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posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 08 2018, @12:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the oceanic-fever dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The oceans are the largest global heat reservoir. As a result of man-made global warming, the temperature in the global climate system increases; around 90% of the extra heat is absorbed by the oceans. This means that the average sea temperature can tell us a lot about the state of our climate, both today and in the past. However, it is difficult to determine an accurate average value across all sea depths and regions of the world.

The results of previous measurement methods heavily depend on location, season or sea depth, which can lead to distorted results. As part of the WAIS Divide Ice Core Project, an international research team led by Bernhard Bereiter from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography - now working at Empa and the University of Bern - has developed a method of measuring ocean temperatures over the last 24'000 years with high accuracy.

These measurements have now been published in Nature. "Our study clearly shows that the basic idea - the connection between the concentration of noble gases in the atmosphere and the average ocean temperature - is correct and that the method works," said Bereiter.


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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 08 2018, @04:51PM (3 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Monday January 08 2018, @04:51PM (#619572) Homepage Journal

    I have read that the atmosphere's temperature is not rising as fast as originally predicted.

    I expect this is due to absorption of heat by the oceans.

    If water has ice in it and then you add heat to it, the ice will melt while the water's temperature remains constant. It is only after all the ice melts that the temperature goes up.

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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @06:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @06:18PM (#619614)

    Woah now, don't want to pop all the pinheads at once!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @09:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @09:43AM (#619933)

    If water has ice in it and then you add heat to it, the ice will melt while the water's temperature remains constant. It is only after all the ice melts that the temperature goes up.

    And that's why the ocean temperature in tropics in 0 °C... /s

    (this only works in small scale, like in the high school lab)

  • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Tuesday January 09 2018, @12:07PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Tuesday January 09 2018, @12:07PM (#619963) Journal

    That's right, but it only works in the *local neighbourhood* of the interface layer between water and ice.

    If you put water and ice in your bath (0°C) but you pour a fresh kettle in at the foot end (100°C), the water/ice at the head end stays 0 for a while even while the ice at the foot end is all melted and the water there is warmer than 0 already.

    My mum had to carefully mix the water in my zinc bathtub before I could step in (and she put pump water in of course, not ice water, so it was already above 0 though it felt bloody cold). Or maybe I remember it wrong and we had tap water already.
    Still cheaper to pour in cold water and add a kettle or three of boiling water, than to run the warm tap for ages.