Re: The Western Interior Seaway (and computers)

[Aidan Karley <aidan_karley@yahoo.co.uk>]

In article <20050628.130115.-985265.4.bigelowp@juno.com>, Phil Bigelow 
wrote:
> 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.
>
       AIUI, the driver process is the change in sea-water density caused 
by cooling and by the removal of significant fresh water to form pack ice. 
There's also a simple thermal contribution too, but it's less important as 
indicated by the Heinrich events (Laurentide/ Greenland deglaciation yields 
lots of fresh-water runoff to the North Atlantic, which inhibits the 
sinking of water in the NE Atlantic and shuts down the system. Seabed 
sediment data indicates this happens on the timescale of years not decades, 
providing some justification for the (allegedly) atrocious climate-foul-up 
film of last year. [sorry, brain has drawn a blank on it's name. It's late 
here. Whatever.])

> Did hydraulic
> shear occur at mid-depth between the northward-flowing warm water and the
> southward flowing colder water?
>
       Well it happens these days, so presumably it could have happened in 
the past.
       
-- 
 Aidan Karley,
 Aberdeen, Scotland,
 Location: 57°10' N,  02°09'  W (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233
 Written at Wed, 29 Jun 2005 04:07 +0100



                
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