How the Pacific Ocean leaks
The Tasman leakage is the second-largest link between the Pacific and Indian oceans, and can greatly affect both the Australian and global climate. Image: SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE A state-of-the-art ocean model has been used in a new study to conduct the first detailed investigation of oceanic water flow between the Pacific and Indian Oceans via the south of Australia. This so-called Tasman leakage is the second-largest link between the Pacific and Indian oceans after the Indonesian through-flow to the north of Australia, researchers from the UNSW Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) and CSIRO report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Water travels through the world's oceans along great loops driven by massive and often deep currents in a process known as the global thermohaline circulation, notes the study's lead author, Dr Erik Van Sebille, a physical oceanographer at the CCRC. Acting over millennial time scales, the global thermohaline...