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There is a continuous circulation of water in the oceans. Warm surface currents cool as they move away from the tropics, and the water becomes denser and sinks. The cold water moves back towards the equator as a deep sea current, driven by changes in the temperature and density of the water, before eventually welling up again towards the surface.
Seawater, or sea water, is water from a sea or ocean. On average, seawater in the world's oceans has a salinity of about 3.5% (35 g/L, 35 ppt, 600 mM). This means that every kilogram (roughly one liter by volume) of seawater has approximately 35 grams (1.2 oz) of dissolved salts (predominantly sodium ( Na +
T-S diagram of a station in the North Pacific. In oceanography, temperature-salinity diagrams, sometimes called T-S diagrams, are used to identify water masses.In a T-S diagram, rather than plotting each water property as a separate "profile," with pressure or depth as the vertical coordinate, potential temperature (on the vertical axis) is plotted versus salinity (on the horizontal axis).
Direct density measurements are also used to estimate salinities, particularly in highly saline lakes. [4] Sometimes density at a specific temperature is used as a proxy for salinity. At other times an empirical salinity/density relationship developed for a particular body of water is used to estimate the salinity of samples from a measured ...
Ocean stratification is the natural separation of an ocean's water into horizontal layers by density. This is generally stable stratification , because warm water floats on top of cold water, and heating is mostly from the sun, which reinforces that arrangement.
An oceanographic water mass is an identifiable body of water with a common formation history which has physical properties distinct from surrounding water. Properties include temperature , salinity , chemical - isotopic ratios, and other physical quantities which are conservative flow tracers .
Seawater density is primarily influenced by both these factors—colder, saltier water is denser than warmer, fresher water. This variation in density creates stratification in the ocean and is key to understanding ocean circulation patterns. Pycnocline: The pycnocline is a layer within the ocean where the density increases rapidly with depth ...
GEBCO is the only intergovernmental body with a mandate to map the whole ocean floor. At the beginning of the project, only 6 per cent of the world's ocean bottom had been surveyed to today's standards; as of June 2022, the project had recorded 23.4 per cent mapped. About 14,500,000 square kilometres (5,600,000 sq mi) of new bathymetric data ...