Tiny, invisible swirls and twirls – not much bigger than a coin – deep below the ocean’s surface are silently shaping some of the biggest forces steering our climate: sea level rise, fisheries collapse, extreme flooding, and how much carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs.
Tiny, invisible swirls and twirls – not much bigger than a coin – deep below the ocean’s surface are silently shaping some of the biggest forces steering our climate: sea level rise, fisheries collapse, extreme flooding, and how much carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs.
An international research team, led by the University of Cambridge, found that deep ocean turbulence – the process that distributes heat, nutrients and carbon from the surface to the seafloor and back – affects our lives not on a scale of thousands of years as was previously thought, but within the span of a human lifetime.
However, the tools used to predict these effects and inform policy do not adequately represent this turbulence, or the speed at which it moves. The results are reported in the journal Nature Communications.
The findings come at a time when global ocean research of this kind is at risk. In May, the US National Science Foundation announced the dismantling of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $368 million ocean observation network that provides vital oceanographic data worldwide, although the plans were later reversed.
Read More: University of Cambridge
Photo Credit: StockSnap via Pixabay
