Updated: Recent Global Climate Discoveries Made by Oregon Coast Scientists

Published 06/03/2015 at 5:21 AM PDT - Published 06/03/2015 at 5:34 PM PDT
By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Newport, Oregon) – A handful of Oregon-based scientists with connections to the Hatfield Marine Science Center on the central coast have recently published two new sets of research revealing more about the global climate, each coming from two rather surprising places. One looks at massive waves beneath the ocean that humans can't see, and the other gazed into ice cores tens of thousands of years old.

A new study headed up by some Oregon scientists reveals the way icebergs moving near North American during the last ice age may have affected the production of methane in tropical wetlands. These findings are important, researchers say, because they identify a critical piece of evidence for how the Earth responds to changes in climate.

The findings were recently released by scientists that included Rachael Rhodes, a research associate in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University and lead author on the study.

“Essentially what happened was that the cold water influx altered the rainfall patterns at the middle of the globe,” said Rhodes. “The band of tropical rainfall, which includes the monsoons, shifts to the north and south through the year.

By examining evidence from ice core samples, they were able to make extremely detailed measurements of the air trapped in the ice. From that they could compile highly detailed records of some 60,000 years, finding that while the cooling caused by the icebergs may have been mostly regional, it impacted a much broader segment of the global climate in different ways.

By cooling those areas around North America, the rain belts – otherwise known as the tropical climate system – get pushed farther south. Among the effects: monsoon seasons became more concentrated, dumping more rain.

“It is a great example of how inter-connected things are when it comes to climate,” Rhodes said. “This shows the link between polar areas and the tropics, and these changes can happen very rapidly. Climate models suggest only a decade passed between the iceberg intrusion and a resulting impact in the tropics.”

Between Taiwan and the Philippines, the South China Sea is the raceway for a massive wave as tall as the Empire State Building and as much as 100 miles wide – all beneath the surface. These are called “internal waves,” and another OSU scientist with connections to the Hatfield Marine Science Center has just released findings on how these affect the global climate.

Jonathan Nash, an Oregon State University oceanographer and co-author on the study, said these are part of the mechanism that distributes heat throughout the oceans of the world. Indeed, they are critical.

“Without them, the ocean would be a much different place,” Nash said. “It would be significantly more stratified – the surface waters would be much warmer and the deep abyss colder.”

Nash, who is in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. said internal waves help move a tremendous amount of energy from Luzon Strait across the South China Sea. But until this project, scientists didn’t know what became of that energy. As it turns out, it’s a rather complicated picture. A large fraction of energy dissipates when the wave gets steep and breaks on the deep slopes off China and Vietnam, much like breakers on the beach.

The waves originating in Luzon Strait are the largest in the world, based on the region’s tidal flow and topography. A key factor is the depth at which the warm- and cold-water layers of the ocean meet – at about 1,000 meters.

The waves can get as high as 500 meters tall and 100-200 kilometers wide before steepening.

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