Mysterious Zones of Antarctica - 4

West Indian Ocean [Area A]

East Indian Ocean [Area B]

Ross Sea [Area C]

Amundsen Sea [Area D]

Bellingshausen Sea [Area E]

Weddell Sea [Area F]

I. Background

This will be the last post in this series (unless something unexpected comes up).

Only the graphs of the final depths will be featured in this post.

If you want to look at the general map layout of the six Antarctica zones featured in this series, see one or more of the previous posts (Mysterious Zones of Antarctica, 2, 3).

Those readers who have already perused one or more of the previous posts know that this is a story about the most powerful current on the planet.

It is a current that has more moving water in it than all of the land based rivers on Earth combined (think Mississippi, Columbia, Colorado, Amazon, Nile, and many others).

In short, this series is about the world's most powerful ocean current which is mightily bringing warmer water to the world's largest ice sheet.

And so, in the final analysis this is the most certain source of the demise of civilization (Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).

I say the "most certain source" because the other contender, all out nuclear war, is less certain only because it is more easily avoided.

Nevertheless, just because nuclear war is more easily avoided does not mean it will not happen before the disintegration of Antarctica's tidewater glaciers have destroyed the world's seaports (Greenland & Antarctica Invade The United States, 2, 3, 4; Why Sea Level Rise May Be The Greatest Threat To Civilization, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Unlike coastal cities and towns where people can migrate inland, this civilization's foundation of sea trade cannot be re-engineered to be mobile enough so as to be able to move inland easily (The Extinction of Robust Sea Ports, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).

Add to that the fact that sea level change varies a lot from nation to nation, and even within nations, the engineering challenge is all the more difficult.

West Indian Ocean [Area A]

East Indian Ocean [Area B]

Ross Sea [Area C]

Amundsen Sea [Area D]

Bellingshausen Sea [Area E]

Weddell Sea [Area F]

II. Not The First Time

Current civilization is like ancient Phoenicia because we too are a civilization based on sea trade which is based on seaports:

Of all the ancient civilizations, perhaps ours is more like the Phoenicians than some of the others:

The Phoenicians were a great maritime people, known for their mighty ships ... The island city of Tyre and the city of Sidon were the most powerful states in Phoenicia ... Phoenicia thrived as a maritime trader and manufacturing center from c.1500-332 BCE and was highly regarded for their skill in ship-building, glass-making, the production of dyes, and an impressive level of skill in the manufacture of luxury and common goods.

(Phoenicia, cf. Carthage). The current version of "International Trade Civilization" is truly global, not regional like Phoenicia was:

Liner shipping could lay claim to being the world's first truly global industry. Likewise it could claim to be the industry which, more than any other makes it possible for a truly global economy to work. It connects countries, markets, businesses and people, allowing them to buy and sell goods on a scale not previously possible.

(World Shipping, emphasis added; cf. Global Container Fleet, Shipping Ports). As go the shipping ports, so goes "International Trade Civilization" (Confusing "Civilization" With "Species").

I am not saying that the human, or any other species, is not threatened, they certainly are, I am saying that in the sequence of events current civilization goes first.

(The Extinction of Robust Sea Ports - 3). Like the mighty current featured in this series, the mighty seaports are the critical organs of this civilization:

The reality is that current civilization's cardiovascular system (seaports and sea lanes) is the dynamic to watch, and to watch very closely:

"By volume, more than 95 percent of U.S. international trade moves through the nation's ports and harbors, with about 50 percent of these goods being hazardous materials."

(Why Sea Level Rise May Be The Greatest Threat To Civilization - 5). Current civilization would destabilize and disappear virtually overnight if seaports were substantially debilitated.

Seaports are the place where the true lifeblood, international trade goods, flow in and out of the orifices of civilization around the world.

(The Extinction of Robust Sea Ports - 4). Ninety-Five percent is one figure, other nations will vary above and below that percent, but all nations face the problem together.

