The near-bottom water on the U.S. Northeast continental shelf provides a critical cold-water habitat for the rich regional marine ecosystem.
The near-bottom water on the U.S. Northeast continental shelf provides a critical cold-water habitat for the rich regional marine ecosystem. This “cold pool” preserves winter temperatures, even when waters become too warm or salty elsewhere during the summer.
However, the U.S. Northeast coastal ocean has experienced accelerated warming in recent years, compared to the global average. Now, scientists using salt as a tracer are investigating how much the influx of warm, salty offshore water onto the continental shelf contributes to the observed seasonal “erosion” of the cold pool.
Lukas Taenzer, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the MIT-WHOI Joint Program between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), is the lead author of the paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.
Read more at: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
Lukas Taenzer (right), first author of the study, and Adrienne Silver, former Postdoc at WHOI, prepare a Conductivity-Temperature-Depth (CTD) rosette to be deployed from RV Neil Armstrong to capture the water properties on the US Northeast continental shelf (Photo Credit: Avijit Gangopadhyay/©UMass Dartmouth).
