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Water is the medium of the oceans, the medium which carries all the substances and elements involved in the marine biogeochemical cycles. Water as found in nature almost always includes dissolved substances, so water has been described as the "universal solvent" for its ability to dissolve so many substances.
The modern thermohaline circulation is thus more controlled by density contrasts due to thermal differences, whereas during the LGM the oceans were more than twice as sensitive to differences in salinity rather than temperature. In this way, the thermohaline circulation can be considered to have been less "thermo" and more "haline".
The water column is the largest, yet one of the most under-explored, habitats on the planet; it is explored to better understand the ocean as a whole, including the huge biomass that lives there and its importance to the global carbon and other biogeochemical cycles. [2]
Plot of temperature and salinity in the Arctic Ocean at 85,18 north and 117,28 east dated Jan. 1st 2010. [4] In the graphical representation, three layers can be discerned: About 50 m (160 ft) of low salinity water "swimming" on top of the ocean. The temperature is −1.8 °C (28.8 °F), which is very near to the freezing point.
T-S diagram of a station in the North Pacific. In oceanography, temperature-salinity diagrams, sometimes called T-S diagrams, are used to identify water masses.In a T-S diagram, rather than plotting each water property as a separate "profile," with pressure or depth as the vertical coordinate, potential temperature (on the vertical axis) is plotted versus salinity (on the horizontal axis).
Annual mean sea surface salinity for the World Ocean. Data from the World Ocean Atlas 2009. [1] International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO) standard seawater. Salinity (/ s ə ˈ l ɪ n ɪ t i /) is the saltiness or amount of salt dissolved in a body of water, called saline water (see also soil salinity).
At locations where salinity is high, as in the tropics, β is low and where salinity is low, β is high. A high β means that the increase in density is more than when β is low. This graph shows the 2020 average salinity in an intersection in the Atlantic ocean at 30W. The salinity is low near Antarctica and high in the tropics.
At typical salinity, it freezes at about −2 °C (28 °F). [1] The coldest seawater still in the liquid state ever recorded was found in 2010, in a stream under an Antarctic glacier: the measured temperature was −2.6 °C (27.3 °F). [2] Seawater pH is typically limited to a range between 7.5 and 8.4. [3]