The deep ocean releases large amounts of old, pre-industrial carbon dioxide (CO) to the atmosphere through upwelling in the Southern Ocean, which counters the marine carbon uptake occurring elsewhere. This Southern Ocean CO release is relevant to the global climate because its changes could alter atmospheric CO levels on long time scales, and also affects the present-day potential of the Southern Ocean to take up anthropogenic CO. Here, year-round profiling float measurements show that this CO release arises from a zonal band of upwelling waters between the Subantarctic Front and wintertime sea-ice edge.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite technological advances over the last several decades, ship-based hydrography remains the only method for obtaining high-quality, high spatial and vertical resolution measurements of physical, chemical, and biological parameters over the full water column essential for physical, chemical, and biological oceanography and climate science. The Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program (GO-SHIP) coordinates a network of globally sustained hydrographic sections. These data provide a unique data set that spans four decades, comprised of more than 40 cross-ocean transects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDetailed descriptions of microbial communities have lagged far behind physical and chemical measurements in the marine environment. Here, we present 971 globally distributed surface ocean metagenomes collected at high spatio-temporal resolution. Our low-cost metagenomic sequencing protocol produced 3.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOffshore Antarctic polynyas-large openings in the winter sea ice cover-are thought to be maintained by a rapid ventilation of deep-ocean heat through convective mixing. These rare phenomena may alter abyssal properties and circulation, yet their formation mechanisms are not well understood. Here we demonstrate that concurrent upper-ocean preconditioning and meteorological perturbations are responsible for the appearance of polynyas in the Weddell Sea region of the Southern Ocean.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe original version of this Article contained errors in Fig. 6. In panel a, the grey highlights obscured the curves for CESM, CM2.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUpwelling of global deep waters to the sea surface in the Southern Ocean closes the global overturning circulation and is fundamentally important for oceanic uptake of carbon and heat, nutrient resupply for sustaining oceanic biological production, and the melt rate of ice shelves. However, the exact pathways and role of topography in Southern Ocean upwelling remain largely unknown. Here we show detailed upwelling pathways in three dimensions, using hydrographic observations and particle tracking in high-resolution models.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrine rejection that accompanies ice formation in coastal polynyas is responsible for ventilating several globally important water masses in the Arctic and Antarctic. However, most previous studies of this process have been indirect, based on heat budget analyses or on warm-season water column inventories. Here, we present direct measurements of brine rejection and formation of North Pacific Intermediate Water in the Okhotsk Sea from moored winter observations.
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