Noise from deep-sea earthquakes provides a new way to measure ocean warming

An artist performed earthquake waves under the sea. Credit: California Institute of Technology

Using sound waves from sea floor earthquakes, researchers have demonstrated a new, largely abandoned method for measuring ocean warming around the world – measuring seismic ocean temperatures.

The method, which they tested in the eastern Indian Ocean and where they discovered a decadal warming trend beyond previous estimates, holds great promise for expanding our ability to monitor rates and patterns of ocean warming and their impacts on climate change, according to the study authors.

While observing ocean warming is critical to understanding and predicting future climate change, it remains a difficult phenomenon to quantify and limited to a relatively small number of single-point measurements that sample from vast, unfathomable depths. Wenbo Wu and colleagues introduced the ocean seismic thermometer, which uses low-frequency sound waves from repeated undersea earthquakes to determine ocean temperature at much larger scales.

The speed of sound in sea water depends on its temperature. Consequently, changes in the time when sound waves travel between the source and receiver can infer the average ocean temperature over large distances and at depth. While these principles were first explored as a way to monitor ocean temperatures more than 40 years ago, prohibitive expense and concern about the impact of artificial sound sources on marine mammals led to this approach being abandoned.

Here Wu et al. Revive this technique and demonstrate that it can be done passively, using natural sea floor earthquakes as a low-frequency sound source.

To infer the temperature changes, the authors collected and analyzed data on 2,047 pairs of “frequent” earthquakes that occurred between December 2004 and June 2016 in the eastern Indian Ocean. They used the data to compile a basin-level temperature profile of 3,000 kilometers.

The results indicate a decadal warming trend that far exceeds previous estimates. Wu et al. Show how an interesting combination of physical oceanography and classic seismology techniques may open the way to an entirely new and globally capable observational system, ”Karl Wunsch wrote in a related perspective.

Read California Institute of Seismic Technology innovations using undersea earthquakes to change climate science for more information on this research.

Reference: “Seismic Ocean Temperature Measurement” by Wenbo Wu, Zhongwen Zhan, Shirui Peng, Sidao Ni, and Jörn Callies, Sep 18, 2020, Science.DOI: 10.1126 / science.abb9519

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