Earthquakes can be used to define changes in ocean heat content In the past 50 years, the major conceptual revolution in physical oceanography is the transformation from considering the ocean as a large-scale, extremely slowly changing fluid to a fundamentally turbulent one. The ocean changes across a wide range of temporal and spatial scales, from millimeters to 30,000 km and from seconds to multimillennia, with major regional differences. Because ocean exploration relied on a few slow, expensive ships exploring over many decades and depicting only the grossest mappable global properties, observing the variability is a forbidding challenge. The ocean is very noisy, filled with short–spatial scale structures that make obtaining large-scale average properties problematic. The oceanographic community responded by developing altimetric and gravity satellites, the Argo profiling system, and ever more capable models. On page 1510 of this issue, Wu et al. (1) demonstrate how an intriguing combination of physical oceanography and classical seismological techniques potentially opens the way for an entirely new and globally capable observation system.

中文翻译：

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全球海洋声学进展

地震可用于定义海洋热含量的变化 在过去的 50 年中，物理海洋学的主要概念革命是从将海洋视为大规模、变化极其缓慢的流体转变为从根本上是湍流的流体。海洋在广泛的时空尺度上变化，从毫米到 30,000 公里，从几秒到几千年，具有重大的区域差异。由于海洋探索依赖于几十年来缓慢而昂贵的船只进行探索，并且仅描绘最粗略的可绘制全球特性，因此观察可变性是一项艰巨的挑战。海洋非常嘈杂，充满了短空间尺度结构，这使得获得大尺度平均属性成为问题。海洋学界通过开发高度测量和重力卫星、Argo 剖面系统以及功能更强大的模型来做出回应。在本期第 1510 页，Wu 等人。(1) 展示物理海洋学和经典地震学技术的有趣组合如何潜在地为全新且具有全球能力的观测系统开辟道路。