Persistent warm-eddy transport to Antarctic ice shelves driven by enhanced summer westerlies.

The offshore ocean heat supplied to the Antarctic continental shelves by warm eddies has the potential to greatly impact the melting rates of ice shelves and subsequent global sea level rise. While featured in modeling and some observational studies, the processes around how these warm eddies form and overcome the dynamic sub-surface barrier of the Antarctic Slope Front over the upper continental slope has not yet been clarified. Here we report on the detailed observations of persistent eddies carrying warm modified Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) onto the continental shelf of Prydz Bay, East Antarctica, using subsurface mooring and hydrographic section data from 2013-2015. We show the warm-eddy transport is most active when the summer westerlies strengthen, which promotes the upwelling of CDW and initiates eddy formation and intrusions. Our study highlights the important role of warm eddies in the melting of Antarctica's ice shelves, both now and into the future.

Southern Ocean warming and its climatic impacts.

The Southern Ocean has warmed substantially, and up to early 21st century, Antarctic stratospheric ozone depletion and increasing atmospheric CO2 have conspired to intensify Southern Ocean warming. Despite a projected ozone recovery, fluxes to the Southern Ocean of radiative heat and freshwater from enhanced precipitation and melting sea ice, ice shelves, and ice sheets are expected to increase, as is a Southern Ocean westerly poleward intensification. The warming has far-reaching climatic implications for melt of Antarctic ice shelf and ice sheet, sea level rise, and remote circulations such as the intertropical convergence zone and tropical ocean-atmosphere circulations, which affect extreme weathers, agriculture, and ecosystems. The surface warm and freshwater anomalies are advected northward by the mean circulation and deposited into the ocean interior with a zonal-mean maximum at ∼45°S. The increased momentum and buoyancy fluxes enhance the Southern Ocean circulation and water mass transformation, further increasing the heat uptake. Complex processes that operate but poorly understood include interactive ice shelves and ice sheets, oceanic eddies, tropical-polar interactions, and impact of the Southern Ocean response on the climate change forcing itself; in particular, limited observations and low resolution of climate models hinder rapid progress. Thus, projection of Southern Ocean warming will likely remain uncertain, but recent community effort has laid a solid foundation for substantial progress.

Climatic modulation of surface acidification rates through summertime wind forcing in the Southern Ocean.

While the effects of the Southern Annular Mode (SAM), a dominant climate variability mode in the Southern Ocean, on ocean acidification have been examined using models, no consensus has been reached. Using observational data from south of Tasmania, we show that during a period with positive SAM trends, surface water pH and aragonite saturation state at 60°-55° S (Antarctic Zone) decrease in austral summer at rates faster than those predicted from atmospheric CO2 increase alone, whereas an opposite pattern is observed at 50°-45° S (Subantarctic Zone). Together with other processes, the enhanced acidification at 60°-55° S may be attributed to increased westerly winds that bring in more "acidified" waters from the higher latitudes via enhanced meridional Ekman transport and from the subsurface via increased vertical mixing. Our observations support climatic modulation of ocean acidification superimposed on the effect of increasing atmospheric CO2.