As seaports fail one by one, the system will suffer more and more stress as other seaports struggle to handle the increased load (ongoing example of such stress).

III. The Graphs

The graphs in the upper left hand column detail the seawater temperatures from the previous post's maximum depth of 1300 meters on down to the depth of 3500 meters.

The graphs in the lower right hand column detail the seawater temperatures from >3500 meters down to where the measurements stop, which at this time is maxed out at 5000 meters (16,404.2 feet, 3.11 miles).

The current we are perusing is The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), which flows from the ocean surface down to a maximum depth of about 4000 meters ("The ACC extends from the sea surface to depths of 2000-4000 m").

The graphs in this series show that most of the seawater temperature around Antarctica is warm enough to melt the tidewater glaciers at those depths.

Thus, the graphs confirm that assessment of the impacts of the ACC on them.

Below that general depth of 4000 meters there is little temperature variation (generally less than a degree of temperature change per depth level).

IV. Conclusion

Watch Antarctica.

This series covers an important subject, because as goes the tidewater glaciers of Antarctica, so goes civilization as we know it.

The previous post in this series is here.

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The Hunt Takes Down Some More Witches - 2

Indicted Manafort associate who worked with Cambridge Analytica lied to reporters about working in US

Trump Administration Withholds 100K Pages Of Brett Kavanaugh’s Records

Paul Manafort associate pleads guilty, agrees to cooperate with Mueller investigation

The previous post in this series is here.

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Previous example posts concerning the hunted: The Shapeshifters of Bullshitistan, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

Mysterious Zones of Antarctica - 3

Seawater transport @ Southern Ocean

Today we look deeper into the Southern Ocean current which transports more water than all the rivers of the Earth combined.

The graphic to the left depicts a rough layout of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), the Subantarctic Front (SAF), and the Subtropical Convergence or Subtropical Front (STF).

The blue line above the coast of Antarctica, which zigs and zags a bit, is the "Southern Ocean current which transports ["up to 150 times"] more water than all the rivers of the Earth combined"  and is described in full detail in the article I have linked to in previous posts of this series (The Antarctic CP Current, ACC, ACC System).

"Bottom of the world"  view

West Indian Ocean [Area A]

East Indian Ocean [Area B]

Ross Sea [Area C]

Amundsen Sea [Area D]

The two circles in Area C and Area F are "gyres with clockwise surface circulation in the Weddell Sea [Area F] and in the Ross Sea [Area C]" (ibid).

Bellingshausen Sea [Area E]

Weddell Sea [Area F]

The graphs below match the areas ('A' - F') with their names and show their area's seawater Conservative Temperature (CT) at depths greater than 600 meters down to 1300 meters.

The shallower depths with their seawater temperatures were featured in previous posts (0 to 125m, greater than 125m to 600m).

One thing to remember is that the boundaries and temperatures mentioned in some of the older published papers may have changed since then: "This area of divergence has been considered to be the ACC's southern boundary (Klinck and Nowlin, 1986) but new analysis puts the southern boundary of the ACC further poleward" (ibid).

This is to be expected since "The global oceans together absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat in the climate system and roughly three-quarters of that heat uptake occurs in the Southern Ocean" (Antarctica 2.0 - 3).

Thus, as more and more global warming is absorbed by the world oceans (~93% now), and as ~75% of that 93% ends up in the Southern Ocean, we can look for additional changes.

Those less-cold waters being pushed around Antarctica at a rate larger than all of the planet's rivers combined is going to continue to disintegrate the tidewater glaciers there.

And that disintegration will be done at an accelerating rate rather than at a constant rate.

Anyway, as the graphs show, the patterns of seawater temperature are different from one another at these depths as they were in the previous depths shown in the previous posts.

The source of these different patterns seems clear to me ... it is the most powerful current on the planet, which circles Antarctica impacting temperatures at great depths.

In the next post we will take a look at the deepest depths there that we have measurements for.

After all, we do better when we consider our planet with actual measurements (The World According To Measurements, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17).

