What happened to the Antarctic ocean?

What happened to the Antarctic ocean?

Water cooled by cold air, outgoing radiation, and katabatic winds off of the Antarctic continent sinks and flows northward along the ocean bottom and is replaced at the surface by an equal volume of warmer water flowing south from the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans.

What is currently happening to Antarctica?

Since the early 1990s, Antarctica has lost roughly three trillion tons of ice. Today, the rate of loss is accelerating as warm ocean water melts and destabilizes the floating ice shelves that hold back West Antarctica’s glaciers, causing those glaciers to flow more quickly into the sea.

What is happening to sea ice in Antarctica?

Unlike the Arctic, where a large area of sea ice lasts year-round, the sea ice around Antarctica is thinner and nearly all of it melts in a typical summer. This happens because no landmass boundary exists to prevent Antarctic sea ice from breaking up and drifting northward into warmer waters, where it eventually melts.

What are the 4 main threats to Antarctica?

Threats

• Climate change. Climate change is the greatest long-term threat to the region.
• Increased fishing pressure and illegal fishing.
• Marine pollution. Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) have been measured around Antarctica and detected in wildlife.
• Invasive species.

Do people live in Antarctica?

Although there are no native Antarcticans and no permanent residents or citizens of Antarctica, many people do live in Antarctica each year.

What is the largest ocean in the world?

The Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of the world ocean basins. Covering approximately 63 million square miles and containing more than half of the free water on Earth, the Pacific is by far the largest of the world’s ocean basins.

Is there a McDonald’s in Antarctica?

There are over 36,000 McDonald’s locations all over the planet, and the chain is on every continent except Antarctica. In South America alone, there are over 1,400 stores. But there is one Latin American country that flat out rejected Big Macs and McNuggets: Bolivia.

What’s the current extent of sea ice in Antarctica?

Antarctic sea ice extent is currently below the long-term average of all decades prior since 1979.

How is Antarctica different from the Arctic Ocean?

Antarctica, on the other hand, is a continent, covered by a very thick ice cap and surrounded by a rim of sea ice and the Southern Ocean. The Arctic Ocean is very deep and closely linked with the climate systems around it, making it more sensitive to climate changes than Antarctica.

What happens to the Arctic sea ice in the summer?

During the summer melt season, the sea ice’s edge retreats toward the North Pole, only to re-grow during the Arctic winter. As a result of ongoing warming driven by human activities, the trend toward summer sea ice loss (from July to September, followed by a winter re-growth) continues.

Why is the air in Antarctica so warm?

The University of Washington study argues that the warming and circulation changes in West Antarctica are can be traced all the way back to changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean: warming in the Pacific triggers a chain of pressure changes in the upper atmosphere ( Rossby waves) that ultimately increases the flow of warm air over West Antarctica.