Emily Chan
Ocean currents are important because they transport water and nutrients in addition to controlling the Earth’s climate.
While currents on the ocean’s surface are fairly easy to measure and monitor, those in the deep sea aren’t so simple to track.
But scientists have recently gathered a plethora of information on deep ocean currents, providing the largest dataset ever on the speed and direction of currents near the seafloor in the region off the coast of Mozambique. They are nothing like what the scientists expected to see.
In the area that was studied, it was previously believed that seafloor currents were steady and flowed from south to north.
However, the results of the study showed that deep-sea currents actually fluctuated more than experts thought.
“These conveyor belts of currents that operate the whole way around our planet are going to be far more complicated than the textbook models suggest,” Mike Clare, the senior author of the study and a sedimentologist from the National Oceanography Center, said. “They really do warrant very careful investigation.”
Sensors secured to the seafloor called acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCPs), are used to measure deep-sea currents.
But managing these tools is a difficult and expensive task, so they have only been used for short periods of time during studies.
Luckily, an Italian oil and gas company named Eni positioned 34 ADCPs on the seafloor just off the coast of the Mozambique Channel for industrial purposes.
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