Royal Navy Data Provide Insights for Arctic Science
The researchers at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) have investigated the nature of turbulence in the ocean beneath the Arctic sea-ice using recently released Royal Navy submarine data reports Science Daily.
This meeting of oceanography and military intelligence has seen declassified data from the 1990s analyzed to gain insights into how diminished ice cover affects turbulence in arctic waters.
Recent decreases in Arctic sea ice may have a big impact on the circulation, chemistry and biology of the Arctic Ocean, due to ice-free waters becoming more turbulent.
By revealing more about how these turbulent motions distribute energy within the ocean, the findings from this study provide information important for accurate predictions of the future of the Arctic Ocean.
The idea was that an ice-free Arctic would be stirred up by the winds and become more turbulent, which can cause effects like the mixing of cold, fresh water layers with warmer, saltier ones and accelerate ice melts.
By investigating the nature of turbulence under sea ice, we can begin to understand how the circulation of the Arctic Ocean is likely to change as it becomes more ice-free during the summer, Charlotte Marcinko, NOC scientist and lead author of this research said.
There are all sorts of currents, eddies, internal waves, and other factors, so to understand the future of the Arctic, it's necessary to have a better understanding of how it behaves under the ice as well as in ice-free regions.
The planet is warming, and the Arctic is warming along with it. However, the Arctic is actually predicted to warm much faster than average, due to a process called ‘ice-albedo feedback’. Albedo describes how well a surface reflects heat and light, explains NOC.