The following video features a well-known expert on the Cryosphere's largest member.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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New Sweek

Alt

"Trust only me ..." is the urging of despots around the globe, including The Don as the mid-term elections approach.

The common folk in free America have a sarcastic response that I like ("who are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes?")

On the other hand, there are agents in other areas of government who urge the same trust, even as their fellows urge an opposing sentiment.

The big problem with "believe!" is the distinction between knowledge and trust/faith that citizens traditionally have in America (The Pillars of Knowledge: Faith and Trust?).

The cacophony created by the Trumposphere's ideological tug-o-war sounds like high schoolers right after sweek:

Page One

"The authors of a new book on 9/11 hope to refocus public attention on the cover-up. Thoroughly mining the multiple official investigations into the event, John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski find huge holes and contradictions in the official story that 9/11 was merely 'a failure to connect the dots.'

Duffy, a left-leaning writer and environmental activist, and Nowosielski, a documentary filmmaker, have nowhere near the prominence of other journalists who have poked holes in the official story, in particular Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, the Pulitzer Prize–winning book that was turned into a gripping multi-part docudrama on Hulu earlier this year.

Page Two

But Duffy and Nowosielski come to the story with a noteworthy credential: In 2009 they scored an astounding video interview with Richard Clarke, a White House counterterrorism adviser during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. In it, Clarke raged that top CIA officials, including director George Tenet, had withheld crucial information from him about Al-Qaeda’s plotting and movements, including the arrival in the U.S. of future hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. In The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror, the authors assemble a compelling case of a government-wide cover-up of Saudi complicity in the affair."

(New Sweek Newsweek). Yes, I know, conspiracy theories are quite popular in some very unexpected places (On The Origin of "Conspiracy Theory", 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; Dept. of Justice Conspiracy Theories, 2, 3, 4).

The text of "Page One" and "Page Two" (see graphics above) of what is called Document #1035-960 is as follows:

1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility fro his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission's published report and documents for new pretext for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission's report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse, results.

2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including out organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience, and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast double otn the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination. Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on out organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.

3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active, however, addresses are requested:

a. To discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible; that the charges of [the] critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

b. To employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passage to assets. Our ploy should point, as applicable, the the critics are (i) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (ii) politically interested, (iii) financially interested, (iv) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (v) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher Knable article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing than Epstein's and comes off badly where contested by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)

4. In private or media discussion not directed at any particular writer, or attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments [would/could] be useful:

a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joestan and Bertrand Russel) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attacks on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, A.J.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt) now believe was set by Van der Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been much more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.)

(Let me know if you discern any typos). BTW, the reason I did this is because the links to the documents and even the website they were on were somehow disabled or destroyed.

No biggie, its just another sweek of snooze week of news.

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Mysterious Zones of Antarctica - 2

Fig. 1a Southern Ocean

Fig. 1b Direction of ACC Flow

I. Background

In the previous post in this series the surface down to 125 meter depths of the seawater around Antarctica was featured.

Today, we will focus on the same general subjects of that discussion, except that we will focus on Antarctica seawater at depths greater than 125 meters down to 600 meters.

We focus on this area of the globe because it is becoming well known that the past managers at various institutions were wrong in their assessments of Antarctica, especially East Antarctica.

More about that later.

II. Its About The Seawater

The story about tidewater glacier dynamics is not so much about the ice on the vast ice sheet, rather, the focus has become a study of the nature of the Antarctic seawater, especially in the sense that it is becoming known as the main cause of sea level change caused by East Antarctica.

The Antarctic seawater is part of, and impacted by, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC):

"The Antarctic Circumpolar Current moves 140 million cubic meters (4.9 billion cubic feet) of water per second around Antarctica. That single current moves more water than all the rivers on the planet combined. The world's rivers move 1.3 million cubic meters (46 million cubic feet) of water per second."

(National Geographic, Antarctic Circumpolar Current). So, we are talking about a serious ocean current.

