Who actually believes that Arctic Ocean awakening as ice melts?”
Earth’s sleepiest ocean is waking, say researchers. The Arctic Ocean’s ice-capped depths have been quiet for millennia, thanks to winds being largely unable to ruffle the surface and stir things up. The rapid loss of summer ice cover is changing all that, however, creating internal waves in the Arctic waters that could dramatically change life there — and perhaps even accelerate the sea ice loss. “It’s a very, very quiet ocean,” said Luc Rainville of the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory, in Seattle. He and his colleague Rebecca A. Woodgate have just published a study in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters reporting how Arctic waters along the continental shelves are getting more turbulent as the summer ice disappears and waves start churning the water like in other oceans. “If you put instruments down in the Pacific or Atlantic oceans you’ll see density changes every few hours” indicating the passage of internal waves within the ocean, Rainville expla
