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Underwater Storms
12/18/2002
Listen in RealAudio 
The ocean has its own weather system with winds and underwater storms that we never hear about
or even see. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton from Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather
Notebook. Oceanographer Dave Gallo from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute describes how
much more there is going on in the ocean than we think.
DG: In the oceans -- 70 percent of the planet, 95 percent of the biosphere -- there are the
highest mountains, the deepest valleys, the largest waterfall. There are more animals in the
sea than on earth. Ninety-nine percent of the heat on the planet that comes from the sun is
stored in the top few tens of feet of the ocean. It has everything the atmosphere has and
more, it has everything that the land has and more, and yet it's hardly explored; we've really
seen less than one percent of what's out there.
Something oceanographers didn't expect were underwater storms. During a recent research
mission to the deepest and darkest part of the ocean where things were thought to be quite
stable, patterns from sediment samples showed disruptions as if a storm had ripped through.
DG: There's a large mass of either sediments and/or water moving usually with gravity downhill
or moving with currents across the sea floor. They can be fairly vicious.
An underwater storm can also cause effect on land, although indirectly. Back in the early
1900s a storm ripped across the sea floor and snapped northeastern transatlantic cables. The
ocean has weather very similar to the atmosphere with high- and low-pressure systems, clear
days and cloudy days.
DG: The same kinds of things we see on The Weather Channel we see in the ocean and yet these
things operate apart from the atmosphere.
Just like predicting the weather on land, underwater predicting is difficult as well. It's
still an unfamiliar world.
The Weather Notebook is supported by Subaru and The National Science Foundation. Thanks today
to Executive Engineer Sean Doucette.
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