The project listed four goals.
Goal 1: Produce a new data synthesis using historical and contemporary observations.
Completed.
This goal was reached within the first few months of the project. It keeps been updated as more data become available. There is an interest for the data set to be made public through the Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS) platform or through the WOCE Southern Ocean data set in collaboration with University of Texas (USA).
This data set has also been used to identify regions near Antarctic ice shelves and document any relationship between southward shift of warm water and increased ice shelf thinning.
Goal 2: Document circum–Antarctic and inter–decadal variability of CDW in the context of ice shelf basal melting. 90% completed.
I have completed time series of the CDW properties and Southern boundary Front position from each region,and compared ocean-based observations with satellite-based observations. I am currently assessing the coherence of (i) with atmospheric forcing, (ii) sea ice extent and (iii) the regional pattern of basal melting.
Goal 3: Document how the southward shift of the ACC impacts the CDW transport across the continental shelf break, offshore Prydz Bay, from 1997 to 2012.
This part is an extention of Goal 2, but applied to a heavily sampled area near Antarctica and involves a complete time series of the Southern Boundary Front from hydrography and satellite altimetry, of wind stress, and of atmospheric modes of variability. This work documents the impact of Southern Ocean dynamics on the basal melting beneath the Amery ice shelf.
Exploitation and Dissemination
Two publications are currently planned as a direct product of the project:
- Paper 1 (Impact of recent Circumpolar Deep Water variability in Antarctic Ice Shelf – Ocean Interactions) is on draft and expected to be ready for submission by the end of the year (I am currently on maternity leave).
- Paper 2 (On the interaction of Circumpolar Deep Water with the Amery Ice Shelf from 1997 to 2012). This paper is on very early stages.
Attendance to several meetings have provided a very productive platform to showcase the results from this project. I attended European Geophysical Union annual meeting in 2018. I also had planned to attend the American Geophysical Union Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland in February 2018 as an invited speaker. Unfortunately, I could not attend due to health issues. However, I will be presenting results from this project in the next Ocean Sciences meeting in February 2020. I have also been invited to visit several institution within Europe. For example, the British Antarctic Survey (twice), the University of East Anglia, the University of Copenhagen and the Alfred Wegener Institut (AWI) in Germany.
I am in contact with Emily Kastner, an author-illustrator of children’s books, to collaborate in her next book, “oceans” (
https://www.emmykmakes.com(si apre in una nuova finestra)). I hope we can extend this collaboration to include the role of the ocean in shaping up the coast lines through the poles.
