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Science Forum Index » Environment Forum » Antarctic Deep Sea Gets Colder With Record Sea Ice Extent
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 Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 11:59 pm |
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The Polarstern. Staff Writers
Bremerhaven, Germany (SPX)
Apr 29, 2008
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/The_Antarctic_Deep_Sea_Gets_Colder_999.html
The Antarctic deep sea gets colder, which might stimulate the
circulation of the oceanic water masses. This is the first result of the
Polarstern expedition of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and
Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association that has just ended in
Punta Arenas/Chile. At the same time satellite images from the Antarctic
summer have shown the largest sea-ice extent on record. In the coming
years autonomous measuring buoys will be used to find out whether the
cold Antarctic summer induces a new trend or was only a "slip".
The Polarstern expedition ANT-XXIV/3 was dedicated to examining the
oceanic circulation and the oceanic cycles of materials that depend on
it. Core themes were the projects CASO (Climate of Antarctica and the
Southern Ocean) and GEOTRACES, two of the main projects in the Antarctic
in the International Polar Year 2007/08.
Under the direction of Dr. Eberhard Fahrbach, Oceanographer at the
Alfred Wegener Institute, 58 scientists from ten countries were on board
the research vessel Polarstern in the Southern Ocean from 6 February
until 16 April, 2008. They studied ocean currents as well as the
distribution of temperature, salt content and trace substances in
Antarctic sea water. "We want to investigate the role of the Southern
Ocean for past, present and future climate," chief scientist Fahrbach
said. The sinking water masses in the Southern Ocean are part of the
overturning in this region and thus play a major role in global climate.
"While the last Arctic summer was the warmest on record, we had a cold
summer with a sea-ice maximum in the Antarctic. The expedition shall
form the basis for understanding the opposing developments in the Arctic
and in the Antarctic," Fahrbach said. In the frame of the GEOTRACES
project the scientists found the smallest iron concentrations ever
measured in the ocean. As iron is an essential trace element for algal
growth, and algae assimilate CO2 from the air, the concentration of iron
is an important parameter against the background of the discussion to
what extent the oceans may act as a carbon sink.
As the oceanic changes only become visible after several years and also
differ spatially, the data achieved during the Polarstern expeditions
are not sufficient to discern long-term developments. The data gap can
only be closed with the aid of autonomous observing systems, moored at
the seafloor or drifting freely, that provide oceanic data for several
years. "As a contribution to the Southern Ocean Observation System we
deployed, in international cooperation, 18 moored observing stations,
and we recovered 20. With a total of 65 floating systems that can also
collect data under the sea ice and are active for up to five years we
constructed a unique and extensive measuring network," Fahrbach said.
--
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
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"...and I think future generations are not going to blame us for
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panic us"
Dr. Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology MIT and Member of the
National Academy of Sciences
"What most commentators-and many scientists-seem to miss is that the
only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes"
Dr. Richard Lindzen
[most of the current alarm over climate change is based on] "inherently
untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately
forecast the weather a week from now." Dr. Richard Lindzen |
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