Re: The Western Interior Seaway (and computers)

[Phil Bigelow <bigelowp@juno.com>]

On Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:15:46 -0500 "jrc" <jrccea@bellsouth.net> writes:

> See Slingerland et al's work.


Will do. (and thanks also to Tom for the full ref.)


> >Water depth in the WIS (which was shallow) complicates our
> > understanding somewhat, because most of our existing models of
> > large-scale oceanic circulation assume deeper water in order to 
> work
> > correctly.

> If I remember correctly, water depth was taken into account in 
> Slingerland's 
> work.  After all, one of its intended purposes was to approximately 
> quantify 
> differential sediment transport in the WIS.


I was thinking way back to my Geo. 101 lab days.  Cold water at the poles
sinks, drawing the warm water from the equator northward to take its
place.  The cold water then upwells near the tropics to begin the process
over.  It apparently works very well on a global scale in extremely deep
water.  But in a shallower epieric sea, would it still work?   Would
there be a sufficient temperature gradient with increasing depth (and
between the tropics and the poles) in the WIS to drive such a dynamo? 
And if there were pole-to-tropics bottom currents in the WIS, were the
currents disrupted by boundary effects on the sea floor?  Did hydraulic
shear occur at mid-depth between the northward-flowing warm water and the
southward flowing colder water?

Too many questions.  Clearly, I need to read their paper!!

<pb>
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