Small-scale turbulences in the ocean interior operate on short time-scales and at all depths

Amazing stuff! We still know so little about our oceans!

Unfortunately, the primary focus of this study was climate effects!

The news release contains the term "butterfly effect". However, the abstract of  respective research article does not mention it.

This research again confirms that climate models are junk!

"An international research team ... found that deep ocean turbulence – the process that distributes heat, nutrients and carbon from the surface to the seafloor and back – affects our lives not on a scale of thousands of years as was previously thought, but within the span of a human lifetime.  ...

Using a combination of previously collected physical and chemical measurements, the researchers identified several fast-moving climatic processes affected by small-scale turbulence, including the distribution of heat, nutrients, and carbon. When compared with how climate models predict how turbulence in the deep ocean will affect life on land, the researchers found these models require significant improvements.  ...

“There is a microphysics of the ocean, similar to cloud physics, that is extremely difficult and expensive to observe ...

The researchers tracked how far and how fast CFCs [chlorofluorocarbon] have travelled over the past six decades by measuring their concentration at depth. They found some deep waters have carried CFCs all the way from Antarctica to the mid-Pacific and north Indian Ocean in just 40 years. The same waters also carry carbon, oxygen, and heat. As they travel, they mix with other waters, and so turbulence is key to how much tracers, heat, and carbon remain trapped in the deep ocean and on what time scales. ...

Another experiment involved injecting dye into the deep ocean at known locations and depths and tracking its movement. In a deep canyon in the Rockall Trough, not far from UK waters, the dye rose as much as 100 metres per day: roughly 10,000 times faster than models predicted. ...

However, when comparing the CFC, dye, and other observational data with climate models, the team found that the models’ output often deviated significantly from the observational data. ..."

From the abstract:

"Small-scale turbulent mixing in the ocean interior is vital in governing ocean circulation and tracer distributions, and hence global climate. However, the planetary extent of this role and its dependence on the microphysics of mixing remain inadequately understood.

Here, we emphasize the variety of spatio-temporal scales on which such interior turbulent mixing can shape the climate system. In addition to its well-established role in facilitating the equilibration of deep branches of ocean circulation on centennial-to-millennial timescales, interior turbulent mixing is a leading determinant of oceanic tracer budgets on timescales as short as sub-annual.

We highlight the importance of the co-dependence of vertical (diapycnal) mixing and lateral (isopycnal) stirring in establishing the large-scale impacts of oceanic turbulence.

We conclude with a summary of theoretical, observational and computational bottlenecks in the way of a sufficiently accurate representation of mixing in Earth System Models, and discuss emerging opportunities for making progress in these areas."

Scientists unravel the fast-moving ‘butterfly effect’ of the deep ocean | University of Cambridge "Tiny, invisible swirls and twirls – not much bigger than a coin – deep below the ocean’s surface are silently shaping some of the biggest forces steering our climate: sea level rise, fisheries collapse, extreme flooding, and how much carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs."

Climatic reach of small-scale turbulence in the ocean interior (open access)

Fig. 1: Turbulent mixing is ubiquitous at all depths and diverse in nature.

Fig. 2: Turbulence spans a wide range of scales and is difficult to observe in the deep ocean.