Colossal undersea mountains, towering up to thousands of metres high, stir up deep sea currents: impacting how our ocean stores heat and carbon.
Colossal undersea mountains, towering up to thousands of metres high, stir up deep sea currents: impacting how our ocean stores heat and carbon.
An international team, led by the University of Cambridge, used numerical modelling to quantify how underwater turbulence around these mountains, called seamounts, influences ocean circulation; finding it is an important mechanism in ocean mixing and one that is missing from climate models used in policy making.
“The intense turbulence around seamounts makes them a major contributor to ocean mixing at a global scale, but we don’t have that process represented in climate models,” said Dr Ali Mashayek from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Science, who led the study.
The findings, which were published in the journal PNAS, could be used to improve model forecasts of how the ocean will respond to global warming.
Read more at University of Cambridge
