To begin: a movie of horizontal tracer sections through an analogue deep convection chimney. What you see are daily sections over a period of 2 months from a computer model showing the evolution of the tracer as peripheric instability acts to restratify the water column.
horizontal tracer pixmap MOVIE
Following the violent mixing phase of open-ocean deep convection , restratification of the surface (around 500 m) layers occurs rapidly, much more rapidly than can be accounted for by air-sea fluxes. Recent observations in the Gulf of Lions (Send et al., 1995) show that only one week after cessation of convective mixing, 50 to 100 km scale chimneys can be fully recapped to a depth of a few hundred meters.
This study sets out to characterise the observed behaviour, examining the dynamics driving:
Back to the top