Dwindling sea ice could strengthen a whirling current called the Ross Gyre, bringing warm waters closer to land and hastening the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet.
. The warmer water and glacial melt expected from a stronger gyre already show hints of slowing part of the global ocean’s overturning circulation, a critical “conveyor belt” of currents that distributes heat and removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. “These are pretty grim predictions,” Larter says. “There are a lot of bad consequences if we really are on a downward sea ice trend.”
In these waters, hidden beneath sea ice, spins the 1000-kilometer-wide Ross Gyre, fed by warm currents from farther north. Felipe Gomez Valdivia, a physical oceanographer at BAS, and his colleagues wanted to find out how declining sea ice might affect the gyre. Using the UK Earth System Model, a next-generation climate model, they found that as sea ice thinned, the force of surface winds on newly exposed water.
Although it is only a single model result, the expansion makes physical sense, says Tiago Dotto, a physical oceanographer at the U.K.’s National Oceanography Centre. This “could play a significant role on the ice shelf melting in West Antarctica,” he says. It’s quite possible the expansion has already begun:showed that a strengthening gyre could have contributed to part of the 0.3°C of warming recorded in waters under the ice shelves over the past 20 years.
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