—including in the Baltic Sea. While the surface water reacts relatively quickly to the higher temperature of the atmosphere, the deeper water absorbs the heat with a delay. In some areas of the Baltic Sea; however, the deeper layers are warming faster than the. How can this be? Leonie Barghorn, a physical oceanographer at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research, and her colleagues investigated whether temporal changes in the inflow of North Sea water into the Baltic Sea could be the cause.
The brackish water Baltic Sea draws its salt content from the North Sea. However, the inflowing North Sea water is heavier than the brackish water of the Baltic Sea due to its higher salinity and therefore flows in at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. This is not a permanent process, because the Baltic Sea usually has a high filling level due to numerous rivers and large annual precipitation amounts, resulting in a strong outflow.
There are still no sufficiently long observation series on the summer inflows, so a trend analysis based on the measured data is fraught with too much uncertainty. Barghorn has therefore used model simulation to investigate whether within the last 150 years the frequency of saltwater inflows in summer and early autumn has increased and whether there is a causal link to the"We analyzed a so-called hindcast simulation covering the period from 1850 to 2008," Barghorn explains.
While the Arkona Basin, which is upstream of the Bornholm Basin, is regularly mixed due to its shallower depth, so that the inflowing warm saltwater is distributed over the entire water column, the downstream Gotland Basin is not accessible to the small summer to early autumn saltwater inflows. Thus, only the Bornholm Basin has conditions that make this"bottom heating" visible.
Co-author Markus Meier adds,"We don't yet know exactly what caused the shift in salinity input to the warm season. For the Bornholm Basin, at any rate, the consequences can be serious, because higher temperatures will also drive oxygen depletion and thus promote the spread of 'dead zones.'"L.