Spatial variation in seabed temperatures in the Southern Ocean: Implications for benthic ecology and biogeography

By A. Clarke, Huw Griffiths, D. Barnes, M. Meredith, S. Grant. 2009

111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Antarctic seabed has traditionally been regarded as cold and thermally stable, with little spatial or seasonal variation in temperature. Here we demonstrate marked spatial variations in continental shelf seabed temperature around Antarctica, with the western Antarctic Peninsula shelf significantly warmer than shelves around continental Antarctica as a result of flooding of the shelf by Circumpolar Deep Water from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The coldest shelf seabed temperatures are in the Weddell Sea, Ross Sea, and Prydz Bay as a consequence of seasonal convection associated with strong air-sea heat fluxes and sea-ice formation. These waters constitute the dense precursors of Antarctic Bottom Water, and can descend down the adjacent slope to inject cold water into the Southern Ocean deep sea. Deep sea seabed temperatures are coldest in the Weddell Sea and are progressively warmer to the east. There is a distinct latitudinal gradient in the difference between seabed temperatures on the shelf and in the deep sea, with the deep sea warmer by up to similar to 2 K at high latitudes and colder by similar to 2 K around sub-Antarctic islands. These differences have important consequences for benthic ecology and biogeography, understanding the evolutionary history of the Antarctic marine biota, and the impact of regional climate change.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Ecology, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5cbb73c6852a80716200937f821ae4bde43a54c5

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Citations in the corpus

Patterns, processes and vulnerability of Southern Ocean benthos: a decadal leap in knowledge and understanding (2013, background): “A second shortcoming is the fact that site-specific microclimates often differ significantly from the average environment measured for the observed area making our understanding of general processes much more difficult (Clarke et al. 2009).”
Cryptic speciation and the circumpolarity debate: A case study on endemic Southern Ocean octopuses using the COI barcode of life (2011, background): “In the second matrix, the shortest distance between two locations that did not involve passing through the warmer water (Clarke et al., 2009) to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula was recorded.”
The spatial structure of Antarctic biodiversity (2014, background): “In contrast to this, the western Antarctic Peninsula and southern Bellingshausen Sea shelves are flooded by warmer (;18C) Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) (Clarke et al. 2009), which is warmer than the water both below and, for most of the year, above.”
Admiralty Bay Benthos Diversity—A census of a complex polar ecosystem (2011, background): “…is considered one of the fastest warming regions on the Earth (Clarke et al., 2007; Turner et al., 2009) with the temperature of western Antarctic Peninsula shelf waters being significantly warmer than that of other Antarctic shelves (including Bransfield Strait shelf areas) (Clarke et al., 2009).”
Conservation biogeography of the Antarctic (2012, background): “…differentiation exists (Fraser et al., 2009; González-Wevar et al., 2011), whereas for other groups substantial biogeographic structure is present, that may also be related to temperature (Barnes & De Grave, 2001; Clarke et al., 2007, 2009; Barnes & Griffiths, 2008; Griffiths et al., 2011).”