"This small, isolated opening in the sea ice in the
Southern Ocean can have significant, large-scale climate implications,"
said Irina Marinov, a study author and assistant professor in Penn's Department
of Earth and Environmental Science in the School of Arts & Sciences.
"Climate models suggest that, in years and decades with a large polynya,
the entire atmosphere warms globally, and we see changes in the winds in the
Southern Hemisphere and a southward shift in the equatorial rain belt. This is
attributable to the polynya."
The study appears in the Journal of Climate. Marinov
coauthored the work with Anna Cabre, a former postdoc in Marinov's lab and now
an oceanographer with the Institute of Marine Sciences in Barcelona, and Anand
Gnanadesikan, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at
Johns Hopkins.
Typically, the Southern Ocean is covered in ice during the
Southern Hemisphere's winter. Polynyas occur when warm subsurface waters of
North Atlantic and equatorial origin mix locally with cold surface waters, a
process known as open-ocean convection.
Credit: University of
Pennsylvania
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