Publications database

The Antarctic marine environment, although rich in life, is predicted to experience rapid and significant effects from climate change. Despite a revolution in the approaches used to document biodiversity…

Antarctic geothermal heat flow (GHF) affects the thermal regime of ice sheets and simulations of ice and subglacial meltwater discharge to the ocean, but remains poorly constrained.

Antarctica is increasingly vulnerable to invasive species, some of which have already established on the Antarctic Peninsula. The East Antarctic environment is currently recorded to be free from established non-native invertebrates.

Ocean-driven basal melt can thin and weaken ice shelves, reducing buttressing and causing sea level rise. However, the processes driving melt in ice shelf cavities are challenging to observe. Here we report float observations spanning the ocean cavity beneath Shackleton Ice Shelf.

With more than 90% of global warming occurring in the ocean, sea level rise doubling in the past 30 years, and the ever-increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, ocean observations are essential for understanding and addressing some of these most pressing global challenges.

The long-held view that the East Antarctic margin is isolated from warm offshore waters has been challenged by recent observations showing incursions of warm modified Circumpolar Deep Water (mCDW) reaching several East Antarctic ice shelves. However…

The retreat of Antarctic ice shelves due to calving and the subsequent reduction in buttressing of the Antarctic Ice Sheet are of major concern for future sea-level rise. Sudden…

Human-caused climate change worsens with every increment of additional warming, although some impacts can develop abruptly. The potential for abrupt changes is far less understood in the Antarctic compared with the Arctic, but evidence is emerging for rapid…

Continent-continent collisions develop mature orogenic systems over tens of millions of years, creating a thermally weakened mid-crustal infrastructure layer (15–50 km deep) that flows laterally from the thickened mountain ranges or plateaus.

The Antarctic Peninsula has experienced considerable anthropogenic warming in recent decades. While cryospheric responses are well defined, the responses of moss-dominated terrestrial ecosystems have not been quantified. Analysis of Landsat archives (1986–2021)…

Genomic adaptation and introgression can occur during the speciation process, enabling species to diverge in their frequencies of adaptive alleles or acquire new alleles that may promote adaptation to environmental changes.

Understanding past climate is essential to our knowledge of how our current climate system operates, and how it might respond to future change. Techniques to reconstruct climate history are challenging, and both accuracy and certainty are hampered by the quality of the datasets used.

The East Antarctic krill fisheries are spread across two Divisions of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), Division 58.4.1 between 80-150°E and Division 58.4.2 between 30-80°E.

Background … The Antarctic is an extreme environment for plants. Several invasive plant species, however, have invaded the sub-Antarctic Southern Ocean islands and increasingly threaten the vulnerability of maritime and continental Antarctica, particularly with changes in climate.

There is growing interest from research and conservation groups in the potential for using small unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs; <2 kg) to conduct wildlife surveys because they are affordable, easy to use, readily available and reliable. However, limitations such as short flight endurance…

Understanding the dispersion of floating objects and ocean properties at the ocean surface is crucial for various applications, including oil spill management, debris tracking and search and rescue operations. While mesoscale turbulence has been recognized as a primary driver of dispersion…

Invasive alien insects are an important yet understudied component of the general threat that biological invasions pose to biodiversity.

The additional water from the Antarctic ice sheet and ice shelves due to climate-induced melt can impact ocean circulation and global climate. However, the major processes driving melt are not adequately represented in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) models. Here…

Large earthquakes in the vicinity of Antarctica have the potential to cause postseismic viscoelastic deformation affecting measurements of displacement that are used to constrain models of glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA). In November 2013, a Mw 7.

Dense, cold waters formed on Antarctic continental shelves descend along the Antarctic continental margin, where they mix with other Southern Ocean waters to form Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW). AABW then spreads into the deepest parts of all major ocean basins…

This Summary for Policymakers uses information and infographics from the research articles, updated with other more recent research articles, to provide the following information: 1.

The papers in this volume were, with a few exceptions, presented at the third Island Invasives conference, held in Dundee, Scotland in July 2017. The papers demonstrate up-scaling in several aspects of eradication operations – not least in ambition, land area, operational size…

The spreading of dense shelf water (DSW) from Antarctic coastal margins to lower latitudes plays a vital role in the ocean thermohaline circulation and the global climate system. Through enhanced localized sea ice production in Antarctic coastal polynyas…