Editing Sverdrup (section)

== History ==
The sverdrup is named in honor of the Norwegian oceanographer, meteorologist and polar explorer [[Harald Sverdrup (oceanographer)|Harald Ulrik Sverdrup]] (1888–1957), who wrote the 1942 volume ''The Oceans, Their Physics, Chemistry, and General Biology'' together with Martin W. Johnson and Richard H. Fleming.<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal |last1=Eldevik |first1=Tor |last2=Haugan |first2=Peter Mosby |date=2020-04-06 |title=That's a lot of water |journal=Nature Physics |language=en |volume=16 |issue=4 |pages=496 |doi=10.1038/s41567-020-0866-0 |s2cid=216292609 |issn=1745-2481|doi-access=free }}</ref>

In the 1950s and early 1960s both Soviet and North American scientists contemplated the damming of the [[Bering Strait]], thus enabling temperate Atlantic water to heat up the cold [[Arctic Sea]] and, the theory went, making Siberia and northern Canada more habitable. As part of the North American team, Canadian oceanographer Maxwell Dunbar found it "very cumbersome" to repeatedly reference millions of cubic meters per second. He casually suggested that as a new unit of water flow, "the inflow through Bering Strait is one sverdrup". At the Arctic Basin Symposium in October 1962, the unit came into general usage.<ref name=":0" />