Circumpolar Antarctic Current Accelerating

SciTechDaily: “Antarctica’s hidden threat: world’s most  powerful water flow is accelerating, could have disastrous consequences.” The Antarctic Circumpolar Current carries greater than 100 times more water than all the world’s rivers combined. It extends from the ocean surface to the sea floor. In places it is as much as 2,000 km or some 1200 miles wide. It connects the Indian, Atlantic + Pacific oceans. Continuously circling clockwise around the southernmost continent, this is the world’s most powerful + consequential mover of water. “In a new study, an international research team used sediment cores from the planet’s roughest and most remote waters to chart the ACC’s relationship to climate over the last 5.3 million years.” The data show the current moves ‘in tandem’ with Earth’s temperataure, slowing down during cold times + gaining speed in warm ones—’speedups that abetted major losses of Antarctica’s ice.’ The study “implies that the retreat or collapse of Antarctic ice is mechanistically linked to enhanced ACC flow, a scenario we are observing today under global warming,” Winds over the Southern Ocean have increased in strength by about 40% in the past 40 years. “Among other things, this has speeded the ACC and energized large-scale eddies within it that move relatively warm waters from the higher latitudes toward Antarctica’s huge floating ice shelves, which hold back the even vaster interior glaciers.” ‘Through a complex set of processes, the ocean waters ringing Antarctica also currently absorb about 40% of the carbon that humans introduce into the atmosphere.’ Remember, were Antarctica to melt entirely, it would raise global sea levels by about 190 ft. A chilling thought.