The moon pulls on Halifax and on the Bay of Fundy with the same force, and the tide at one is eight times the other. What makes the difference is the shape and depth of the water it arrives in, and that turns out to matter to wharves, turbines and dykes.
Ocean Physics
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation keeps northwestern Europe warmer than its latitude allows and drives some of the North Atlantic's most productive fisheries. The question of whether it is slowing down is one of the most consequential in climate science right now.
Ocean Physics
Ocean currents run on wind, on density, and on the energy that mixes deep water back to the surface. What they deliver to a stretch of coast can be set years earlier and hundreds of kilometers away.
Ocean Physics
The ocean is sorted into layers by density, and very little moves between them without energy. Where wind, tides and winter cooling return nutrients to the sunlit layer, production follows. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence in summer, the cold water is the layer in the middle.
Ocean Physics
Heat that enters the ocean this year will still be moving through it in a hundred. A look at where the energy actually sits, how it gets from one place to another, and what happened along the British Columbia coast when some of it stalled there for two years.
