A new way to eavesdrop on ocean temperature in the Arctic

New research led by scientists at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography finds that the travel time of underwater sounds moving across the Arctic Ocean can be used to precisely measure ocean temperature under the region's sea ice, providing precious data on temperature variability in a rapidly changing environment that is remote and difficult to access. The technique, known as ocean acoustic thermometry, was originally developed by the late Walter Munk and Peter Worcester at Scripps and Carl Wunsch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.