Eight hundred meters below the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, microbes in subglacial Lake Whillans create organic carbon that helps power the Southern Ocean’s vast food chain.
Southern Ocean
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Ship-Based Measurements Overestimate Southern Ocean Carbon Sink
New research suggests that combining ship- and float-based observations provides a more accurate measure of how much carbon the Southern Ocean absorbs.
Posted inNews
Drilling into the Past to Predict the Future
Climate change is at the center of a remarkable international drilling operation into Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Creating Icebergs in Ocean Models Coupled to Ice Shelves
Modeling icebergs as Lagrangian elements held together by numerical bonds provides insights into coupled exchanges of heat, freshwater, and momentum between large icebergs and the ocean.
Posted inNews
Warm Water Is Rapidly Eroding Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf
The underside of the world’s largest ice shelf is melting—by meters per year in some places—because of the seasonal inflow of water heated by the Sun, observations of the White Continent reveal.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Antarctica’s Seasonal Streams Contribute Iron to the Ross Sea
Analysis of nutrient concentrations in four streams that discharge to the Southern Ocean indicates they are important sources of iron and phosphorous for coastal phytoplankton communities.
Posted inScience Updates
Understanding Past Changes in Southern Ocean Sea Ice
C-SIDE Workshop; Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 24–26 October 2018
Posted inScience Updates
Connecting the Southern Ocean with Clouds
ACE-DATA/Antarctic Sea-Atmosphere Interactions Data (ASAID) Workshop; 5–6 November 2018, Lausanne, Switzerland
Posted inEditors' Highlights
An Inherently Noisy Ocean Can Disguise Regional Sea Level Trends
Sea level trends in different regions of the ocean caused by both natural and man-made changes in the atmosphere can be partially hidden by internal random processes intrinsic to the ocean.
Posted inScience Updates
Exploring the Unknown of the Ross Sea in Sea Ice–Free Conditions
A team of polar scientists aboard the OGS Explora, cruising in rare ice-free conditions, discovered new evidence of ancient and modern-day ice sheet sensitivity to climatic fluctuations.