Dziecie Chaosu
Temat: Creatures Great and Small Are Stirring the Ocean
...issue). Physical and biological oceanographers led by William Dewar of Florida State University in Tallahassee calculated how much energy phytoplankton store in new organic matter each year: about 63 1012 watts (63 terawatts, or TW). Perhaps something like 1% of that, or almost 1 TW, may go into swimming motions that stir ocean waters, they estimate from expected energy losses and from the amount of oxygen consumed in the ocean.
A TW of biomixing would be a lot. In 1998, Walter Munk of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, and Wunsch estimated that 2 TW of mixing is required to mix deep, cold waters to the surface. That completes the "conveyor belt" circulation of the world ocean, which is vital to the climate system. Dewar and his colleagues speculate that the decimation of stocks of big fish and whales over the past couple of centuries could have removed enough biomixing to have an effect on...
Źródło: planktonforums.org/viewtopic.php?t=2988
Temat: Introducing Walter Munk, or "The Old Man and the Sea"
bridges vol. 17, April 28 / News from the Network: Austrian Researchers Abroad by Pepita Adelmann Through the glass doors of DC's famous Cosmos Club, I can see an elderly man waving and smiling warmly at me. "We've been expecting you," he says with a lovely accent that includes unmistakable British politeness and traces of German. "Shall we sit upstairs?" It's hard to keep up, as the 90-year-old Dr. Walter Munk, Secretary of the Navy, Chief of Naval Operations Oceanography, and Chair of the world-famous Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, briskly climbs up the stairs, needing no assistance but a simple walking stick... Great story >>> read it here: http://www.ostina.org/content/view/3027/935/ Considering that Munk only got into oceanography by coincidence and that his whole life has been built upon an alignment of...
Źródło: planktonforums.org/viewtopic.php?t=6781