic Ocean,” said Viktor Zurbas, a physicist and oceanographer at the Shirshov Institute. “There are common features of equatorial circulation and mixing in all three oceans.”Moscow oceanography spoke live science.
“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.”
Ocean water is a patchwork of interconnected layers and masses that mix and separate. iStock
As the name suggests, Atlantic Equatorial Water is formed by the mixing of separate bodies of water by currents along the equator.
To distinguish such clumps from the surrounding water, oceanographers analyze the relationship between temperature and salinity (which determines the density of seawater) throughout the ocean.
Back in 1942, this graph of temperature and salinity led to the discovery of equatorial waters in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. live science Note.
Because the equatorial waters of the India and Pacific Ocean are formed by the mixing of northern and southern waters, they have similar temperatures and salinities that curve along lines of the same density, making them easy to distinguish from surrounding waters.
However, for many years no such relationship was discovered in the Atlantic Ocean.
But thanks to data collected by Project Argo, an international collection of robotic self-submersible floats deployed across the Earth’s oceans, researchers have discovered that the Argos, located parallel to the North Atlantic and South Mid-Atlantic waters, We discovered an unnoticed curve of temperature and salinity.
This was the elusive Atlantic Equatorial Water.
“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. Explained via email.to live science.
The discovery is important because it allows experts to better understand how the ocean mixes, which is essential to how the ocean transports heat, oxygen and nutrients around the world.
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