The Ocean Conveyor Belt Gets Closeup Study

A team of experts from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Duke University, in the United States, has managed to place another piece in the puzzle that is our planet's Great Conveyor Belt. Originally meant as an oversimplification of the actual processes that take place, the concept of Conveyor Belt refers to the surface and underwater currents that exist in our planet's oceans, and drive our entire climate. These currents heat the land and cool certain regions, while at the same time creating clouds, rain, monsoons, hurricanes, tornadoes, and just about everything in between.

However, despite the fact that oceanologists have known about the basic operating principles of the Belt for more than 20 years, they still haven't been able to piece together all the elements that make it up. The recent study comes to shed a little more light on the matter, as it offers a new insight into how the underwater, cold water currents traveling southwards from the North Atlantic move.

Conventional wisdom now has it that warm water currents move on the surface of the oceans, whereas the cold ones move underwater. In the Northern Atlantic, a change occurs, in that warm water currents flowing northwards lose their heat and, as such, the water cools. The heat raises in the atmosphere and then is pushed by winds across Europe, heating it and generating rains. The water, no warm left in it, sinks and starts its journey southwards, via the underwater current.

Thus far, researchers have believed that the current travels along the eastern coast of Canada and the US, and then over the north tip of South America. But the new paper, which was published in the May 14th issue of the research journal Nature, shows that the cold water actually moves through a very turbulent area of the central Atlantic. “This new path is not constrained by the continental shelf. It's more diffuse. It's a swath in the wide-open, turbulent interior of the North Atlantic and much more difficult to access and study,” WHOI Department of Physical Oceanography Senior Scientist Amy Bower, who has also been a co-principal author of the research, said.

“The new float observations and simulated float trajectories provide evidence that the southward interior pathway is more important for the transport of Labrador Sea Water through the subtropics than the Deep Western Boundary Current, contrary to previous thinking,” Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment Professor of Physical Oceanography Susan Lozier, the other co-principal author of the study, concluded. She has worked together with graduate student Stefan Gary and German oceanographer Claus Boning for the computer model that has yielded the conclusion.