Your teacher places the following supplies on a table: water, hot plate, salt, beakers, food coloring, and test tubes. Using the supplies listed, how could you plan an investigation of how differences in temperature and salinity affect ocean currents? Include the following vocabulary in your explanation: salinity, density, temperature, wind, surface currents, deep currents. Make sure to include specific details and steps.

Higher saline water is more dense that lower saline water

Explanation:

The ocean salinity varies with rainfall, run off from estuaries and the pattern of ocean current. In addition to this, higher temperature affects the kinetic movement of water as well as the salinity. The movement of the wind also contributes to the movement of water and the particles and solute distribution. The surface currents do not do much to mix the entire body of water and this is because this is from less dense areas. Deep currents factor in to mix just the heavier more dense layers.

In planning an experiment to test this one would do two experiments.

First: Heat 4 batches of water at different temperatures and color the different temperatures with different food coloring. Next layer the water carefully from hottest to coldest in a beaker and then from coldest to hottest in another beaker.

Second: Dissolve salt in 4 batches of water increasing the amount by half each time. Color each with different food colouring and layer the salty water from least salt to most salt in a beaker. Layer the water from most salt to least salt in another beaker.

Make observations:

The cooler water should be more dense and sink to the bottom while the saltier water should be more dense and sink to the bottom.