( Read more about how climate change is affecting the ocean’s conveyor belt.) An environment like no otherįor now, by fencing in the frigid southern waters, the ACC helps keep Antarctica cold and the Southern Ocean ecologically distinct. Some of the most rapid melting of the continents ice sheets and shelves have been where the ACC is closest to land. Ocean water moving through the ACC is warming, scientists have learned, but it’s unclear how much this is impacting Antarctica. Scientists are currently studying how human-driven climate change is altering the Southern Ocean. In both those ways, the Southern Ocean has a crucial impact on Earth’s climate. Cold, dense water that sinks to the ocean floor off Antarctica also helps store carbon in the deep ocean. It pulls in waters from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, helping drive a global circulation system known as the conveyor belt, which transports heat around the planet. Ocean circulation defines the Southern Ocean.Įxtending from the surface to the ocean floor, the ACC transports more water than any other ocean current. “Rimmed by the formidably swift Antarctic Circumpolar Current, it is the only ocean to touch three others and to completely embrace a continent rather than being embraced by them.” “While there is but one interconnected ocean, bravo to National Geographic for officially recognizing the body of water surrounding Antarctica as the Southern Ocean,” Earle wrote in an e-mailed statement. Marine biologist and National Geographic Explorer at Large Sylvia Earle praised the cartographic update. “This change was taking the last step and saying we want to recognize it because of its ecological separation.” “We’ve always labeled it, but we labeled it slightly differently ,” Tait says. The change, he adds, aligns with the Society’s initiative to conserve the world’s oceans, focusing public awareness onto a region in particular need of a conservation spotlight. He and the National Geographic Society’s map policy committee had been considering the change for years, watching as scientists and the press increasingly used the term Southern Ocean. “It’s sort of geographic nerdiness in some ways,” Tait says. Geographers debated whether the waters around Antarctica had enough unique characteristics to deserve their own name, or whether they were simply cold, southern extensions of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.
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