Blog Posts Tagged "seawater composition"

Seawater circulation and ocean composition

One of the reasons geochemists like myself are interested in studying North Pond is the tremendous amount of seawater that is being flushed through rocks in these places. Imagine that at any given time 1-2% of the ocean water is actually below the seafloor.  That water flows because there is a lot of heat in the deeper seafloor and it interacts with rocks it encounters along its flow path. Very slowly, the composition of the flowing water will change, and when it finally exits the seafloor, it has a composition that is somewhat different from the composition of the rest of the ocean. We call this process "seawater circulation" and believe that it plays an important role in explaining the composition of seawater.