Antarctic sea ice control on ocean circulation in present and glacial climates
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Ferrari-2014-Antarctic sea ice co.pdf
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Author(s)
Ferrari, Raffaele
Jansen, Malte Friedrich
Adkins, Jess F.
Stewart, Andrew L.
Thompson, Andrew F.
Burke, Andrea, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date Issued
June 2014
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
Citation
Ferrari, Raffaele, Malte F. Jansen, Jess F. Adkins, Andrea Burke, Andrew L. Stewart, and Andrew F. Thompson. “Antarctic Sea Ice Control on Ocean Circulation in Present and Glacial Climates.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (June 2, 2014): 8753–8758.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
In the modern climate, the ocean below 2 km is mainly filled by waters sinking into the abyss around Antarctica and in the North Atlantic. Paleoproxies indicate that waters of North Atlantic origin were instead absent below 2 km at the Last Glacial Maximum, resulting in an expansion of the volume occupied by Antarctic origin waters. In this study we show that this rearrangement of deep water masses is dynamically linked to the expansion of summer sea ice around Antarctica. A simple theory further suggests that these deep waters only came to the surface under sea ice, which insulated them from atmospheric forcing, and were weakly mixed with overlying waters, thus being able to store carbon for long times. This unappreciated link between the expansion of sea ice and the appearance of a voluminous and insulated water mass may help quantify the ocean’s role in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide on glacial–interglacial timescales. Previous studies pointed to many independent changes in ocean physics to account for the observed swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Here it is shown that many of these changes are dynamically linked and therefore must co-occur.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1323922111
