The renewal of bottom water masses in the deep South Adriatic Pit (SAP) is mainly determined by the arrival of very dense water that forms in the North Adriatic in winter (NAdDW) and which is transported into the SAP by gravity currents. To investigate the occurrence of these currents, we analyze high-frequency time series of thermohaline and velocity data at three moorings of the EMSO South Adriatic Sea regional facility, whi...

In double-diffusive mixing, whenever salinity and temperature decrease with depth, the water column is either unstable or predisposed to a state called salt fingering (SF), which exhibits increased vertical mixing. Analysis of a high-frequency time series of thermohaline data measured at the EMSO-E2M3A regional facility in the southern Adriatic Pit (SAP) from 2014 to 2019 reveals that in the south Adriatic, SF is the dominant...

The available historical oxygen data show that the deepest part of the South Adriatic Pit remains well-ventilated despite the winter convection reaching only the upper 700 m depth. Here, we show that the evolution of the vertical temperature structure in the deep South Adriatic Pit (dSAP) below the Otranto Strait sill depth (780 m) is described well by continuous diffusion, a continuous forcing by heat fluxes at the upper boun...