Over 800,000 vertical profiles of Temperature and Salinity have been collected since 2004 in the World Ocean by attaching tags on marine mammals, such as Southern elephant seals.
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Pathways of warm water across the Antarctic slope
Friday, 21 February 2020
This is a sample blog postDr. Annie Foppert is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research at CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere in Hobart, Tasmania. She is interested in the dynamics, circulation, and water-mass transformation of the Southern Ocean. Using the MEOP-CTD database, she and co-authors quantified eddy-driven transport of Circumpolar Deep Water across the East Antarctic slope and identified hotspots of this onshore transport.
The transport of relatively warm and salty water (known as Circumpolar Deep Water, CDW) from the open ocean to the Antarctic continental shelf has global significance. The amount of warm water that reaches the ice shelves regulates how quickly the ice melts which affects sea levels rise. At the same time, the amount of salt on the continental shelf regulates how much heat and carbon are stored in the deep ocean through dense water formation. Yet, the ways in which this circumpolar deep water makes it across the slope and onto the shelf, and the relative importance of the different processes that transport this water, are still unknown.
Using the MEOP database of CTD profiles, we quantified the strength of one of these mechanisms for circumpolar deep water transport – eddy-driven transport – along the continental slope of East Antarctica. The data show that, in general, eddies transport this deep water across the continental slope to the shelf break – the point where the continental shelf transitions to the continental slope. Closer inspection of this eddy-driven transport mechanism revealed specific regions where eddies are much more efficient at carrying circumpolar deep water across the slope (while eddy-driven transport is negligible elsewhere). The waters at the shelf break are warmer and saltier in these hot spots of eddy-driven transport, and therefore more circumpolar deep water is available to move onto the continental shelf in these locations. What happens to these regional reservoirs of heat and salt once they move beyond the shelf break will ultimately determine which ice shelves are most vulnerable to ocean-driven melting and where the densest ocean waters are formed.
Check out her paper: Foppert, A., Rintoul, S. R., and England, M. H., 2019. Along-Slope Variability of Cross-Slope Eddy Transport in East Antarctica. Geophysical Research Letters, 46:8224-8233. doi: 10.1029/2019GL082999