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A new study suggests that this may already be happening. Researchers found evidence that deep ocean heat<\/a> has shifted closer to Antarctica over the past 20 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n That matters because the ice shelves<\/a> ringing the continent help hold back the huge masses of land ice behind them. If those shelves weaken, the ice on land can start flowing into the ocean more quickly.<\/p>\n The study was led by the University of Cambridge<\/a> and it is the first to show this change clearly using long-term observations from the Southern Ocean. <\/p>\n Scientists had seen hints of it before and climate models<\/a> had been pointing in this direction for years. But this is the first time they have been able to say with confidence that the shift is showing up in the actual data.<\/p>\n The heat is coming from below<\/p>\n The focus of the study is a body of water called circumpolar deep water. It is relatively warm compared with the colder layers near Antarctica, and it moves around the continent deep below the surface.<\/p>\n What the researchers found is that this warm water has expanded and moved closer to the Antarctic continental shelf over the last two decades.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s concerning, because this warm water can flow beneath Antarctic ice shelves, melting them from below and destabilizing them,\u201d said lead author Joshua Lanham from the University of Cambridge.<\/p>\n That is really what gives this study its weight. This is a sign that warmth in the ocean may be moving into exactly the wrong place.<\/p>\n Why ice shelves matter<\/p>\n Ice shelves can be a little confusing because they are already floating. So when they melt, they do not directly raise sea levels<\/a> in the same way land ice does.<\/p>\n But that does not mean they are unimportant. Far from it.<\/p>\n Their real job is to act like a kind of support or brace. They help slow the flow of glaciers and inland ice sheets behind them.\u00a0<\/p>\n If the shelves weaken or collapse, more land ice can slip into the sea faster. And Antarctica holds a staggering amount of that land ice, enough to raise global sea levels by roughly 58 meters.<\/p>\n That does not mean that kind of rise is around the corner. But it does show why scientists pay such close attention to these shelves.\u00a0<\/p>\n If they start failing, the effects do not stay local for long.<\/p>\n A hard place to track<\/p>\n One reason this took so long to confirm is that the Southern Ocean is an incredibly difficult place to study. For years, scientists mostly had ship-based measurements taken along certain routes, sometimes only once every decade or so.\u00a0<\/p>\n Those surveys were detailed, but they were also patchy.\u00a0<\/p>\n That made it hard to tell whether the warm deep water was truly moving over time or whether researchers were just catching isolated moments.<\/p>\n To get around that, the team combined those older ship observations with data from Argo floats, robotic instruments that drift through the upper ocean and keep recording conditions.\u00a0<\/p>\n The floats provide much more regular coverage, though they have not been operating as long as the ship surveys have.<\/p>\n So the researchers used machine learning to combine the two. That let them build a much fuller record, with monthly snapshots covering the last four decades.<\/p>\n Antarctica\u2019s cold buffer is thinning<\/p>\n \u201cIn the past, the ice sheets were protected by a bath of cold water, preventing them from melting,\u201d said senior author Sarah Purkey from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cNow it looks like the ocean\u2019s circulation has changed, and it\u2019s almost like someone turned on the hot tap and now the bath is getting warmer!\u201d<\/p>\n Antarctica used to be protected by colder water close to the continent. Now that shield seems to be weakening while warmer water pushes in.<\/p>\n And in a way, it fits exactly with what climate scientists would expect. More than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by global warming ends up in the ocean and the Southern Ocean takes in a huge share of that heat.<\/p>\n So if one part of the climate system was going to start showing deep warming clearly, it makes sense that it would be here.<\/p>\n Problems beyond Antarctica<\/p>\n The Southern Ocean matters for much more than just Antarctica itself.<\/p>\n These waters are part of the planet\u2019s larger system for moving heat, carbon, and nutrients around. In polar regions, very cold, dense water forms and sinks into the deep ocean, helping drive the global circulation that links the world\u2019s oceans together.<\/p>\n That includes connections to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation<\/a> (AMOC), another major current system that scientists are already deeply concerned about.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Southern Ocean plays a key role in regulating global heat and carbon storage, so changes in heat distribution here have wider implications for the global climate system,\u201d said Ali Mashayek from Cambridge.<\/p>\n So this is not only a story about Antarctic ice and sea level rise. It is also about the way the planet\u2019s larger climate machinery is shifting.<\/p>\n Not just a model anymore<\/p>\n For years, climate models have suggested that as the planet warms, Antarctica will produce less of the cold, dense water that normally forms around it. <\/p>\n As that happens, warmer circumpolar deep water would move in toward the continent to fill the gap.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can now see this scenario is already emerging in the observations,\u201d said Lanham.<\/p>\n \u201cThis isn\u2019t just a possible future scenario suggested by models; it\u2019s something that is happening now, bringing wider implications for how carbon<\/a>, nutrients, and heat are cycled through the global ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n The study is published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a long time, scientists have worried that Antarctica\u2019s ice shelves might be attacked from below, not just…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":["post-618589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}