Yahoo Finance A Hidden Blob Of Water Has Abruptly Reappeared In The Atlantic
For decades, scientists have known about “equatorial waters”—masses of ocean that separate waters north and south of the equator—in both the Pacific and Indian oceans. But a similar mass in the Atlantic has long remained elusive.
A new study by The Shirshov Institute of Oceanology finally discovered this aquatic mass, known as the Atlantic Equatorial Water (AEW), by poring over data available through the international Argo program.
Understanding this water mass—as well as others—will help scientists grasp how the world’s oceans transfer heat and nutrients across the planet.
Stare out into the grand expense of the ocean, and it can truly seem endless. Although oceans appear vast and uniform, they’re actually a mixture of roiling layers and masses both connected and split apart by various currents, temperature changes, and salinity variations.
One of these sections of ocean is what’s known as equatorial water, which forms along the equator and separates bodies to its north and south. For decades, scientists knew about equatorial waters in both the Pacific and Indian oceans—they had been detected through the collection of salinity and temperature data. However, a similar mass in the Atlantic remained ever elusive. This has been a particularly sticky problem for oceanologists, because it suggests that the Earth’s other equatorial oceans somehow behave differently than the Atlantic.
Finally, scientists from The Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow say they’ve found the Atlantic Equatorial Water (AEW) by combing over data provided by Argo, an international program that gathers ocean data using robotic platforms. The results were published in late October in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“In 1998 the Argo program was launched, [which] collects information from inside the ocean using a fleet of robotic instruments that drift with the ocean currents and move up and down between the surface and a mid-water level,” the paper reads. “Re-examination of water masses using previously unavailable high-quality large volume Argo data allowed us to distinguish a formerly unnoticed water mass in the main thermocline [transition layer between warm surface water and cooler deep water] of the Equatorial Atlantic and thereby complete the phenomenological pattern of basic water masses of the World Ocean.”
By focusing on temperature and salinity profiles, Viktor Zhurbas—oceanologist at The Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow and study co-author—and his team refined and supplemented “a detailed volumetric temperature-salinity diagram” of the upper 2,000 meters of the Atlantic ocean, which allowed them to finally discover the hidden AEW. As its name suggests, this new watery blob separates the north and south Atlantic roughly along the equator.
Understanding these areas of the ocean, and knowing they exist in the first place, is incredibly important. The paper notes that these water masses can act as reservoirs of heat, salt, and dissolved gasses—all of which reflect climate variability. Studying AEW, as well as other oceanic masses, will also help scientists grasp how the mixing process transfers heat and oxygen around the globe, according to Live Science.
The ocean’s dizzying complexity—along with its notable inhospitality to human biology—is why experts say we know more about the surface of Mars than Earth's own seas. But that sense of scientific murkiness just experienced a major moment of clarity.
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