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A Harvard study found that some areas of the great Pacific could cool down as a result of a climatic event that occurred hundreds of years ago.
Two researchers, one from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the other from Harvard University, have uncovered evidence of a deep cooling of the oceans, probably because of the small Ice age. In their article published in the journal Science, Jake Gebbie and Peter Huybers describe their study of temperatures in the Pacific Ocean over the last 150 years and what they discovered, Phys reported.
Previous research has suggested that it takes a very long time for the water of the Pacific Ocean to circulate in its lowest depths. In fact, it only gets back to the south, which means it takes a lot of time on the surface to get to the surface – maybe even hundreds of years. That's what Gebbie and Huber discovered in 2012. This led them to think that the water temperature at the bottom of the Pacific could give an idea of what was the surface temperature there are hundreds of years old.
To find out if this was really the case, the researchers obtained data from an international consortium called Argo Program, a group of people who together were performing ocean measurements up to a depth of 39, about two kilometers. By way of comparison, the researchers also obtained the data collected by the crew of the HMS Challenger – they had raised the temperature of the Pacific Ocean to a depth of two kilometers between 1872 and 1876. The computer model researchers intended to mimic the circulation of water in the Pacific Ocean over the last one hundred and fifty years.
The model showed that the Pacific Ocean has cooled during the twentieth century to depths of 1.8 to 2.6 km. The amount is still not accurate, but the researchers suggest that it is most likely between 0.02 and 0.08 ° C. This cooling, according to the researchers, is probably due to the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1300 to 1870, there was an era known as the "warm medieval period," which had caused the warming of the deep waters of the Pacific just before the current cooling.
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