A groundbreaking discovery has been made by a team of researchers who claim to have uncovered a massive, previously unknown body of water in the Atlantic Ocean.
Water bodies within the world’s oceans possess unique physical properties, including temperature, salinity, formation history, and chemical makeup. Notable examples include the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the widely recognized Gulf Stream.
In 1942, scientists identified large, distinct bodies of water in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, known as equatorial waters. These enormous unique formations were the result of the mixing of water from the north and south of their locations.
“It’s remarkable that the Equatorial Water mass exists in the Pacific and Indian oceans, but was previously undiscovered in the Atlantic Ocean,” the team stated in their study. “This is surprising because the equatorial circulation and mixing in all three oceans share common features, such as the equatorial undercurrent and the equatorial waves.”
The team utilized data from the Argo program, an initiative that deploys robotic instruments to collect information about the oceans as they float, sink, and drift along the water’s surface and mid-level. This data led to the identification of a distinct body of water in the Atlantic Ocean, which the team has named the Atlantic Equatorial Water. They believe it was formed through the merging of the South Atlantic Central Water and the North Atlantic Central Water, stretching from the coast of Brazil to the Gulf of Guinea.
“The discovery of this new water mass has allowed us to improve our understanding of the fundamental water masses of the World Ocean,” said lead author Viktor Zhurbas in an interview with Live Science.
Further exploration of this area is expected to contribute to a better comprehension of ocean mixing processes. The study detailing this discovery has been published in Geophysical Research Letters.
