Seismic Oceanography:  Imaging Thermohaline Finestructure with Reflection Seismology

Figure:  Time-lapse images, ~2 days apart, of finestructure across the North Atlantic Front, Newfoundland Basin.  Images are ~250 km across and 4.5 km deep. 

This talk will present a new application of marine reflection seismology --  the imaging of thermohaline finestructure in the ocean’s interior (Holbrook et al., Science, 2003; Nandi et al., GRL, 2004; Holbrook and Fer, GRL, 2005).  The reflection method is ideally tuned to detect thermohaline finestructure in the ocean, with sensitivity down to temperature contrasts of ~0.05˚C.  The resulting images show the ocean in a way it's never been seen before and include many features relevant to mixing processes in the ocean, such as water-mass boundaries, intrusions, mesoscale eddies, internal waves, and turbulent boundary layers.