The team was led by Professors Dake Chen and Xianxian Han from Sun Yat-sen University and the Alfred Wegener Institute. They used the mission's high-resolution satellite altimetry to map eddies across the pan-Antarctic marginal seas and found that the activity is especially intense in regions influenced by rapid ice shelf melting or dense shelf water formation.
Mesoscale eddies play an important role in regional and global climate processes, and satellite observations of them have helped drive major advances in ocean science over recent decades. But the Antarctic margin has remained difficult to study because traditional altimetric products do not resolve these features well enough.
In Antarctic marginal seas, the mesoscale is typically about an order of magnitude smaller than in lower-latitude oceans, leaving a major observational gap in an area that affects dense water supply to the deep ocean and helps regulate Antarctic glacial melt rates.
The recently launched SWOT satellite changes that picture by delivering sea surface height data at much finer resolution than previous systems. That capability allowed the researchers to identify the abundance and spatial characteristics of small eddies around Antarctica and to connect regional eddy intensification with two major processes: basal melting beneath ice shelves and the formation of dense shelf waters.
Those two processes are important far beyond Antarctica because they influence global overturning circulation, sea level rise and climate dynamics. By showing that new-generation satellite measurements can monitor these processes through the detection of small mesoscale eddies, the study closes a significant gap in understanding ocean dynamics in one of the most remote and difficult regions on Earth.
The researchers say the findings will broaden scientific understanding of ocean and ice shelf processes around the Antarctic continent. Earlier work on Antarctic mesoscale processes was constrained by limited observations, slowing progress in oceanography, cryosphere science, biogeochemistry and climate research. The new results provide a stronger foundation for future studies aimed at improving projections of how the Earth system may evolve.
Research Report:High coastal eddy activity around Antarctica revealed by SWOT
Related Links
Sun Yat-sen University
Beyond the Ice Age
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