Editor's Summary

14 May 2009

Catching the drift

The southward export of Labrador Sea Water has a big influence on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the large-scale ocean mixing driven by global density gradients, and is therefore an important factor in oceanic energy redistribution. The Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC) is widely assumed to be the main pathway linking the Labrador Sea with the Atlantic Ocean, but a study in the early 1990s in which profiling floats were released into the Labrador Sea found little evidence of them finding their way into the DWBC. Now a two-year study of the fate of improved neutral buoyancy floats, together with simulations of 'e-float' trajectories, confirms that the dominant route for the export of Labrador Sea Water into the North Atlantic is via internal pathways rather than the DWBC.

Letter: Interior pathways of the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation

Amy S. Bower, M. Susan Lozier, Stefan F. Gary & Claus W. Böning

doi:10.1038/nature07979

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