In the World Ocean, so little studied by man, there are many interesting things - outlandish "landscapes", as well as bizarre plants and animals. But no less interesting are the natural phenomena occurring there, for example, the halocline …
In the Bloody Mary cocktail, you can see a clear boundary between two drinks poured into a glass.
And in the World Ocean you can see a halocline - the place where two layers of water with different salinity meet, which do not mix with each other.
Haloclines are vertical and horizontal.
Horizontal halocline: water is layered - fresh (less dense) on top, salty (denser) below. Such a natural phenomenon can be observed in several cases: when fresh river waters flow into the sea with high salinity; during heavy rainfall over the ocean; when melting fresh glaciers of the Arctic and ocean waters meet.
A vertical halocline is typically seen where two seas meet. Such a halocline can be many kilometers in length.
There are other “wedges” in the World Ocean: thermocline, chemocline, and pycnocline.
Thermocline is a meeting place for waters with different temperatures. The most striking example is the meeting of the warm waters of the Gulf Stream with the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
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Chemocline is the contact boundary of waters with different chemical composition.
Pycnocline is a very abrupt change in water density at depth.