Imaging a water mass boundary
This image shows the first joint temperature-reflection image of the ocean. During a 2003 cruise aboard R/V Ewing to acquire seismic reflection data to image the Storegga Slide off Norway, we simultaneously deployed more than 100 expendable instruments (XBT's and XCTD's) to measure ocean temperature and salinity (the T-S data acquisition was funded by a SGER grant from the National Science Foundation's Physical Oceanography program). We focused our efforts on a few lines to create densely sampled (~5 km) T-S structures. The resulting data set provided the first-ever joint seismic reflection/temperature images. Most of the reflections come from the water-mass boundary between the Norwegian Atlantic Current (warm colors) and Norwegian Sea Deep Water (cool colors).