#Salt water density how to#

#Salt water density how to#

Some places are deeper, some places are shallower, but there is that reference level from which we work.Īny questions on that? Then we moved into a discussion of how to measure salinity and temperature in the oceans, and I talked about some of the methods to do that.

It’s an oversimplification to say, of course, that the ocean basins have flat bottoms like a bathtub or something.īut there is a little bit of a tendency that way because they do have-they do have ocean crust beneath them which floats at a certain level and gives you the depth of about 5 kilometers in many, many places around the world ocean. And that’s why there are these vast areas of the ocean that are at about the same depth below sea level, these abyssal planes. The continental crust which sits a bit higher, and the ocean crust which sits a bit lower.

We connected that to plate tectonics, both to make the point that those ocean basins are changing through geologic time, but also to get at this curious issue of how the oceans are not just kind of a random roughness on the Earth, but they really represent two basic levels of Earth crust. And last time I gave an overview of the nature of the ocean basins, basically the geometry of the basins in which the water sits. Professor Ron Smith: So now we are into this new section of the course, oceanography.

The Atmosphere, the Ocean, and Environmental Change GG 140 - Lecture 20 - Ocean Water Density and Atmospheric ForcingĬhapter 1: Ocean Depth Profiles