Profile
Seismic Ocean Thermometry
PIs: Joern Callies and Zhongwen Zhan
Research Team: Shirui Peng and Wenbo Wu, PhD
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences
Climate Science Initiative
This project will monitor ocean warming by inferring basin-scale deep ocean temperature changes from sound waves that are generated by repeating earthquakes. The ocean absorbs over ninety percent of the heat trapped on Earth by increasingly abundant greenhouse gases, but large natural temperature fluctuation pose a challenging sampling problem. By making use of some of the information generated by the tens of thousands of shallow submarine earthquakes that occur every year, this project aims to grow this approach into a program that significantly augments existing ocean observing systems, helping diagnose the planetary energy imbalance and improve predictions for the future rate of warming.