Scientists finally discover huge 'missing' blob of water in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean

Seas might seem endless but they have waterfalls, rivers, and gigantic blobs for long stretches beneath them which often go undetected. Scientists have found a massive blob in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean which stretches from the tip of Brazil to the Gulf of Guinea, near West Africa, reported Live Science. It is a water mass that has been discovered for the first time in the Atlantic. The researchers published this discovery in the journal, "Geophysical Research Letters" on October 28, 2023.

The blob which is called the "Atlantic Equatorial Water," is formed along the equator as ocean currents mix different bodies of water to the north and south. While such a phenomenon has been previously observed in the Pacific and Indian oceans, finding it in the Atlantic has left scientists with many questions. Viktor Zhurbas, a physicist and oceanologist at The Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow told Live Science, "It seemed controversial that the equatorial water mass is present in the Pacific and Indian oceans but missing in the Atlantic Ocean because the equatorial circulation and mixing in all three oceans have common features."

He continued, "The identified new water mass has allowed us to complete (or at least more accurately describe) the phenomenological pattern of basic water masses of the World Ocean." Ocean water is said to be a patchwork of interconnected masses and layers. They mix and split because of currents, eddies and changes in temperature and salinity. Oceanographers differentiate water masses by checking the temperature and salinity across the ocean. These two factors are essential to understand the density of seawater. 

It was because of the data collected by the Argo program, an international collection of robotic, self-submerging floats that have been installed across Earth's oceans, that the scientists found a temperature-salinity curve parallel to the North Atlantic and South Atlantic Central waters, reported Indy100. The published paper read, "Re-examination of water masses using previously unavailable high-quality large volume Argo data allowed us to distinguish a formerly unnoticed water mass in the main thermocline [transition layer between warm surface water and cooler deep water] of the Equatorial Atlantic and thereby complete the phenomenological pattern of basic water masses of the World Ocean."

Zhurbas said, "It was easy to confuse the Atlantic Equatorial Water with the South Atlantic Central Water, and in order to distinguish them it was necessary to have a fairly dense network of vertical temperature and salinity profiles covering the entire Atlantic Ocean." This particular discovery is important for the researchers according to Zhurbas because it gave them a better understanding of how oceans mix which is significant to the oceans' transport of heat, oxygen and nutrients around the globe. In 1942, scientists charted out temperature salinity and discovered the equatorial waters in the Pacific and Indian oceans. As they were formed due to the mixing of waters to the north and south, the Indian and Pacific Equatorial waters have similar temperatures and salinities curving along lines of constant density, which makes them easily identifiable from the surrounding water.