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Media Contacts: The paper in the July 18 issue of Science is the first effort by HOME investigators to collectively document their findings. The HOME scientists chose the Hawaiian Ridge, a 1,600-mile largely submerged volcanic mountain chain that stretches from the Big Island of Hawaii to Midway Island, due to its rough topography, including large underwater mountains and valleys. Such areas are sometimes referred to as the “stirring rods” of the oceans. Prior to the HOME project, areas
such as the Hawaiian Ridge were hypothesized to be a major energy pathway
for ocean mixing turbulence.
“One of the triumphs of the HOME experiment was being able to measure the cascade from thousands of meters down to centimeter scales,” said Dan Rudnick, a professor of oceanography at Scripps and lead author of the Science paper. “I don’t think this effort is rivaled in terms of measuring detailed dissipation over a topographic feature.” HOME scientists, using the Scripps research vessel Roger Revelle, the flagship of the Scripps fleet; the towed instrument SeaSoar, which took a variety of measurements of upper ocean properties; a new Doppler sonar developed by Scripps Professor Robert Pinkel; and a variety of other instruments and equipment, found that the Hawaiian Ridge is indeed a site with vastly increased ocean mixing. They documented undersea internal wave energy that was enhanced 10 times at the Hawaiian Ridge as compared with normal open ocean areas. With the details of the cascading processes described in the Science paper, the coauthors helped further close the gap of how energy is dissipated in ocean mixing. But the paper notes that the energy puzzle is not completely solved with these results. Even more energy for ocean mixing must be found elsewhere. In addition to Rudnick, coauthors
of the study include Joseph P. Martin, Planning for the HOME project began in 1996 and the final field phases of the project were concluded last month. Scientific analysis of the data set is planned through 2005. |
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new research paper in the journal Science describes ocean mixing in unprecedented
detail. Using an array of technologies and instruments, scientists in
the Hawaii Ocean-Mixing Experiment (HOME), a nearly $18 million National
Science Foundation-sponsored project focused on pinpointing, dissecting,
and analyzing ocean mixing, captured intriguing phenomena including undersea
waves that spanned nearly 1,000 feet.
“Our
conclusion is interesting because we found that there was certainly a
lot of energy loss occurring at the Hawaiian Ridge, but much of it propagates
away and doesn’t get dissipated at the ridge. So we’re approaching
closure of this phenomenon,” said Rudnick. “But until we have
a firmer understanding of this process—until we get a better
handle on mixing—climate models will be of limited use.”