A recent paper by Deborah Verfaillie, with TiPACCs researchers Nicolas Jourdain and Christopher Bull, alongside Charles Pelletier, Hugues Goosse, Quentin Dalaiden, Vincent Favier, Thierry Fichefet & Jonathan D. Wille has been published in the Communications Earth & Environment journal.

Verfaillie et al. (2022): The circum-Antarctic ice-shelves respond to a more positive Southern Annular Mode with regionally varied melting. Commun, Earth Environ. 3. Doi: doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00458-x 

In Deborah’s words: we assess the impact of one of the most prominent climate variations during the last century in the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, namely the increase in the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) index, on the basal melting of ice shelves (the floating extensions of the ice sheet) around Antarctica and its related mechanisms. The SAM index is a measure of the difference in atmospheric pressure between the mid- and the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. To this end, we performed idealized numerical and show that positive phases of the SAM (characterized by an increased intensity and southward shift of the westerly wind belt) lead to increased advection of warm and saline waters (referred to as “upwelling”) towards the ice shelves, and increasing subsurface ocean temperature and salinity close to the base of ice shelves, while the opposite occurs for negative phases.

To read more about the work behind the paper, click here.