Remember that the Southern Ocean receives a serious share of the global warming that finds its way into the world's oceans:

"The vast Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, plays a starring role in the future of climate change. The global oceans together absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat in the climate system and roughly three-quarters of that heat uptake occurs in the Southern Ocean."

(Antarctica 2.0 - 3, quoting Climate Central, emphasis added). Here is more about Climate Central:

"To that end, an NSF-funded $21 million initiative called Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling (SOCCOM) run by Princeton University, and including Climate Central, MBARI, Scripps, University of Washington, University of Arizona and others, was launched in 2014 with the goal of deploying over a six-year period a fleet of autonomous, robotic floats, capable of observing the Southern Ocean (for the first time) year-round and across the entire expanse."

(Climate Central, emphasis added). Regular readers understand that this is a major scientific endeavor that we do well to keep an eye on.

III. Where Does The Less-Cold ("Warm") Seawater Come From?

Area A [West Indian]

Area B [East Indian]

Area C [Ross]

Area D [Amundsen]

Area E [Bellingshausen]

Area F [Weddell]

One of the factors we are considering in this series is "where does the less-cold ('warmer') deep water around Antarctica come from?"

There seems to be a changing narrative that seems to be engendered by a world ocean that is absorbing "over 90 percent" of global warming.

The changing narrative is to be expected because years ago the oceans were not absorbing that warming from the atmosphere, because global warming wasn't here yet.

Global warming came into existence a decade or so after the Industrial Revolution (circa 1750) but became a part of our public conversations many years later.

So, keep in mind (as you read older textbooks) that at some point the narrative changes simply because the climate began to change:

"There are two primary views concerning the stability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. One view, relying critically on the interpretation of Sirius Group glacial deposits in the Transantarctic Mountains, is that the ice sheet has been fluctuating dramatically throughout its existence and that it last disappeared during the Pliocene ∼3 Ma ago. By analogy with the warmer Pliocene, it is argued that the current ice sheet is susceptible to global warming. The other view, originating from marine and terrestrial work in the 1970s and 1980s is that the ice sheet has been stable for ∼14 Ma and that the continent has been subjected to unbroken, cold polar conditions subsequently. After summarising the status of the two hypotheses, we explain the rationale for this volume. Building on the Vega Syposium of April 1993, it presents the case for the stability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and includes new work on terrestrial geomorphology and geology, marine cores and ice-sheet modelling."

(Geografiska Annaler., Vol. 75, No. 4, 1993). That 1993 paper (25 yrs. ago) argues: move along folks, nothing to see here, East Antarctica is stable.

They were wrong.

Let's read some of the narratives that mention where the warmer seawater comes from:

"The mean ACC temperature ranges from -1 to 5°C, depending on the time of year and location. The mean surface salinity decreases poleward, in general, from 34.9 at 35°S to 34.7 at 65°S. Typical salinity values are between 33.5 and 34.7, poleward of 65°S. This Temperature-Salinity signature is due to a combination of water masses that meet in the Southern Ocean and are mixed and redistributed by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Following the inclined isopycnals, deep waters from the North Atlantic (NADW) are upwelled at the Antarctic Divergence, the current's southern boundary. As this water rises to the surface it mixes with and becomes Antarctic Surface Water (ASW). When the water mass reaches the near surface flow it is diverted northward by Ekman transport. This newly formed Antarctic Circumpolar Water (labeled by some 'modified NADW') travels north across the ACC until it reaches the convergence of the Polar Frontal Zone. Here, near surface Sub-Antarctic Water from the north mixes with the ASW and sinks to a mid-depth becoming Antarctic Intermediate Water (AAIW). While this mixing is taking place the geostrophic component of the ACC is translating the water eastward. The AAIW will continue north but, due to the 'West Wind Drift,' will be ejected into the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific basins, where over time, it will be upwelled to the surface. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is a critical component of the 'Great Ocean Conveyor Belt.'"

