Craig Stevens/NIWA/Supplied
The formation of Antarctic sea ice causes cold, salty water to sink to the sea floor, where it flows away and links to the global oceanic conveyor belt, the thermohaline circulation.
Recent studies reveal surprising changes in the Ross Sea region, a choke-point in ocean circulation. David Williams reports. As the three-masted British ship Erebus sailed south in Antarctic waters with the slightly smaller Terror in January 1841, commander James Clark Ross, the world’s most experienced polar explorer, saw a low white line extending as far as the eye could see. “It presented an extraordinary appearance,” he wrote, “gradually increasing in height, as we got nearer to it, and proving at length to be a perpendicular cliff of ice, between one hundred and fifty feet and two hundred feet above the level of the sea, perfectly flat and level at the top, and without any fissures or promontories on its even seaward face.”
An aerial view shows the storage tanks for treated water at the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, Japan on Feb 13, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]
The peak of radioactive nuclear wastewater Japan plans to dump would reach the middle of the Pacific Ocean within two years of its release and eventually approach the west coast of the United States, a German study found.
Erik Behrens, a research fellow at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, copublished an essay in 2012 with his colleagues on Environmental Research Letters, which is also shared for open access online.
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