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Deep-sea dye confirms turbulent-mixing theory — with implications for climate

Carbon storage in Earth’s oceans is controlled by deep-sea mixing processes, but the details have proved difficult to test. Ambitious efforts to track ocean mixing using dye have now demonstrated the pivotal role of the sea floor.
  1. Ryan M. Holmes

    1. Ryan M. Holmes is at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Sydney, New South Wales 2000, Australia.

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Seawater that lies more than 2 kilometres below the ocean’s surface has a crucial part in controlling millennial-scale shifts in Earth’s climate. This deep water undergoes turbulent mixing that drives it towards the surface through a process known as upwelling, and the rate at which this happens influences how quickly the ocean’s reserves of carbon and heat are exchanged with the atmosphere1. This much has been known for decades, and yet observations of deep-ocean upwelling are sparse, so theories about its structure and patterns remain mostly unconfirmed — including a proposal that upwelling is mainly instigated close to the sea floor in areas where it slopes2,3. In a paper in Nature, Wynne-Cattanach et al.4 confirm this theory by using dye to directly track upwelling near the sea floor in a deep ocean canyon.

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Nature 630, 824-825 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01647-8

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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