(Antarctic Circumpolar Current, emphasis added). The ACC, the largest ocean current on Earth, flows from west to east circling Antarctica (Fig. 1a, Fig. 1b).

IV. The Mixing Of Seawater

The ACC spreads seawater "from the north" all around Antarctica and into Area A through Area F (see Mysterious Zones of Antarctica and Antarctica 2.0 - 6 [& supplements A, B, C, D, E, F]).

As with the previous graphs, which show impacts that the mixing has on shallower 0-125 meter depths, the graphs in today's post detail the impacts that the mixing has on greater depths.

V. Conclusion

The impacts shown by the graphs tell the same story, which is that the Conservative Temperature (CT) changes are, in general, chaotic.

Temperatures at one depth at a given time will become warmer or colder than depths below and/or above them.

Whatever these temperatures are, previous posts have shown that the seawater involved in the mixing/warming have the potential to melt the colder ice of the glaciers they come in contact with (Hot, Warm, & Cold Thermal Facts: Tidewater-Glaciers, 2, 3, 4).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Here Come De Conservative Judges - 7

Alt Righty then ...

This series began on March 16, 2009.

It still tells a true story nine years later:

Trump’s appointments, according to interviews with experts and 5th Circuit practitioners, have begun to shift an already right-leaning court toward a more monolithic brand of conservatism. These are judges, experts say, whose views are less hidden and whose outcomes are easier to predict. Compared with their colleagues appointed by other Republican presidents, their philosophies are less idiosyncratic; so far, they have seldom surprised. And as their numbers swell, the 5th Circuit is teetering toward a tipping point — one that might, in the next close vote, mark a monumental shift on a political issue that divides the country.

“Anybody out there that runs a group that litigates will notice that vote and is going to be thinking about it,” said David Coale, an appellate lawyer who frequently appears before the 5th Circuit. “It isn’t just that they’re conservative, though they are conservative. They’re waving a big flag.”

“A rightward push”

(Trump-appointed judges are shifting the country’s most politically conservative circuit court further to the right).

And this Dredd Blog series still begs the question: Why have democratic senators gone with the flow (Invertebrate Chuck Schumer Makes Deal To Fast-Track Trump Judicial Nominees) ?

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Mysterious Zones of Antarctica

Ocean Currents & Zones of Antarctica

I. Begin Here

Today we take a look at the temperatures of the tidewaters of the Antarctic coast.

I am talking about the tidewaters that are melting the tidewater glaciers (Hot, Warm, & Cold Thermal Facts: Tidewater-Glaciers, 2, 3, 4).

We only skim the surface by looking at measurements from the surface down to ~410 feet (125 meters), but in future posts of this series we will look as deep as there are measurements available from my SQL server filled with some 1.3 billion measurements from SOCCOM and WOD.

Area A [West Indian]

Area B [East Indian]

Area C [Ross]

Area D [Amundsen]

Area E [Bellingshausen]

Area F [Weddell]

Don't be put off by the notion of skimming the surface, because the purpose in this series is not dependent on depth.

It is more dependent on depth perception.

This introductory post has the purpose of preparing readers to become familiar with the mystery of the warming of the deadly cold Antarctic waters.

If you will, notice the different patterns (graphs Area A through Area F).

The variations are caused by different seawater temperatures in each zone.

Compare them with the graphic at the top-left of this post and you will begin to get my drift.

These are fingerprints, if you will, of impacts on Antarctica from different events, different forces, and different factors.

II. Area D, The Amundsen

For example, in the graph of Area D [Amundsen Sea] the pattern begins circa 1992 with a decrease in seawater temperature at every depth level down to 125 meters.

Some of the seawater temperatures descend steeply for two years, until circa 1994, then level out a bit until circa the year 2000.

However, two of those depth levels descent more slowly (purple & green lines) until circa the year 2000.

In about the year 2000, they all begin to have warmer temperatures until about the year 2005.

In about the year 2005 they all of a sudden go their separate ways in terms of seawater temperature.

