How ocean ridges affect large‐scale ocean circulation

Driving the flow of heat and nutrients around the ocean is the meridional overturning circulation, a large‐scale current system that in the Atlantic Ocean carries warm surface waters northward and cold, dense water to the south along the bottom of the ocean. An important leg of this journey is the conversion of light warm water into North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW), which occurs along the coasts of Greenland and Labrador, Canada. The temperature and density profile of the ocean is important for climate and ecological systems, so understanding any physical features that may impinge on the properties of NADW, such as ocean ridges, is particularly important. Using experiments in a laboratory water tank, Stewart et al. identified how a ridge could affect the circulation patterns in a model ocean. The authors imposed temperature and heat flux gradients on the surface of the ocean analogue and tracked how differences in ridge size, shape, and location affected the temperature and density stratification. They found that when the ridge is sufficiently shallow, such that the depth of the water between the top of the ridge and the surface of the ocean is less than twice as deep as the ocean thermocline—a near‐surface band of the ocean in which water temperature decreases rapidly with depth—the ridge can significantly affect downstream properties. The authors found that when the deep water is forced up and over a shallow ridge, it tends to mix with the warmer water of the thermocline, increasing the average temperature and density stratification of water downstream from the ridge. (Journal of Geophysical Research‐Oceans, doi:10.1029/2011JC006980, 2011