Abstract
MR. LAUGHTON treats an experiment which was only intended to be illustrative as if it had been advanced as probative, and tests it by a doctrine of “thermometric gradients” which does not correspond to the facts of the case. A uniform reduction of the temperature of ocean-water from the Equator to the Pole would doubtless give a “thermometric gradient” of infinitesimal minuteness. But the water of the circumpolar area, on which what Sir John Herschel truly designated the intense action of polar cold is exerted, brings with it so much of equatorial heat that a very decided increase of its specific gravity must be produced by the cooling process to which it is subjected within the polar area. This increase will be adequate, as I have attempted to show, to produce a continuous downward movement of the whole mass of water subjected to the cooling process; and such a movement, however slow, will make itself perceptible in a continuous outflow of the chilled dense water along the deepest floors of the great oceanic basins, and in a continuous indraught of warmer surface water into the polar area. The proof that such is the case seems to me to be afforded by the fact that temperatures not much above 32° seem to be uniformly met with at depths exceeding 2,000 fathoms, even under the equator; a fact of which Mr. Laughton and those who think with him have not, so far as I am aware, offered any account. That there is nothing in depth, per se, which produces this depression is shown by the absence of it in the Mediterranean.
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CARPENTER, W. Oceanic Circulation. Nature 4, 183 (1871). https://doi.org/10.1038/004183a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/004183a0
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