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Getting to the bottom of the ocean

Nature Geoscience volume 9, pages 857–858 (2016)Cite this article

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Accelerated by surface wind and thermohaline forcing, or by tidal forces, oceanic flows rely largely on interactions with the slopes and roughness of the bottom topography for their ultimate arrest3,4,5,8. Though they set the energy and momentum balance of the ocean, these near-bottom dissipative processes remain rather poorly understood — some of them still lack identification and most of them lack accurate quantification8,9. The absence of a reliable closure of momentum and energy budgets in turn hampers our ability to describe and model the flow of heat and other climatically important tracers across the oceans, both within the deep and upper layers.

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Figure 1: Depth distributions of seafloor area, ocean volume, the number of model grid points, and observational hydrographic sampling, shown as a cumulative percentage from the bottom upward.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sorbonne Universités (Université Pierre et Marie Curie Paris 6)-CNRS-IRD-MNHN, LOCEAN Laboratory, Paris, F-75005, France

    Casimir de Lavergne, Gurvan Madec & Xavier Capet

  2. Ifremer, Univ. Brest, CNRS, IRD, Laboratoire d'Océanographie Physique et Spatiale (LOPS), IUEM, Plouzané, F-29280, France

    Guillaume Maze

  3. Department of Meteorology (MISU), Stockholm University, Stockholm, 106 91, Sweden

    Fabien Roquet

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  1. Casimir de Lavergne
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Correspondence to Casimir de Lavergne.

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de Lavergne, C., Madec, G., Capet, X. et al. Getting to the bottom of the ocean. Nature Geosci 9, 857–858 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2850

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