According to the researchers, the average temperature of the global ocean is 3.5°C. And now, they have discovered a pioneering advance to determine the ocean’s average temperature. Assessing the alterations in the average temperature of the ocean of the complete world has proven to be an almost unattainable undertaking owing to the distribution of diverse water masses, said the scientists.
Every water layer can have significantly diverse temperatures, so evaluating the average over the total of the depths and surface of the ocean represents a challenge, said researchers. Now, a research team at the University of California San Diego in the United States has been able to overcome these hurdles by assessing the value indirectly.
Rather than determining the water temperature, the evaluated the relative amount of noble gases in the environment that are in direct relation to the temperature of the ocean. A geoscientist at the University of California San Diego, Jeff Severinghaus, said, “This technique is a completely new approach to determine alteration in total ocean heat. It takes help of the verity that the environment is well-mixed, so one measurement at anyplace in the world can provide you the answer.”
In the research, the researchers determined the values of the noble gases krypton, xenon, and argon in air bubbles trapped within ice in Antarctica. Xenon and krypton are liberated into the environment in identified amounts as the oceans warm. The relative amount of these gases in the environment thus enables to calculate the average global ocean temperature. The research evaluated that the average global ocean temperature was 0.9°C at the crest of the last ice age.
The average temperature of the modern ocean is 3.5°C. The cumulative assessments of these data points offer a perceptive of the worldwide climate never before achievable, said the researchers. Measurements were obtained from ice samples gathered during the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide coring assignment.
Over the period of 6-field seasons in Antarctica, ice was drilled in cylindrical sections 3.7 m in length. The ultimate section was taken at a deepness of 3,405 m in 2011. This log spans almost 100,000 Years and the layers’ age can be evaluated to within 50 years. The atmosphere of Earth blendes on a range of weeks to months, so the calculation of these air bubbles provides what is fundamentally a global average.
The researchers concentrated on specimens 8,000 to 22,000 years old and gathered information in increments equating 250 Years in resolution.
