Environment

Far beneath the waves of the stormy Southern Ocean, cold, salty water plunges off Antarctica’s continental shelf like a silent underwater waterfall, fueling a vast ocean current system that helps regulate Earth’s climate. Long hidden and nearly impossible to observe, these dense water cascades are finally being seen not by ships or divers, but from space. In a groundbreaking study, researchers have used satellite data to track these powerful underwater flows by spotting tiny dips in sea level often just a few centimetres. These subtle signals, detected by satellites orbiting hundreds of kilometres above Earth, mark the sinking of cold, heavy water as it plunges to the ocean floor. This discovery opens up a low-cost, carbon-free way to monitor one of the ocean’s most important but elusiv...