flexe: From Local to Extreme Environments

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Dataset 1: Temperature vs Depth

Greetings FLEXE Students and welcome to the FLEXE Forum. I am Dr. Matt Smith, a geologist, doing research and teaching at the University of Florida. As a deep-sea geologist, I spend much of my time investigating the volcanoes at mid-ocean ridges and studying the lavas they erupt. I want to understand how these volcanoes help to form the ocean crust. I have been on over a dozen oceanographic research cruises and have used many different types of deep-sea submersibles and oceanographic equipment (see pictures on the right).

When I am not at sea, I am usually teaching at the University of Florida. One of the courses I am teaching right now is Oceanography. This semester, I have more than 120 students in my class. This past week we've been looking at temperature in the ocean. In particular, we've been talking a lot about how (and why) the temperature of ocean water changes with increasing depth from the surface to the bottom of the ocean. We call a graph showing this change a vertical water-column temperature profile. We have also been talking about how this temperature profile changes from place to place around the world. In particular, we've been looking at differences in the profile at different latitudes and discussing how the ocean environment changes from place to place. Temperature patterns are important to understand because they strongly affect the way surface waters and deep ocean water move around. Understanding this can help increase our knowledge of the ocean's effect on climate change.

I understand that you have been investigating temperature and heat transfer in your local environment, making your own measurements and analyzing your own data. That's a great way to learn about temperature and heat transfer. That's how most scientists working in the ocean began - studying their local environment, understanding how it operates, and then extending their understanding to new places. As you'll see, some of these environments are quite different, even extreme.

What can you do?

So let's get started applying what you've learned to an investigation of the ocean environment. I thought I'd challenge you by showing you some temperature data that we recently gathered in the eastern Pacific Ocean using the deep submersible Alvin. To gather this data, we used a special pressure-tested thermometer attached to the outside of Alvin. The thermometer took a temperature measurement once every second as Alvin descended from the surface to the deep-ocean floor along the mid-ocean ridge. Below is a graph showing the temperature readings from the surface to the seafloor. Your teacher will give you a handout with this graph and several questions for you to answer. Check out the related links to the right for more background information. When you have worked through all the questions, send your responses to us through the FLEXE Forum.