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Ocean water flow over the Greenland-Scotland Ridge.

Ocean water flow over the Greenland-Scotland Ridge.
Ocean water flow over the Greenland-Scotland Ridge.
Ocean water flow over the Greenland-Scotland Ridge.
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211302
Oberlander, E. Paul
Ocean water flow over the Greenland-Scotland Ridge.
Illustration
09/05/2005
greenland-scotland-ridge.jpg
Image Of the Day caption:
Greenland-Scotland Ridge looms like a great undersea dam, stretching from East Greenland to Iceland and the Faroe Islands and across to Scotland. Warm, salty Gulf Stream waters flow over it into the Nordic Seas, where they lose heat to the atmosphere in winter, become colder and denser, and sink to fill Nordic Seas basisns. The cold deep waters eventually pile up and spill over the Greenland-Scotland Ridge, and then flow southward underneath the lighter warmer waters flowing northward. More than one million gallons per second falls over the ridgesome 1,400 times the volume of water that goes over Niagara Falls.
Caption from Oceanus magazine, Vol. 48, No. 1, pg. 31:
The North Atlantic and Norwegian Atlantic Currents carry warm, salty, tropical surface waters northward, where they surrender heat to the atmosphere, tempering winters in Europe. The waters become colder and denser and sink to the depths of the seas north of the Greenland- Scotland Ridge. The ridge, stretching from East Greenland to Iceland and across to Scotland, is an undersea barrier between the northern seas and the North Atlantic. The Denmark Strait is a critical passageway through the ridge. Cold, dense water (purple arrows) in the northern seas plunges over the ridge (below) and down into the Irminger Sea in a submarine waterfall thousands of times greater in volume than all terrestrial waterfalls combined.
Oceanus online caption:
Almost like a subsea waterfall, cold, dense waters flow over the Greenland-Scotland Ridge and then underneath warmer, lighter waters, heading southward.
Illustration by E. Paul Oberlander
© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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