Recent reports prove that underwater mountains help ocean water rise from the abyss. The ocean's surface waters cooled by icy temperature becomes dense at high latitudes.
This dense sink a few thousand meters into the ocean's abyss. Ocean waters flow from surface to the deep water continuously. There is no clear evidence where the deep waters rise to the surface. As written in Environmental News Network, this information would help researchers estimate how long the ocean may store carbon in its deepest regions before returning it to the surface.
It is stated in MIT News, scientists from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) and the University of Southampton in the U.K. have identified a mechanism by which ocean waters may rise from the ocean's depths to its uppermost layers.
The team found that topographic features can trap deep waters from migrating to flatter, calmer parts of the ocean using numerical modelling and observations. The features taken in the calculation are seamounts, ridges and continental margins. The longer the ocean water is trapped among turbulent flows, the more it mixes with the upper layer of the ocean, circulates back toward the surface.
Raffaele Ferrari, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Oceanography in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences says that in the abyssal ocean which have 4000-meter Sea Mountains and very deep troughs, seamounts, ridges and continental margins help create turbulence. Ocean water spends a lot of time and comes back up from the abyss in these places where turbulence is really strong.
The regions where deep ocean waters return to the surface could help scientists identify where carbon is released back into the atmosphere. Lead author and MIT postdoc Ali Mashayek said that abyssal waters take few to several thousand years to resurface. Ferrari says that the amount of water that continually sinks to the deep ocean in cold polar regions is estimated to be about 107 cubic meters per second.
