Thousands of metres below the ocean’s surface, there are tiny waves moving through the water.

Much like breaking waves at the beach, these small waves within the ocean must eventually break. When they do, they create turbulence and mixing, similar to what you feel from a big wave breaking on the beach.

This might seem far removed from your everyday life. In fact, for a long time scientists have assumed this deep ocean turbulence only mattered over long time scales – that is, centuries to millennia.

But our new research, published in Nature Communications, shows this isn’t always the case. In fact, what happens deep below the ocean’s surface can change what happens above it – even over the course of a single year.

Yet the tools scientists use to understand how the climate is changing do not currently consider the effects of these tiny, crucial movements.

Studying different scales

For our study, we used a combination of previously collected physical and chemical measurements to examine the many different scales on which deep ocean turbulence shapes the global climate system, with a particular focus on short timescale........

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