Why the water in the Mariana Trench is warmer (34-39 F) than the water the victims of the Titanic fell in (28 F)?
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Water near the surface changes temperature with the weather, after some lag (water is slow to heat and slow to cool down). The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic in April…it’s *cold* up there. The surface water was still below freezing…hence ice bergs hanging around, among other things.
Water deep in the oceans is insulated from the weather by, literally, miles of water above it. That’s a *very* good insulator. Water down deep with limited current, like the Mariana Trench, basically has no idea what’s going on with the weather or climate. It doesn’t care about air temperature, or seasons, or really anything. It’s at thermal equilibrium with the sea floor, which is (very very very very) slowly conducting heat up from the hot mantle rock below.
Edit: clarified that the mantle is hot but not molten.
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