The newly discovered water mass called the Atlantic Equatorial Water stretches from Brazil to West Africa.
Atlantic Ocean during a storm. Image: Alamy
Scientists found a previously undiscovered body of water in the mid-Atlantic Ocean. It is a giant body of water stretching across the Atlantic Ocean, from Brazil to the Gulf of Guinea, near West Africa, according to research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The body of water called the Atlantic Equatorial Water forms along the equator when ocean currents mix the waters of the south and north, Live Science reported on April 22.
Before the discovery of Atlantic Equatorial Water, scientists noticed water mixing along the equator in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but never in the Atlantic. According to Viktor Zhurbas, a physicist and oceanographer at the Shirshov Institute in Moscow, the newly identified water mass allows them to complete the phenomenological model of the world's basic water masses.
Not uniform everywhere, ocean water is a patchwork of many interconnected water masses and layers, constantly mixed and separated by ocean currents, eddies, changes in temperature and salinity. Water masses are characteristic parts of this network, each water mass has the same geographical characteristics, formation history and general properties such as density and dissolved isotopes of oxygen, nitrate and phosphate. To differentiate water masses, oceanographers plot the relationship between temperature and salinity across the ocean, combining the two measurements to determine the density of ocean water.
In 1942, this temperature-salinity graph led to the discovery of equatorial water in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Formed by the mixing of water in the north and south, both the equatorial Pacific and Indian Oceans have temperatures and salinities that curve along constant density lines, easily distinguishable from surrounding water. However, such a relationship has never been recorded in the Atlantic.
To search for the missing water mass, the team looked at data collected by the Argo program, a collection of autonomous semi-submersible buoys that litter the world's oceans. After analyzing data collected by the buoy network, the researchers found a temperature-salinity curve parallel to the one that marks the central North Atlantic and South Atlantic water masses. That is the Equatorial Atlantic Ocean. After identifying this water mass, the team was able to better understand the ocean's mixing processes, which are important for transporting heat, oxygen and nutrients around the world, according to Zhurbas.
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