Everything Science Forum

Australia discovers ocean current "missing link" (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/australia_ocean_dc;_ylt=AgdZujO7aHiXl8a6r3_yWCUPLBIF)

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists have discovered a giant underwater current that is one of the last missing links of a system that connects the world's oceans and helps govern global climate.

New research shows that a current sweeping past Australia's southern island of Tasmania toward the South Atlantic is a previously undetected part of the world climate system's engine-room, said scientist Ken Ridgway.

The Southern Ocean, which swirls around Antarctica, has been identified in recent years as the main lung of global climate, absorbing a third of all carbon dioxide taken in by the world's oceans.

"We knew that they (deep ocean pathway currents) could move from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean through Indonesia. Now we can see that they move south of Tasmania as well, another important link," Ridgway, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, told Reuters.

In each ocean, water flows around anticlockwise pathways, or gyres, the size of ocean basins.

The newly discovered Tasman Outflow, which sweeps past Tasmania at an average depth of 800-1,000 meters (2,600 to 3,300 feet), is classed as a "supergyre" that links the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic southern hemisphere ocean basins, the government-backed CSIRO said in a statement on Wednesday.

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and now

Australian scientists call for ocean network probe (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070817/sc_nm/climate_australia_dc;_ylt=AtoTFUDyM1wZhBcmnZXaqOYiANEA)

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists want to string a vast array of probes across the oceans of the southern hemisphere to warn of changes in ocean circulation that may affect the global climate.

The senior science adviser to the U.N.-backed World Climate Research Programme on Friday called for the establishment of a network of deep ocean moorings to extend a system already in operation in the northern hemisphere.

Instruments could be strung across the South Atlantic and through the Indonesian archipelago, as well as in the Southern Ocean where special designs would be necessary, said John Church of the government-backed Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

A North Atlantic moored network of scientific instruments already provides measurements of the northern "overturning circulation" conveyor belt of ocean currents, which forms a giant loop from the Gulf of Mexico to Iceland and back.

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Cool!  :koala