Rapid mixing and exchange of deep-ocean waters in an abyssal boundary current.

Author Posting. © National Academy of Sciences, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of National Academy of Sciences for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(27), (2019): 13233-13238, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1904087116.The overturning circulation of the global ocean is critically shaped by deep-ocean mixing, which transforms cold waters sinking at high latitudes into warmer, shallower waters. The effectiveness of mixing in driving this transformation is jointly set by two factors: the intensity of turbulence near topography and the rate at which well-mixed boundary waters are exchanged with the stratified ocean interior. Here, we use innovative observations of a major branch of the overturning circulation—an abyssal boundary current in the Southern Ocean—to identify a previously undocumented mixing mechanism, by which deep-ocean waters are efficiently laundered through intensified near-boundary turbulence and boundary–interior exchange. The linchpin of the mechanism is the generation of submesoscale dynamical instabilities by the flow of deep-ocean waters along a steep topographic boundary. As the conditions conducive to this mode of mixing are common to many abyssal boundary currents, our findings highlight an imperative for its representation in models of oceanic overturning.The DynOPO project is supported by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (grants NE/K013181/1 and NE/K012843/1) and the US National Science Foundation (grants OCE-1536453 and OCE-1536779). A.C.N.G. acknowledges the support of the Royal Society and the Wolfson Foundation. S.L. acknowledges the support of award NA14OAR4320106 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, US Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or the US Department of Commerce. We are grateful to the scientific party, crew, and technicians on the RRS James Clark Ross for their hard work during data collection.2019-12-1