It is as if Conservative Temperature (CT) morphed into 'Chaotic' Temperature.

III. The Measurement Years

The graphs begin in the same year, 1992, to make it easier to compare the patterns in them.

The graphic at the top left of this post shows potential ocean current sources.

The currents are changing so we may not have as much of an understanding of them now.

But the fact that the seawater temperatures in Antarctic Zones are inexplicably not marching to the same beat, the same drum, and/or the same drummer, IMO, indicates an impact from a major source or sources.

IV. The Winds Of Change?

I have passed upon this mystery, in a smaller scope (Totten Glacier), in at least one previous post:

There are two approaches to explaining the massive changes taking place in Antarctica's tidewater glaciers.

One of those approaches has a limited or narrow outlook or scope, as exemplified by this paper (Wind Causes Totten Glacier Melt).

Why one glacier would melt because of surface wind and others would not is a suspicious hypothesis, plus the WOD Zone records do not show what the authors "thought to be driven by a variable supply of warm, salty, modified circumpolar deep water" (ibid).

The graphs (discussed below) based on in situ ocean water temperatures do not bear that out.

Another approach links global events into the causation picture (AMOC Weakens, Same), and yet another targets other currents (Carbon Brief).

Those and other global events have an impact on the Southern Ocean:

"Researchers have been worried about an Atlantic slowdown for years. The Atlantic serves as the engine for the planet’s conveyor belt of ocean currents: The massive amount of cooler water that sinks in the North Atlantic stirs up that entire ocean and drives currents in the Southern and Pacific oceans, too. “It is the key component” in global circulation, says Ellen Martin, a paleoclimate and ocean current researcher at the University of Florida. So when the Atlantic turns sluggish, it has worldwide impacts: The entire Northern Hemisphere cools, Indian and Asian monsoon areas dry up, North Atlantic storms get amplified, and less ocean mixing results in less plankton and other life in the sea."

(How Climate Change Could Jam Ocean Circulation, emphasis added). There is a reason to look for global sources of impact on the Southern Ocean.

Local phenomena have a local (limited) impact, so they are not as likely to be a significant cause of continent-wide changes.

(Antarctica 2.0 - 6). Regular readers know that I am skeptical of the local wind hypothesis.

The main winds blow from west to east, and generate the largest ocean current on the globe:

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is the most important current in the Southern Ocean, and the only current that flows completely around the globe.
...
The ACC is arguably the "mightiest current in the oceans" (Pickard and Emery, 1990). Despite its relatively slow eastward flow of less than 20 cm s-1 in regions between the fronts, the ACC transports more water than any other current (Klinck and Nowlin, 2001). The ACC extends from the sea surface to depths of 2000-4000 m and can be as wide as 2000 km.

(The Antarctic CP Current, emphasis added). That would seem to make ocean currents the primary suspect for subsurface seawater changes.

That is especially so considering the merits:

"The vast Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, plays a starring role in the future of climate change. The global oceans together absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat in the climate system and roughly three-quarters of that heat uptake occurs in the Southern Ocean. In addition, the global oceans absorb around 25 percent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and the Southern Ocean alone accounts for about half of the uptake of CO2.

Despite its critical role in our climate system, the Southern Ocean has gone almost completely unobserved. Scientists have struggled to gather precise measurements because of the harsh environment and extreme remoteness. The changing dynamics of the Southern Ocean will in turn drive key aspects of our future climate, including how sensitive the Earth will be to further warming and increases in carbon dioxide emissions. As a result, improved observations are crucial to helping scientists understand and predict how our climate will change."

(Antarctica 2.0 - 3, quoting Climate Central, emphasis added). Seems like a slam dunk to me.

V. Conclusion

I am not convinced that these fingerprints shown in today's graphs that detail chaotic seawater temperature changes are caused by weaker and temporary local winds.

In my opinion these are the results of deep ocean currents running amok (The oceans’ circulation hasn’t been this sluggish in 1,000 years. That’s bad news).

The next post in this series is here.

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