SOCCOM News

Join SOCCOM modeling team lead Dr. Joellen Russell for her lecture on "Climate and the Deep Blue Sea," part of the University of Arizona's College of Science Lecture Series "Searching for Certainty."   The lecture will be streamed live on Tuesday, January 29th starting at 7 pm MT / 9 pm ET.  
 

SOCCOM researchers Seth Bushinsky and Joellen Russell are quoted in this Nature article about Southern Ocean carbon fluxes:

Data from robotic ocean floats reveal that waters off Antarctica don’t absorb as much carbon as scientists thought

Jeff Tollefson, December 14, 2018

The Southern Ocean is one of humanity’s allies, slowing global warming by absorbing heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But now researchers report that the choppy waters around Antarctica are also quietly belching out massive quantities of CO2 during the dark and windy winter, reducing the ocean’s climate benefit.

The scientists behind the work, presented this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington DC, say that the winter emissions reduce the Southern Ocean’s net uptake of CO2 by 34%, or more than 1.4 billion tonnes per year. That amount is roughly equal to Japan's annual carbon emissions.

The U.S. Antarctic Program's "Antarctic Sun" reports on how SOCCOM is changing the way scientists look at Antarctica’s Southern Ocean:

A new network of automated instruments throughout the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, is dramatically changing how scientists view the planet’s least understood ocean.

With four years of data in hand, researchers recently found that the Southern Ocean absorbs far less overall carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than previously thought. The discovery is a major departure from long-standing models that predicted that the region was a major carbon "sink," and is causing scientists who study the global carbon cycle to revisit their understanding its mechanics around the Antarctic. [read more...]
 

(Photo: Kelly Brunt, courtesy National Science Foundation)                        

SOCCOM researchers Ben Bronselaer, Michael Winton, Stephen Griffies and Joellen Russell are authors on a just-released paper in the journal Nature that investigates the impact of melting Antarctic ice. The study is the first to project how the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet will affect future climate, said first author Ben Bronselaer, adding that current climate models do not include the effects of melting ice on the global climate. As the Antarctic ice sheet melts, warming of the atmosphere will be delayed by about a decade but sea level rise will accelerate, [read more]