(Table 2, page 1376) Chemical analyses of manganese nodules and crusts from the South-western Pacific

Phosphate deposits which apparently formed during the Miocene climatic optimum are widespread on the Chatham Rise and Camp bell Plateau, and on seamounts in the north Tasman Sea. They formed under oxidising conditions by the phosphatisation of older or contemporaneous foraminiferal oozes (Campbell Plateau and Chatham Rise) and coral limestones (Tasman Sea). The phosphorites of the rise and plateau were formed where current activity was sufficiently strong to prevent normal sedimentation, and now form lag deposits. After the Miocene, phosphorite formation ceased and was followed by manganese oxide deposition where conditions were highly oxidising on the eastern Campbell Plateau and north Tasman seamounts, and by glauconite formation in the much less oxidising environments of the western Campbell Plateau and the Chat ham Rise. The manganese deposits are not volcanogenic, as was formerly thought, but formed by slow precipitation from well oxygenated sea water.

(Table 1) Strontium concentration and isotope ratios of carbonates from DSDP Holes 69-504B as well as 83-504B and fish debris samples from Indian and Pacific Ocean sediments

Recent revisions of the geological time scale by Kent and Gradstein (in press) suggest that, on the average, Cretaceous magnetic anomalies are approximately 10 m.y. older than in Larson and Hilde's (1975) previous time scale. These revised basement ages change estimates for the duration of alteration in the ocean crust, based on the difference between secondary-mineral isochron ages and magnetic isochron-crustal ages, from 3 to approximately 13 m.y. In addition to the revised time scale, Burke et al.'s (1982) new data on the temporal variation of 87Sr/86Sr in seawater allow a better understanding of the timing of alteration and more realistic determinations of water/rock ratios during seawater-basalt interaction. Carbonates from all DSDP sites which reached Layer 2 of Atlantic crust (Sites 105, 332, 417, and 418) are deposited within 10-15 m.y. of crustal formation from solutions with 87Sr/86Sr ratios identical to unaltered or contemporaneous seawater. Comparisons of the revised seawater curve with the 87Sr/86Sr of basement carbonates is consistent with a duration of approximately 10-15 m.y. for alteration in the ocean crust. Our preliminary Sr and 87Sr/86Sr data for carbonates from Hole 504B, on 5.9-m.y.-old crust south of the Costa Rica Rift, suggest that hydrous solutions from which carbonates precipitated contained substantial amounts of basaltic Sr. For this reason, carbonate 87Sr/86Sr cannot be used to estimate the duration of alteration at this site. A basalt-dominated alteration environment at Hole 504B is consistent with heat-flow evidence which indicates rapid sediment burial of crust at the Costa Rica Rift, sealing it from access by seawater and resulting in unusually low water/rock ratios during alteration.

La inevitable inconsistencia del Zeus/Júpiter épico

Durante años la investigación literaria ha encontrado fruición en buscar y encontrar inconsistencias narrativas en la Tebaida de Estacio. Concretamente, hay cierto grado de consenso respecto a que las incongruencias en que incurre Júpiter son debidas a negligencia o incuria por parte del poeta. De hecho, no se puede negar que el soberano del cielo se contradice en las ocasiones en que alude a su relación con el Destino. No obstante, no será únicamente el poeta flavio el objeto de mi atención en este artículo. Hoy día se continúa acudiendo a la autoridad filosófica de Séneca (fundamentalmente a Dial. 1.5.8) siempre que el Zeus/Júpiter poshomérico (también el virgiliano) incurre en lo que hemos dado en considerar «incoherencias». Sin embargo, excepción hecha de las composiciones hesiódicas, el estatuto teológico de Zeus/Júpiter es altamente inestable en toda la tradición literaria griega y romana. Quizá deberíamos aceptar, entonces, que durante siglos los que estudiamos literatura antigua hemos tendido a prescindir de la voz autorial y de su autoridad omnímoda para manipular el material literario preexistente con el objeto de generar nuevos significados y nuevas cosmovisiones. En definitiva, nos hemos mostrado proclives a calificar de inconsistencias todo aquello que no se adecua a nuestras expectativas o prejuicios.

EGO gliders NetCDF format reference manual version 1.2

This document specifies the NetCDF file format of EGO-gliders that is used to distribute glider data, metadata and technical data. It documents the standards used therein; this includes naming conventions as well as metadata content. It was initiated in October 2012, based on OceanSITES, Argo and ANFOG user's manuals. Everyone’s Gliding Observatories - EGO is dedicated to the promotion of the glider technology and its applications. The EGO group promotes glider applications through coordination, training, liaison between providers and users, advocacy, and provision of expert advice. We intend to favor oceanographic experiments and the operational monitoring of the oceans with gliders through scientific and international collaboration. We provide news, support, information about glider projects and glider data management, as well as resources related to gliders. All EGO data are publicly available. More information about the project is available at: http://www.ego-network.org

