Quantum Oceanography - 5

Fig. 1 Earth's Largest Desert

In this series, in the first post, I stepped into the fresh concept 'Quantum Oceanography' (Quantum Oceanography, 2, 3, 4).

The concept may or may not have been nicknamed that prior to this series; I just could not find it with a Google Search then; but now it shows up as a Dredd Blog link.

Go figure.

Anyway, in today's fifth element (😎) of this series there are plenty of graphs to update the concept, because the World Ocean Database folks updated their data sets, which allowed me to extend the span of coverage in the graphs from 1970-2019 to 1970-2020.

I updated simply because they recently updated their data set in January of 2021, which included a lot of new 2020 measurements (WOD updates).

A recent Dredd Blog post (which was in response to Dr. Eric Rignot's encouragement that researchers should keep a focus on the 'Grounding Lines' of Antarctica's tidewater glaciers) pointed out how the phenomenon of warming deep water there was a central factor impacting grounding line ice melt (Antarctica 2.0 - 11).

So, I prepared some updated graphs that are relevant:

Appendix Subject	Link
Photon Count (mol/kg)	Graph Page One
Potential Enthalpy	Graph Page Two
Conservative Temperature	Graph Page Three
Quantum Proportion	Graph Page Four

The subjects of the graphs (Photons, Potential Enthalpy, Conservative Temperature, and Quantum Proportion) were explained in previous posts.

These graphs, in keeping with that heads up from Dr. Rignot, show that The Southern Ocean waters (surrounding and touching Antarctica) are indeed different from the other oceans at those depths (the Southern Ocean graphs are the final graph on each appendix).

That is, its two deepest water depths on the Pelagic scale are closer in temperature than any of the other oceans (the deepest in some cases is warmer than the shallower depth).

That means more trouble ("climate emergency") due to the increase in melting ice at the grounding lines (The Ghost Plumes - 15).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.