- Masao Fukasawa, Howard Freeland, Ron Perkin, Tomowo Watanabe, Hiroshi Uchida & Ayako Nishina
- Nature volume 427, pages 825–827 (2004) Cite this article
This is a direct copy of a SciPop or news article preserved here because things on the internet have a bad habit of disappearing when you try to find them again. Full credit is given to the original authors and the source.
– Matty
Abstract
Observations of changes in the properties of ocean waters have been restricted to surface1 or intermediate-depth waters2,3, because the detection of change in bottom water is extremely difficult owing to the small magnitude of the expected signals. Nevertheless, temporal changes in the properties of such deep waters across an ocean basin are of particular interest, as they can be used to constrain the transport of water at the bottom of the ocean and to detect changes in the global thermohaline circulation. Here we present a comparison of a trans-Pacific survey completed in 1985 (refs 4, 5) and its repetition in 1999 (ref. 6). We find that the deepest waters of the North Pacific Ocean have warmed significantly across the entire width of the ocean basin. Our observations imply that changes in water properties are now detectable in water masses that have long been insulated from heat exchange with the atmosphere.
Continue reading “Bottom Water Warming in the North Pacific Ocean”
