Recent research by ocean scientists from Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences has revealed the important role of oxygen ‘mixing’ in maintaining healthy deep-sea environments in the UK and beyond.
A revolutionary study has been published Nature Communicationshows that oxygen mixing during summer storms is an important process for restoring oxygen levels in deep sea waters during summer months and thus maintaining the health of these seas.
Lead author Professor Tom Rippet, from Bangor University, explains: “As the climate warms, there are increasing concerns about the health of our coastal oceans because warmer waters contain less oxygen. Ocean life, like land animals, depends on oxygen to survive. Oxygen is used as decaying matter decomposes in the deep ocean. This creates an oxygen deficit in the deep seas around the UK during the summer months. Unfortunately, this deficit is expected to increase as our climate warms.”
Oxygen stratification and research methods
Stratification in the deep waters around the UK during the summer months isolates the deep waters from the atmosphere, which is the main source of oxygen.
A team of researchers from Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences, the University of Liverpool and the National Oceanography Centre have used new techniques developed at Bangor University to estimate oxygen flux in the ocean. These new results show that oxygen mixing during summer storms can slow the development of deep-sea oxygen depletion by up to 50%.
According to NetZero, these new findings also have important implications for the proposed massive development of floating wind farms in places like the Celtic Sea and the northern North Sea:
“The tidal flow from the proposed floating wind turbines will create a turbulent wave that will mix the oxygen during the summer months. This positive effect will improve the condition of the ocean. However, this new study highlights that the potential impact of this altered mixing needs to be taken into account in the design of turbine foundations and spatial planning of new wind farms,” says Professor Rippet.
Source: Port Altele
