Aussies to investigate climate change impact on Antarctic current

Australian scientists will set out within days on a trip to study the impact of climate change on the planet’s strongest currents, the national science agency said on Monday.

A team of scientists will spend more than a month aboard the research vessel Investigator to study how the Antarctic Circumpolar Current contributes to the melting of ice shelves, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) said.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current flows clockwise around the continent from west to east and is the strongest ocean current on Earth.

Benoit Legresy, the CSIRO’s chief scientist, said in a statement that currents have historically prevented warm water from reaching Antarctica and ice from melting, but the heat is approaching the Pole.

“The Antarctic Circumpolar Current generates the swirling eddies and finer-scale dynamics that we are trying to understand, and which are the prime suspect for the warm water seeping toward the pole,” he said.

“There are five ‘eddy heat flux gates’, or hotspots, identified around the Antarctic Circle and they act as a gateway for the heat to move south. We’re going to pinpoint those little features that we think explain the heat seeping in polar waters.”

CSIRO researchers will be joined on the research vessel Investigator by colleagues from the government-funded Australian Antarctic Program Partnership.

In addition to exploring hotspots, the trip will also verify for the first time images of the Southern Ocean taken by the Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite, which was launched in December 2022 by NASA in collaboration with France’s Center National d’Etudes Spatiales .