Abstract
The ocean is restless. It never stops moving. The famous American oceanographer Matthew Maury described the Gulf Stream ocean current as “a river in the sea,” but all the world’s rivers combined transport only a tiny fraction of the volume of ocean currents. The great ocean currents regulate the climate by transporting heat around the globe, taking warm water from the equator toward the poles and cool water from the poles toward the equator. Water evaporates from the ocean, falls as rain on the land, and returns to the sea. In this chapter we will learn about the Coriolis effect, one of the most important concepts in oceanography and its consequences for wind and ocean currents. Eddies shed from the ocean currents can reach to great depths and cause deep ocean “storms.” We will answer important questions like: What would happen if ice did not float? Why don’t icebergs drift in the same direction as the wind blows? What is storm “wave base”? What does a tsunami wave look like in the middle of the ocean? Why are there new beaches forming on the Arctic coast? What has caused Antarctic sea ice “factories” to close down?
“There is a river in the ocean: in the severest drought it never fails, and in the mightiest floods it never overflows; its banks and its bottom are of cold water while its current is of warm; it takes its’ rise in the Gulf of Mexico and it empties into the Arctic Seas; this mighty river is the Gulf Stream.”
Matthew Fontaine Maury
The Physical Geography of the Sea, 1855
“A ship is safe in harbor, but that is not what ships are built for.”
John A. Shedd
Salt from My Attic, 1928
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- 1.
- 2.
Turekian (2001).
- 3.
Perry et al. (1996).
- 4.
Dai and Trenberth (2002).
- 5.
Hoekstra and Mekonnen (2012).
- 6.
Harris et al. (1996).
- 7.
Nowell et al. (1985).
- 8.
Hollister and McCave (1984).
- 9.
Miller (2017).
- 10.
Ekman (1905).
- 11.
- 12.
Young et al. (2011).
- 13.
Harris and Coleman (1998).
- 14.
Dysthe et al. (2008).
- 15.
Overeem et al. (2011).
- 16.
de Lavergne et al. (2016).
- 17.
- 18.
Levitus et al. (2009).
- 19.
Massom et al. (1998).
- 20.
Johnson (2008).
- 21.
Broecker (1991).
- 22.
Allison (1999)
- 23.
Broecker et al. (1998).
- 24.
Harris et al. (2001).
- 25.
Kusahara et al. (2011).
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Harris, P.T. (2020). The Ocean in Motion!. In: Mysterious Ocean. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15632-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15632-9_5
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