Oceans water: It takes 2,800 years for water to visit every corner

Jules Verne in his famous work already raised the possibility that humans could go around the world in just 80 days. Today, modern technologies allow the feat to be completed in just over a day. But how long could a drop of water in the ocean do it?

Despite the fact that our world is politically divided into five great oceans, in reality, the Earth has only one, the world ocean, which covers 70% of the surface and keeps all its waters in constant connection. This, in essence, could allow a drop of water to go around the world without having to go through the hydrological cycle.

To find out how long the water drop might take, scientists Louise Rousselet, Paola Cessi, and Gael Forget used a digital simulation, known as Estimating Ocean Circulation and Climate (ECCO).

Experts explain that it is the first to follow water trajectories backed by such a large amount of data

ECCO is an ocean model that incorporates more than a billion data collected from satellites, drifting robotic floats on the global Argo network, and other sources that it then merges into a simulation, much like weather forecasts for the atmosphere do. The patches of water followed on its journey through the ocean record physical properties, such as temperature and salinity. Following the labeled parcels in motion is a complement to describing the properties of the ocean at fixed locations.

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In their simulation, Rousselet and her colleagues followed the paths of water originating in what oceanographers call the lower limb of the Atlantic Southern Inverted Circulation (AMOC), a major flow of Atlantic water that moderates temperatures between the equator. and the poles.

In it, 65,000 packages of water followed as corridors from an exit gate in the Atlantic, south of the equator. They then used ECCO to observe the path of the water over a 25-year period, then looped data on the velocity of the water patches. This allowed them to see what possible paths the water could take for another 25 years, then another 25, and so on for millennia.

Thanks to this, the experts recorded that around a third of the plots left the Atlantic to later make a trip through the Indian and Southern Pacific oceans. In total, a trip of 300 years.

Oceans water It takes 2,800 years

About 20% of the water made that trip, but diverting deeper and into the Wedell Sea, off Antarctica. The liquid element took 700 years this time to return to the Atlantic . The largest amount of water, almost half of the plots took 2,800 years to return, diving for approximately 1,000 years in the abyssal Pacific Ocean. This particular water made its trip around the world visiting all the basins of the Earth.

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In all three cases, the properties of the water parcels changed throughout the trip and these changes influenced their speed: “The interaction of water with different densities in the oceans, together with surface winds, is what determines the circulation. oceanic as dense water sinks and light water rises, following labyrinthine paths, ” the experts explain.

The simulated routes allowed the researchers to record what the temperature and salinity were at various route points of the journey. From that, they concluded that the AMOC serves as a conduit through which salt is pumped into the Atlantic Ocean.

If that circulation is a carrier of salinity, that could mean that recent climate change-induced dynamics in the North Atlantic Ocean could destabilize the AMOC. Several researchers have observed that the North Atlantic Ocean is becoming cooler as the melting of glaciers in Greenland accelerates and as relatively fresh water from the Arctic Ocean pours into the Atlantic. This means that freshwater incursions could disrupt the AMOC, which could trigger extreme weather changes, not just around the Atlantic, but eventually around the world.

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