Scientists Discover Massive Blob of Water in the Middle of the Atlantic Ocean
To the uninitiated, there isn’t much to water. Sure, the world’s oceans are filled with monsters, marvels, and mysteries but, otherwise, they’re just vast, singular expanses of liquid. Right? Wrong.
Far from being uniform everywhere, ocean water is a patchwork of interlinked layers and masses which mix and split apart thanks to currents, eddies, and changes in temperature or salinity. Indeed, beneath the surfaces of our great seas, there are waterfalls, rivers and even gigantic blobs, stretching thousands of miles, that somehow manage to evade detection.
Now, scientists have discovered one of these massive blobs in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; extending from the tip of Brazil to the Gulf of Guinea. Until the discovery of this water mass – which has been named the Atlantic Equatorial Water – experts had seen waters mixing along the equator in the Pacific and Indian oceans, but never in the Atlantic.
“It seemed controversial that the equatorial water mass is present in the Pacific and Indian oceans but missing in the Atlantic Ocean because the equatorial circulation and mixing in all three oceans have common features,” Viktor Zhurbas, a physicist and oceanologist at The Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow, told Live Science.
“The identified new water mass has allowed us to complete (or at least more accurately describe) the phenomenological pattern of basic water masses of the World Ocean.”
As the name suggests, the Atlantic Equatorial Water is formed by the mixing of separate bodies of water by currents along the equator. To distinguish such masses from the water surrounding them, oceanographers analyze the relationship between temperature and salinity across the ocean — which determines the density of the seawater.
The discovery is significant because it offers experts a better understanding of how oceans mix, which is vital to how they transport heat, oxygen, and nutrients around the world.