Labrador Sea

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The basin between Labrador and Greenland where winter storms strip so much heat from the surface that the water column overturns to depths of one to two kilometres, forming Labrador Sea Water. For most of the twentieth century this was assumed to be the engine room of the Atlantic overturning. The OSNAP array, deployed across the subpolar North Atlantic in 2014, measured it directly and found otherwise: over the first 21 months, overturning across OSNAP West — the Labrador section — averaged 2.1 ± 0.3 Sv, while across OSNAP East, from Greenland to Scotland, it averaged 15.6 ± 0.8 Sv. Deep convection here is real and dramatic; it is simply not where most of the overturning happens.