Re: The Western Interior Seaway (and computers)

[villandra@austin.rr.com]

Superficially it looks as though I had only to read on; but how wide 
was this seaway?

Dora

From: Phil Bigelow <bigelowp@juno.com>
Date: Tuesday, June 28, 2005 6:21 am
Subject: The Western Interior Seaway (and computers)

> There is nothing presently in existence that is an analog to the WIS.
> 
> The Seaway was, at its maximum, a multi-thousand kilometer, N-S-
> trending,pole-to-semitropical shallow waterway, bounded by two 
> large landmasses
> that supplied a prodigious amount of sediment into the WIS basin.
> 
> With such a long geographic temperature gradient, we really don't know
> how the currents behaved on a macro-level, leave alone on a local 
> level,nor do we know how much they moderated the air temp in the 
> polar regions.
> That would be one of the reasons for doing the project in the first
> place.  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.
>