Ocean temperature measurement by measuring the speed of sound waves that pass through it

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A team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a method for discovering changes in ocean temperatures by measuring sound waves produced by underwater earthquakes. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how their system works and how well it worked when tested.

As the planet heats up due to global warming, scientists are continuing to study its impact. One of these areas of research involves the oceans. Some models have suggested that the world’s oceans absorb nearly 90 percent of the excess heat from greenhouse gases. Unfortunately, because the ocean is so vast and due to the number of variables involved, scientists do not know how warm the ocean as a whole is.

In the 1970s, a team from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography proposed the idea of ​​sending sound waves through the water to measure the amount of heat in it, using a technique they called acoustic tomography of the oceans. It was based on the idea that warm water transmits sound waves faster than cold water. It was observed at the time that this technique could be used to measure the temperature in the ocean from the sea floor to the surface. But the idea was scrapped when ecologists suggested that sending sound waves across the ocean could harm marine life. In recent years, marine scientists have deployed a fleet of 4,000 temperature sensors around the world, but they are only able to collect temperature data up to 2,000 meters.

In this new effort, researchers visited the idea of ​​using acoustic tomography but instead of generating sound waves, they used noise that is naturally generated from earthquakes. For the idea to work, researchers had to find a stable source for the sound waves generated by the earthquake. This led them to use what are known as “repeaters” – earthquakes that occur in the same location and at the same energy levels on a regular basis. After identifying 2,000 replicates (recorded) that occurred during the years 2005 to 2016, the researchers measured changes in the time it took for sound waves to travel from a site in Indonesia to a sensor station on Diego Garcia Island. Looking at the data, they found that the water temperature increased by an average of 0.044 ° C per decade – very close to what floating temperature sensors suggested.

Climate change helped produce the massive ocean heat wave in San Diego in 2018, researchers found more information: Wenbo Wu et al. Seismic ocean thermometry, Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126 / science.abb9519

Carl Wunch. Advances in Global Ocean Acoustics, Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126 / science.abe0960

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Quote: Taking the temperature of the ocean by measuring the speed of the sound waves passing through it (2020, September 18) Retrieved September 18, 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2020-09-temperature-ocean.html

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