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Oceanography

Something stirs in the deep

Nature volume 396, pages 720–721 (1998)Cite this article

In a classic paper entitled “Abyssal recipes”, published in 1966, Walter Munk1 tackled one of physical oceanography's big questions. How do the cold oceanic waters that sink into the abyss at high latitudes, and flow into low latitudes, ever rise again as warm water? The simple answer is that the deep waters are subject to mixing, but putting mathematical clothes on that answer is immensely tricky. Together with Carl Wunsch2, Munk has now returned to the issue in “Abyssal Recipes II”. The new answers are again highly provisional, but they provide a provocative agenda for climatologists as well as oceanographers.

The top few metres of the ocean have the same heat capacity as the entire atmosphere, so that the upper ocean can easily both absorb and drive atmospheric heat changes. It is hardly surprising, then, that climate researchers care about what happens at the ocean surface. But the deep ocean would seem to be different. It is far away from contact with the atmosphere both in space and in time; a water parcel starting at 5 km depth would take a century to rise through the ocean vertically. Yet the deep ocean has a strong influence on world climate. In a few thousand years, the dense, cold, salty water that forms in high latitudes, and sinks to great depths, ought to fill up all the ocean basins from underneath. The result would be an ocean comprised almost completely of such water, which would have a dramatic effect on the climate.

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Figure 1: Lunatic estimates?

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Southampton Oceanography Centre, Empress Dock, SO14 3ZH, Southampton, UK

    Peter Killworth

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  1. Peter Killworth
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Killworth, P. Something stirs in the deep. Nature 396, 720–721 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/25444

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