Halocline

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Halocline" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In oceanography, a halocline (from Greek hals, halos 'salt' and klinein 'to slope') is a cline, a subtype of chemocline caused by a strong, vertical salinity gradient within a body of water.^[1] Because salinity (in concert with temperature) affects the density of seawater, it can play a role in its vertical stratification. Increasing salinity by one kg/m³ results in an increase of seawater density of around 0.7 kg/m³.