The ‘Boaty McBoatface’ team has published the first results from the craft’s maiden voyage, detailing a new warming mechanism in the Southern Ocean which may force a rewrite of current climate models.
This week, researchers published the first results from Boaty’s first expedition to the murky depths of the Southern Ocean where it travelled some 180 kilometers (111 miles) at a depth of 4,000 meters in 2017.
The plucky craft identified a previously unknown but frightening phenomenon whereby the increasingly intense winds blowing over the Southern Ocean exacerbate turbulence in the ice-cold waters below, churning up cold water from the ocean floor and warming it up with hotter currents closer to the surface.
Boaty was deployed on a three-day mission to measure the changing temperatures at the ocean floor, as well as the saltiness and turbulence levels while navigating mountainous underwater valleys in one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth.
“Our study is an important step in understanding how the climate change happening in the remote and inhospitable Antarctic waters will impact the warming of the oceans as a whole and future sea level rise,” researcher Alberto Naveira Garabato said.
The latest publication combines Boaty’s subaquatic data and measurements taken by the RRS James Clark Ross to provide “a completely new way of looking at the deep ocean,” according to researcher Eleanor Frajka-Williams.
Winds above the Southern Ocean have been growing stronger due to the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica and increasing volumes of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
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