When the winds are strong north of Siple islands during winter…

… the flow of warm water into the Getz ice shelf cavity is reduced! Wonder why? Well, Ph.D. Nadine Steiger (who successfully defended her thesis yesterday! Yippie and congratulations, Dr. Nadine!) nicely explains it in a newly published paper:

Intermittent reduction in ocean heat transport into the Getz Ice Shelf cavity during strong wind events (GRL)

Here’s a short version:

1) Eastward wind will (in the southern hemisphere) cause the surface water to move southward. (Oceanographers call this the “Ekman transport”). Water will hence pile up along the coast, along the green lines in the figure below.

Map showing winds (red arrows), Ekman transport (black arrows) and areas with coastal downwelling (green). Courtesy: N. Steiger

2) When surface water piles up along the coast, it will press down the warmer water below (Oceanographers call this “coastal downwelling”)

Ekman transport towards the coast will press the warm water deeper down. Courtesy: N. Steiger

3) The disturbance (i.e. the signal with depressed warm water) will travel along the coast (Oceanographers would call this a coastally trapped, internal wave. The wave is “internal” because the signal is traveling on the interface between two water masses, not on the ocean surface) and reaches the western Getz ice front 3 days after the storm! The figure below shows the observed temperature& salinity in the vicinity of the ice front, and below you see the wind and sea ice concentration. Each time the temperature at depth drops (marked by green triangles) there has been a storm just before!

4) When the wave arrives at the ice front, two things happen. Firstly the thickness of the warm water layer is greatly reduced (see above) and, secondly, the current changes direction so that the flow at depth is aligned with the ice front rather than to enter the ice shelf cavity like it normally does.

Observed mean currents (and temperature) during a) the cold events and b) the deployment period. Courtesy: N. Steiger

During the winter of 2016, this happened at least eight times – causing a reduction of the heat transport into the cavity by about 25%!

Well done, Dr. Steiger!!!

PhD. Nadine Steiger and a proud, ex. supervisor. Photo Andreas H. Opsvik

 

 

 

 

Good news from NFR!

What a morning! Scrolling through the newly published list of funded projects from the Norwegian Research Council while sipping your breakfast tea and finding this:

is even better than learning that Sweden qualified for the quarter-finals yesterday!

… and further down on the list I found this:

where I’m also involved!

I’m super excited to lead/join these interdisciplinary projects on Norwegian/Greenlandic fjords and climate change!

Masfjorden, here we come! The Bjerknes Center will fund our multi-disciplinary fjord project!

Yesterday the Bjerknes administration announced which of the “internal projects” they are to fund during the next four years – and I was very excited and happy to learn that our multi-disciplinary fjord project (led by Mari Myksvoll) was one of them!

Together with paleo-oceanographers and biologists, we will dive deep into the basins (and the mud/sediments) of Masfjorden to study how (and why) oxygen concentrations have varied in the “recent past” (the last 400yrs or so) and how that affects the ecosystem in the fjord.

I’m really looking forward to working locally – not only “locally” as in a nearby fjord, but also “locally” as in “together with colleagues in neighboring offices and buildings”! It’s is such a great team!

Proposal-funding-celebration outside GFI earlier today with parts of the new “Fjord-team”!

 

 

Do you miss Ninja?

Well – don’t worry! Dr. Ruth Mottram, a Climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute is on her way to the Greenland Ice sheet and she is bringing “Ice Man” and “Bat Girl” (likely friends of our Ninja) along! Read her cool story here! (The story “Ninja goes South” is still on Flickr.com!)

Ice Man desperately needs to get to the Arctic – read the story by Ruth Mottram here! Photo: R. Mottram.