Recommendations for in-situ data Near Real Time Quality Control

With the construction of operational oceanography systems, the need for real-time has become more and more important. A lot of work had been done in the past, within National Data Centres (NODC) and International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) to standardise delayed mode quality control procedures. Concerning such quality control procedures applicable in real-time (within hours to a maximum of a week from acquisition), which means automatically, some recommendations were set up for physical parameters but mainly within projects without consolidation with other initiatives. During the past ten years the EuroGOOS community has been working on such procedures within international programs such as Argo, OceanSites or GOSUD, or within EC projects such as Mersea, MFSTEP, FerryBox, ECOOP, and MyOcean. In collaboration with the FP7 SeaDataNet project that is standardizing the delayed mode quality control procedures in NODCs, and MyOcean GMES FP7 project that is standardizing near real time quality control procedures for operational oceanography purposes, the DATA-MEQ working group decided to put together this document to summarize the recommendations for near real-time QC procedures that they judged mature enough to be advertised and recommended to EuroGOOS.

In-situ based reanalysis of the global ocean temperature and salinity with ISAS: variability of the heat content and steric height

The In Situ Analysis System (ISAS) was developed to produce gridded fields of temperature and salinity that preserve as much as possible the time and space sampling capabilities of the Argo network of profiling floats. Since the first global re-analysis performed in 2009, the system has evolved and a careful delayed mode processing of the 2002-2012 dataset has been carried out using version 6 of ISAS and updating the statistics to produce the ISAS13 analysis. This last version is now implemented as the operational analysis tool at the Coriolis data centre. The robustness of the results with respect to the system evolution is explored through global quantities of climatological interest: the Ocean Heat Content and the Steric Height. Estimates of errors consistent with the methodology are computed. This study shows that building reliable statistics on the fields is fundamental to improve the monthly estimates and to determine the absolute error bars. The new mean fields and variances deduced from the ISAS13 re-analysis and dataset show significant changes relative to the previous ISAS estimates, in particular in the southern ocean, justifying the iterative procedure. During the decade covered by Argo, the intermediate waters appear warmer and saltier in the North Atlantic and fresher in the Southern Ocean than in WOA05 long term mean. At inter-annual scale, the impact of ENSO on the Ocean Heat Content and Steric Height is observed during the 2006-2007 and 2009-2010 events captured by the network.

A direct determination of the World Ocean barotropic circulation

The time-mean Argo float displacements and the World Ocean Atlas 2009 temperature–salinity climatology are used to obtain the total, top to bottom, mass transports. Outside of an equatorial band, the total transports are the sum of the vertical integrals of geostrophic- and wind-driven Ekman currents. However, these transports are generally divergent, and to obtain a mass conserving circulation, a Poisson equation is solved for the streamfunction with Dirichlet boundary conditions at solid boundaries. The value of the streamfunction on islands is also part of the unknowns. This study presents and discusses an energetic circulation in three basins: the North Atlantic, the North Pacific, and the Southern Ocean. This global method leads to new estimations of the time-mean western Eulerian boundary current transports maxima of 97 Sverdrups (Sv; 1 Sv ≡ 106 m3 s−1) at 60°W for the Gulf Stream, 84 Sv at 157°E for the Kuroshio, 80 Sv for the Agulhas Current between 32° and 36°S, and finally 175 Sv for the Antarctic Circumpolar Current at Drake Passage. Although the large-scale structure and boundary of the interior gyres is well predicted by the Sverdrup relation, the transports derived from the wind stress curl are lower than the observed transports in the interior by roughly a factor of 2, suggesting an important contribution of the bottom torques. With additional Argo displacement data, the errors caused by the presence of remaining transient terms at the 1000-db reference level will continue to decrease, allowing this method to produce increasingly accurate results in the future.

Mean structure of the North Atlantic subtropical permanent pycnocline from in-situ observations

In the north Atlantic subtropical gyre, the oceanic vertical structure of density is characterized by a region of rapid increase with depth. This layer is called the permanent pycnocline. The permanent pycnocline is found below a surface mode water ,which are ventilated every winter when penetrated locally by the mixed layer. Assessing the structure and variability of the permanent pycnocline is of a major interest in the understanding of the climate system because the pycnocline layer delimits important heat and anthropogenic reservoir. Moreover, the heat content structure translate into changes in the large scale stratification feature, such as the permanent pycnocline. We developed a new objective algorithm for the characterization of the large scale structure of the permanent pycnocline (OAC-P). Argo data have been used with OAC-P to provide a detailed description of the mean structure of the North-Atlantic subtropical pycnocline (e.g.: depth, thickness, temperature, salinity, density, potential vorticity). Results reveal a surprisingly complex structure with inhomogeneous properties. While the classical bowl shape of the pycnocline depth is captured, much more complex pycnocline structure emerges at the regional scale. In the southern recirculation gyre of the Gulf Stream Extension, the pycnocline is deep, thick, the maximum of stratification is found in the middle on the layer and follow an isopycnal surface. But local processes influence and modify this textbook description and the pycnocline is characterized by a vertically asymmetric structure and gradients in thermohaline properties. T/S distribution along the permanent pycnocline depth is complex and reveals a diversity of water masses resulting from mixing of different source waters. We will present the observed mean structure of the North-Atlantic subtropical permanent pycnocline and relate it to physical processes that constraint it.