Southern Ocean

Expedition to the Most Powerful Ocean Current

Taking Sediment Cores with JOIDES Resolution in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current

[20. May 2019] The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the planet’s most powerful and arguably most important. It is the only one to flow clear around the globe without getting diverted by any landmass, sending up to 150 times the flow of all the world’s rivers clockwise around the frozen continent. It connects all the other oceans, and is thought to play a key role in regulating natural climate swings that have repeatedly swept the earth for millions of years. But much is still not known about how it works, including how it might now respond to human-induced climate change.

Starting this month, some 30 scientists from 13 countries aim to study the current’s past dynamics by drilling into the seabed in some of the planet’s remotest marine regions. They will sail May 20 from Puntas Arenas, Chile on the ship JOIDES Resolution, to begin expedition 383 of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP). The IODP is a collaboration of scientists from around the world that studies the history of the earth as recorded in sediments and rocks beneath the ocean floor. The expedition is co led by Frank Lamy, marine geologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and Gisela Winckler, a geochemist and paleoclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

You can find more information on this website of Columbia University’s Earth institute.

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