Understanding What Is Happening in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica

ZOOM LINK
Meeting ID: 926 9189 0462
Passcode: 400442

How fast Antarctica will lose ice and contribute to sea-level rise over the next centuries has become one of today’s most urgent scientific questions. Antarctic ice-sheet mass loss is primarily triggered by ocean warming, but relatively little is understood about the drivers of ocean warming where it matters — at the ice sheet margin — nor about the impact of ice-shelf melting on the ocean. I aim at understanding the past, present, and future states of the Southern Ocean and identifying the causes of ocean warming and Antarctic ice loss on various time scales by (a) conducting oceanographic observations, (b) improving ocean simulations achieving high model-data agreement, and (c) developing ice-ocean coupled simulations.

In this presentation, I will review the literature, including work from my group, that shows how ocean heat intrudes towards the West Antarctic ice shelves, the most rapidly melting region in Antarctica, and controls ice shelf melting. I will also discuss ongoing projects — using both data acquisition and modeling — aimed at deeper understanding of the processes that control the future of the Antarctica ice sheet.

About the Speaker(s)

Yoshihiro Nakayama
Assistant Professor at the Institute of Low Temperature Science, Hokkaido University, Japan

Dr. Nakayama is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Low Temperature Science, Hokkaido University in Japan. He received his PhD in natural science from the Universität Bremen (Germany). He aims to understand the rapidly changing polar oceans and ice sheets by combining observations and state-of-the-art numerical modeling.

Contact

For more information, contact Ashley Parker at ashley.l.parker@dartmouth.edu.