Thursday August 1, 2024
PhysOrg —
The Southern Ocean is wild and dynamic. It experiences Earth’s strongest winds and largest waves. It is home to city-sized icebergs and the biggest ocean current on the globe, as well as tiny turbulent flows that fit inside a teacup.
The Southern Ocean is also crucial to Earth’s natural systems. It forms the dense water that fills the world’s deep oceans. It stores heat and carbon resulting from human-caused global warming, and controls the flux of heat to the huge ice sheet of Antarctica—the greatest threat to runaway global sea-level rise.
The scale and complexity of the Southern Ocean can be hard to comprehend. But our new paper may help. It summarizes the present state of understanding of the Southern Ocean, how it is changing, and where the knowledge gaps lie.