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Decapentaplegia t1_is3e3ug wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Does the salinity of ocean water increase as depth increases? by rhinotomus

> There’s actually fun terms in oceanography for this, spicy and minty, meaning water that is either warm and salty or cold and fresh.

Looking it up, I see these terms are used occasionally. But I have never encountered them in any textbook, or heard them used at conferences. Mostly people just refer to the density, at least in my experience.

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GammaFork t1_is4i4m6 wrote

They're typically used in thermodynamics when talking about changes along isopycnals, when obviously referring to density is unhelpful. They're not super common but a quick Google of ocean spice in scholar finds you a bunch of articles.

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brunswick t1_isairue wrote

Here's a paper from just this year that uses spice. The GSW package included with TEOS-10 includes functions for calculating spiciness. It's definitely a term that gets used. Here's the paper that gives the mathematical definition of spiciness that's used in TEOS-10. It is different from density in certain ways.

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[deleted] t1_isaszy9 wrote

[deleted]

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brunswick t1_isavgaf wrote

Yeah, it's definitely more of a physical oceanography thing, and even then it's sort of niche because there are only certain situations where it's more useful than just using density

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