Monday, February 3

Tag: Oceans

The Tantalizing Mystery of the Solar System’s Hidden Oceans
25Dec By adminNo Comments
Technology

The Tantalizing Mystery of the Solar System’s Hidden Oceans

And yet, defiantly, these alien seas remain liquid.A Mirror-Wrapped OceanScientists suspect that a handful of moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn—and maybe even some spinning around Uranus and Neptune—harbor oceans. Hefty Ganymede and crater-scarred Callisto produce weak, Europa-like magnetic signals. Saturn’s haze-covered Titan, too, very probably has a liquid-water subsurface ocean. These “are the five that most scientists in the community feel pretty confidently about,” said Mike Sori, a planetary scientist at Purdue University.With her colleagues, Margaret Kivelson, a space physicist at UCLA, determined that a global ocean is likely hiding beneath Europa’s surface. Courtesy of Margaret KivelsonSo far, the only absolute oceanic certainty is Enceladus. “That’s a no-brainer,” said Carly Ho...
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Undersea-Aged Champagne Is Starting to Surface
23Dec By adminNo Comments
Technology

Undersea-Aged Champagne Is Starting to Surface

If you’ve ever been hit by a flying champagne cork, you will be painfully aware of the pressure in a bottle of fizz. And that pressure inside—and outside—the bottle has caught the imaginations of champagne innovators.“We conduct many trials every year to fine-tune the pressure to the vintage,” says Louis Roederer’s chef de cave, Jean Baptiste Lécaillon. “We have a lower pressure—so smaller bubbles—[because] we want a seamless and soft mousse.”The pressure inside a bottle of champagne is typically around 6 bar, or three times the pressure of a car tire. But Louis Roederer champagnes can range from 6 to 4.5 bar. “The more acidity you have in the wine, the more aggressive the feeling of the bubbles ... This is also why we are on the low side,” explains Lécaillon, “especially on Cristal, wh...
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If You Didn’t Care About Antarctica’s Icy Belly, You Will Now
27Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

If You Didn’t Care About Antarctica’s Icy Belly, You Will Now

“This is a groundbreaking study using state-of-the-art underwater technology to explore critical regions of Antarctica in unprecedented detail,” says British Antarctic Survey physical oceanographer Peter Davis, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Never before have we been able to observe the ice-ocean interactions occurring within a basal crevasse at an Antarctic ice shelf grounding line at such fine spatial scales.”Icefin found that ocean currents move water through the crevasse, but dynamics within it generate more movement. Because the crevasse is 50 meters tall, the pressure at its top is less than at the opening, at the bottom. The freezing point of seawater is lower deeper in the ocean, so the further down you go, the easier it is for ice to melt. As a result, seawater in this cre...
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This Heat Is Shaking the Very Foundation of the Ocean Food Web
2Aug By adminNo Comments
Technology

This Heat Is Shaking the Very Foundation of the Ocean Food Web

Secondly, the warmer water gets, the less dense it becomes. At the surface, you end up with a band of hot water, with cooler waters in the depths, a layering known as stratification. “If you've ever gone swimming in a lake in the summer, if you're at the surface, it's nice and warm, and then you dive down and it gets cold pretty fast,” says Michael Behrenfeld, an ocean ecologist at Oregon State University. “That's the stratification layer that you're going through.”In the ocean, this warm water acts like a cap that interrupts critical ecological processes. Normally, nutrients well up from the depths, providing food for the phytoplankton floating at the surface. Stratification prevents that. In addition, winds typically blow across the surface and mix that water down deeper, also bringing ...
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Scientists Warn Major Ocean Current System Could Collapse
26Jul By adminNo Comments
Politics

Scientists Warn Major Ocean Current System Could Collapse

An important system of ocean currents that circulates water around the planet could significantly slow down or even stop completely in just a few decades, according to a shocking new study released Tuesday.The network is called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, which includes the Gulf Stream. It’s a series of ocean currents that brings warm water north, and cold water south across the Atlantic Ocean, part of a “global conveyor belt” that impacts weather patterns across North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, according to NOAA.Researchers in Denmark analyzed sea surface temperatures to determine the strength of the AMOC, using data from 1870 to 2020. The pair, Susanne Ditlevsen of the University of Copenhagen, and her brother, Peter Ditlevsen of the university’s Nie...
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