PLEASE NOTE: Application deadline date 08 Jan 2024. Applications are no longer being accepted for this project
Project Overview
Antarctic ice sheet mass loss is primarily driven by warm waters crossing the shelf break. This project will determine whether fast warming around Antarctica that leads to the rapid loss of the ice sheets, is caused mainly by local or remote drivers and at which timescales each driver acts.
Project Description
The melt of the Antarctic ice sheet discharges high volume of freshwater into the ocean, contributing to catastrophic global sea level rise and potential collapse of the global ocean circulation. Warm water crossing the shelf break around Antarctica is the main cause for this melting, mainly in the Amundsen Sea where winds have migrated southward over the last century. However, climatic changes in atmospheric and ice drivers of ocean circulation are taking place all around Antarctica, and there are diverse – and potentially conflicting – hypotheses on the relative importance of local and remote processes in driving Antarctic ice shelf melting.
This project will create a unified framework to challenge and develop a range of process-specific ideas put forward in different regions of Antarctica, aiming to answer the question “is Antarctica one or many?”. The student will investigate if inflows of warm water in different regions respond to driving forces local or afar, and if inflows are synchronous and coherent within different troughs around Antarctica. The role of the wind controlling synchronous circumpolar shelf break inflows will be investigated through in situ observations and modelling simulations. Modelling outputs will be used further to investigate on which timescales this interconnection breaks down, and when baroclinic processes start to be important. Finally, this study will provide evidence of the importance – or otherwise – of short-term coherent inflows variability to Antarctic ice shelf melting. Unravelling these interconnections will yield new fundamental understanding of the warm water inflows and the sensitivity of the ice sheet to changes around Antarctica. This new information will be valuable to improving the representation of the Southern Ocean in climate models in order to better mitigate changes in the Earth’s system.
The INSPIRE DTP programme provides comprehensive personal and professional development training alongside extensive opportunities for students to expand their multi-disciplinary outlook through interactions with a wide network of academic, research and industrial/policy partners. The student will be registered at the University of Southampton and hosted at the National Oceanography Centre. Specific training will include:
- Opportunity to present their work at international conferences.
- Possibility to attend fieldwork on a scientific cruise in the Southern Ocean.
- Possibility to spend weeks/months with the co-supervisors in the partner institutions.
- Attend relevant summer schools
- Spence et al. (2017). Localized rapid warming of West Antarctic subsurface waters by remote winds. Nature Climate Change, 7, doi: 10.1038/nclimate3335.
- Morrison et al. (2020). Warm Circumpolar Deep Water transport toward Antarctica driven by local dense water export in canyons. Science Advances, 6, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aav2516.
- Dawson et al. (2023). Pathways and timescales of connectivity around the Antarctic continental shelf. Journal of Geophysical Research, 128, doi: /10.1029/2022JC018962.
