Observational Evidences of Increasing Warming of the Abyssal Waters in the South Atlantic

Almost three quarters of the of Earth’s surface is covered by the ocean, a layer of water with mean thickness of 4000 meters. Water is a substance with the highest specific heat among all elements commonly found in nature. This makes the ocean a climate buffer, absorbing almost all excess heat injected into the Earth’s atmosphere, slowing down and mitigating changes in the climate. However, the heat gain causes the ocean to warm up, at a slow rate but inexorably and with disastrous consequences. Studies have shown that the transport of thermodynamic properties by the ocean circulation in the South Atlantic is a key element in the stability of climate: small changes in the South Atlantic can lead to abrupt and serious impacts all over the world. To better understand and to help in the development of more accurate climate predictions, a group of scientists from several international institutions, including the AUS, is carrying out an extensive, expensive and long-term observational program to monitor the entire water column along the latitude 34.5S, from South America to Africa, in the South Atlantic Ocean. Two of the most recent products of this effort were published in the Sciences Advances and in the Geophysical Research Letters, two high-impact international journals. The two articles and ongoing additional analyses report observational evidences of increasing warming in the abyssal waters in the South Atlantic, amidst energetic variability in time scales ranging from daily to inter-annual and longer. The warming of waters at depths greater than 4500 meters is a sign that the ocean might have already reached a dangerous tipping point.

Link to the online event: https://meet.google.com/mqp-rxku-sga

About the speaker
Edmo Campos has BS and MS degrees in Physics by the University of Brasilia, Brazil, and a PhD in Physical Oceanography by the University of Miami, USA. He is a Research Fellow at the Department of Biology, Chemistry and Environmental Sciences in the AUS College of Arts and Sciences and Professor Emeritus at the Oceanographic Institute of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He is a specialist in observations and modeling of the ocean circulation and dynamics, from coastal to planetary scales, the ocean-atmosphere interactions and in the role of the ocean on the climate system. He is a permanent, elected member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and a member of several international scientific panels.

More biographical information at: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6399-5496; https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sGlScioAAAAJ&hl=en

For more information, please contact [email protected].