**************************************EXCERPT*************************
Steven Mosher says:
yup vuc!
And as we observed this past melt season when the ice is thin storms can induce mixing of the warmer saltier water to the surface where it really does a nice job of melting the ice.
All you have to do is look at bouy data to see the large disturbances the storm caused in the vertical structure of the ocean column.
it’s not surprising that deeper water would be warmer during that period. no open surface no chance to see what we witnessed this season.
Not sure why people think this is surpising. maybe cause the read the word ‘warmer’ and didnt follow what happened during this past storm to the vertical structure.
of course, before the storm hit people at nevens were already explaining what would happen.
and, yup, they were right. ekman pumping. cool stuff. amazing what you can learn if you keep an open mind.
here of course people argued that there would not be a storm. argued that it would have no effect and argued that it was common.. then, of course, they changed their minds about all of that.
now they argue that the storm was rare and that all the ice disappeared because of it. go figure.
There is a lesson in their somewhere
******************************EXCEPT********************************************
Crispin in Waterloo says:
Building on Steven and Vuc:
Solar salt water ponds were develop in the early 80′s by some Israelis, looking at natural formations at hot springs, I believe. The idea is that if you have increasing salinity with depth (usually in steps) you can maintain at the bottom a much hotter body of water than at the top, somewhat contradicting the axiom that hot water rises. By putting these stratified salty layers into a pond with the bottom painted black, solar heat warms the lowest layer, to quite high temperatures like 60 C.
The process of placing salty water from the Atlantic under the cooler water above, with different quantities of water for both, can lead to unexpected warmth trapped at depth.
Disturbing the carefully balanced layers could cause what can be termed disruptive mixing which allows the structure to progressively collapse across a whole region. The result would be a sudden (faster than usual) melting of ice from the untrapping of the heat, followed by a lower than average temperature throughout the water column (because the heat is lost more efficiently from the warmer surface).
To have a 1-2 degree difference over sugh a depth would be easy if the water is slightly saltier (denser). That heat is not collected locally of course, it is imported.