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scientist have come upon a previously undetected water mass in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean : a gigantic body of water system stretch across the Atlantic from the tip of Brazil to the Gulf of Guinea , near West Africa .
The piss mass , named the Atlantic Equatorial Water , chassis along the equator as sea flow mix separate bodies of water to the north and due south .
The Atlantic Ocean during a storm.
Until the Atlantic Equatorial Water ’s find , scientist had spotted body of water mixing along the equator in the Pacific and Indian sea , but never in the Atlantic . The research worker published their findings Oct. 28 in the journalGeophysical Research Letters .
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" It seemed controversial that the equatorial water mass is present in the Pacific and Indian sea but lose in the Atlantic Ocean because the equatorial circulation and mixing in all three oceans have common features,“Viktor Zhurbas , a physicist and oceanologist at The Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow , told Live Science in an email . " The identified new water mass has allowed us to complete ( or at least more accurately line ) the phenomenological pattern of canonical water multitude of the World Ocean . "
Far from being the same everywhere , sea water is a vast patchwork of interconnected deal and bed , mixed together and rive apart again by current , eddies , and changes to temperature and salinity .
water system masses are the distinct persona of this motley arrangement ; each consistence of water has a shared geography , formation chronicle and plebeian physical property , such as density and dissolved isotopes of O , nitrate and phosphate .
To distinguish H2O masses , oceanographers chart the relationship between temperature and salinity across the ocean — two mensuration that commingle to determine the denseness of brine .
In 1942 , this temperature - salt charting lead to the breakthrough of equatorial waters in the Pacific and Indian ocean . forge from the mixing of waters to the north and south , both the Indian and Pacific Equatorial waters have temperature and salinity swerve along lines of never-ending density that are easily distinguishable from the environ water system . Yet no such kinship could be spotted in the Atlantic .
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To research for the missing water passel , the scientists combed through information collected by the Argo program , an outside regalia of automatic , self - submerging floats scatter across the man ’s oceans .
After analyzing the data collected by this floating regalia , the researcher spotted an unnoticed temperature - salinity curve cuddle parallel to the curves strike out out the North Atlantic and South Atlantic Central waters to the due north and south : the Atlantic Equatorial Water .
" It was leisurely to befuddle the Atlantic Equatorial Water with the South Atlantic Central Water , and to key out them it was necessary to have a fairly dense net of vertical temperature and salinity profiles covering the entire Atlantic Ocean , " Zhurbas said .
Now that the pee mass has been identified , it will give scientists a good discernment of the ocean ’s mixing cognitive operation , which are vital to the oceans ' transport of heating system , atomic number 8 and nutrients around the Earth , Zhurbas said .
