6 April 2016

An Ocean Mystery

Posted by Dan Satterfield

2015ENSO_SSTA little science mystery for you. Look at this image above (Courtesy Climate Central in Princeton). Why is the water south of Greenland getting colder/not warming, while its warmed dramatically elsewhere?? Current hypothesis is melting ice in Greenland is chilling the water, or a slow down in the thermohaline circulation. May be both? Last I heard the climate models were not reproducing it well, but if it is melting ice, they likely would not (I lean toward both based on known data btw). Read this paper by the way (the authors are a who’s who of science experts on climate and paleoclimate).

Folks are working on it though. Science is at its heart a mystery to be solved, and it’s done methodically by rules that have always worked. Those same rules have taken us from log cabins to exploring the universe and nothing else man has invented rivals scientific method.
Science is indeed what we do to keep from lying to ourselves…