Be sure to bookmark our homepage and check back for frequent updates to content, nursing deals and discounts, featured journals, and more. We strive to keep our content as fresh as possible. Make NursingCenter your home for your professional development goals.
A thermocline (also known as the thermal layer or the metalimnion in lakes) is a thin but distinct layer in a large body of fluid (e.g. water, such as an ocean or lake, or air, such as an atmosphere) in which temperature changes more rapidly with depth than it does in the layers above or below.
A halocline is most commonly confused with a thermocline-a thermocline is an area within a body of water that marks a drastic change in temperature. Haloclines are common in water-filled caves near the ocean.n certain high latitude regions (such as the Arctic Ocean, Bering Sea, and the Southern Ocean) the surface waters are actually colder than the deep waters and the halocline is responsible for maintaining water column stability-isolating the surface waters from the deep waters.