14 DAY TRIAL // Analysis of two decades-worth of scientific data on the temperatures in the deep ocean reveal a warming trend, that is directly connected to global sea level rise.
A recent investigation also reveals that the warming trend is especially intense around Antarctica. The Southern Continent has been severely affected by global warming thus far.
Everyone now knows that emitting carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere contributes to warming the planet, but few people know that about 80 percent of the resulting heat is absorbed by the ocean.
As such, the waters are exhibiting the highest degree of warming to date, experts reveal, and this is reflected in the amount of sea level rise that was recorded over the past 20 years or so.
“Previous studies have shown that the upper ocean is warming, but our analysis determines how much additional heat the deep ocean is storing from warming observed all the way to the ocean floor,” says oceanographer Sarah Purkey.
She holds an appointment at the University of Washington, and is also the lead author of a new study detailing the findings. The work will be published in an upcoming edition of the Journal of Climate.
For the purpose of this study, the researcher explains, the deep ocean was considered to be the region spanning below 3,300 feet (1,000 meters). Everything above is the shallow, or upper, ocean.
The researchers were able to determine that the deep ocean absorbed as much as 16 percent of the entire heat levels the upper oceans took in.
This deep kind of warming cannot be easily explained with current models. The team believes that a shift in Southern Ocean winds may be responsible for this.
An additional explanation may be that the Antarctic Bottom Water is changing its density. This concept is used to refer to how quickly bottom water is formed in the region adjacent to the Antarctic.
“A warming Earth causes sea level rise in two ways. The warming heats the ocean, causing it to expand, and melts continental ice, adding water to the ocean,” says expert Gregory Johnson.
“The expansion and added water both cause the sea to encroach on the land,” adds the scientist, who holds an appointment as an oceanographer at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle.
He is also a coauthor of the new paper, and a member of a US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research team.
Past studies have revealed that sea levels have been rising constantly by about 3 millimeters annually since 1993.