Oceanography The Official Magazine of
The Oceanography Society
Volume 28 Issue 02

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Volume 28, No. 2
Pages 240 - 251

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Overturning Assumptions: Past, Present, and Future Concerns about the Ocean’s Circulation

By M. Susan Lozier  
  • Published Online: October 2, 2015
  • https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2015.50
  • Full Article: PDF Download PDF

  • About the Lecture Series:
    The Roger Revelle Commemorative Lecture Series was created by the Ocean Studies Board of the National Academies in honor of Roger Revelle to highlight the important links between ocean sciences and public policy. M. Susan Lozier, the sixteenth annual lecturer, spoke on March 4, 2015, at the Baird Auditorium, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History.

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Article Abstract

In 1800, Count Rumford ascertained the ocean’s meridional overturning circulation from a single profile of ocean temperature constructed with the use of a rope, a wooden bucket, and a rudimentary thermometer. Over two centuries later, arrays of gliders, floats, and moorings are deployed across the span of the North Atlantic to measure the overturning circulation and its spatial and temporal variability. While Rumford appreciated the role the ocean’s overturning plays in redistributing heat, today we understand its crucial role in sequestering anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the deep ocean. What we don’t understand, however, are the mechanisms that control overturning strength and how and why the overturning will change in the decades ahead. This information is crucial to our understanding of the climate system because the extent to which the ocean will continue to be a heat and carbon reservoir depends on the strength of the overturning. Although we have reasons to reject the popularized ocean conveyor belt as a paradigm for the overturning, oceanographers are just now piecing together the complex flow patterns that carry warm waters poleward and cold water equatorward. As the pieces come together, some long-held assumptions are being overturned, and some new paradigms are surfacing.

Citation

Lozier, M.S. 2015. Overturning assumptions: Past, present, and future concerns about the ocean’s circulation. Oceanography 28(2):240–251, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2015.50.

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