Correlation Between the Specific Heat Capacity of the Ocean and Salt Content

Introduction

In this article I am going to talk all about the ocean and climate change. One of the problems that is causing global warming is the melting ice caps which are affecting the specific capacity of the oceans. 

Background Information

Oceans are extremely important to our planet. They have plenty of jobs that keep the earth as healthy as possible, for example it produces more than half of the worlds oxygen and stores more than 50 times of carbon dioxide than our atmosphere. The ocean also provides with seafood and ingredients that also come from the sea, without this we wouldn’t be able to eat what we do in our everyday basis. There are many more examples of why the oceans are important but what I think is most important is how the ocean transports heat from the equator to the two poles by using the 70% of surface area it has on earth. This is what we call “Climate Regulation”. The tropical oceans close to the equator are seas the receive the most heat from the sun and then what happens is that the ocean transports the energy, using its large surface area, all around the globe.

Before we start our experiment we need to talk about key vocabulary that you will need to know so that you can have a more clear understanding of what is going on. The first words are, specific heat capacity, the specific heat capacity of a substance is the amount of heat in joules required to raise 1kg of the substance by 1ºC. Some examples of specific heat capacity are that water has 4200 (J/kg°C) , ethanol has 2410 (J/kg°C) and hydrogen has 14150 (J/kg°C).

Climate Change is the most urgent problem facing us humans right now, it is changing the earth and is starting to change the way we live. Climate change is one of the reasons why ice caps are melting and entering our oceans which ends up reducing the concentration of salt. There are many reasons that are created by us humans that ultimately are causing us to destroy our own home. For example:

Humans are cutting down trees that are so vital to our earth. Trees are so important because they absorb most carbon dioxide and convert it into oxygen that we can breathe, but when there are no trees to absorb CO2, this causes the gas to just fly all the way up to the atmosphere. Us humans are also increasing the amount of farming and livestock which causes there to be more methane in the atmosphere. Methane is mostly produced by cows and sheep after they digest their food, and if there are more cows and sheep then there will be more methane produced by the animals. The main problem in my opinion that us humans are creating is the burning of gas and oil, this action causes many harmful gases into our atmosphere and end up destroying the ozone layer. Some examples of these harmful gases are; carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.

Climate change is also creating a massive problem called the greenhouse effect, this effect is something that we can’t see but is heating up our earth. The main greenhouse gasses consist of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and water vapor. When the sun shines through the atmosphere the radiation is mainly absorbed by the land and sea if not it will be reflected right back into space and the greenhouse gases will stop them from going back to space. The problem that us humans are creating s that we are forcing an imbalance in our atmosphere and if you look at this in the bigger picture we are destroying our own planet.

Hypothesis

My prediction is that as the concentration of salt in the water increases the specific heat capacity of the water will decrease. This means that as the global warming carries on the earth will get hotter, and the heat of the earth will carry on melting the ice caps and if the ice caps dissolve into the water it will decrease its specific heat capacity and this will mean that there is more heat travelling in the air because the water won’t be able to absorb all the energy and the heat will have to reflect owaya from the water.

Conclusion

In conclusion, alanysing researches on this topic we can clearly see that the specific heat capacity decreases as you increase the amount of salt in the water, but what does this mean in the bigger picture? As we talked about in the background information climate change is occuring every second in our earth and the global warming is causing for our ice caps in the two poles start melting, falling into the sea and ends up dissolving into the seawater. The ice has salt and when it dissolves into the sea that means that salt is being added to the water, and as we can see from the results from the experiment when the concentration of salt in the water increases, the specific heat capacity decreases. If the water has a lower specific heat capacity this means that when the energy coming from the sun goes right into the sea it won’t be able to absorb all the energy that they receive, as the energy goes into the water, find out there is no space for most of it and will end up reflecting out of the water and be released back into the air. This will mean that the air will be warmer because the heat will have nowhere else to go because as I said in my background information the greenhouse gases will just end up trapping the heat on earth rather than letting them reflect back to space where they came from. Secondly, like I said the ocean plays a massive part in climate regulation and if it doesn’t have enough heat it won't be able to transport the heat all over the world.

07 July 2022
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