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Ocean/ice shelf interaction in the southern Weddell Sea: results of a regional numerical helium/neon simulation

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Abstract

Ocean/ice interaction at the base of deep-drafted Antarctic ice shelves modifies the physical properties of inflowing shelf waters to become Ice Shelf Water (ISW). In contrast to the conditions at the atmosphere/ocean interface, the increased hydrostatic pressure at the glacial base causes gases embedded in the ice to dissolve completely after being released by melting. Helium and neon, with an extremely low solubility, are saturated in glacial meltwater by more than 1000%. At the continental slope in front of the large Antarctic caverns, ISW mixes with ambient waters to form different precursors of Antarctic Bottom Water. A regional ocean circulation model, which uses an explicit formulation of the ocean/ice shelf interaction to describe for the first time the input of noble gases to the Southern Ocean, is presented. The results reveal a long-term variability of the basal mass loss solely controlled by the interaction between waters of the continental shelf and the ice shelf cavern. Modeled helium and neon supersaturations from the Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf front show a “low-pass” filtering of the inflowing signal due to cavern processes. On circumpolar scales, the simulated helium and neon distributions allow us to quantify the ISW contribution to bottom water, which spreads with the coastal current connecting the major formation sites in Ross and Weddell Seas.

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Notes

  1. Derived from bomb-produced radiocarbon invasion rates into the ocean and, hence, \(k_0\) includes implicitly the Schmidt number for \(^{14}{\rm C}\).

  2. We assumed a constant total atmospheric pressure of 992.94 hPa \(\approx\) 0.97996 atm.

  3. The uncertainty in the parameterization of the flux dependence to wind speed has probably a larger effect.

  4. GMT (General Mapping Tool) topography is mainly based on the World Vector Shore data set of the National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder, CO, USA.

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Acknowledgements

We thank W. Roether and his former group at University Bremen for providing the noble gas data and supporting the completion of the manuscript in various ways. Thanks also to three reviewers, whose invaluable criticism helped to clarify and improve the manuscript. We thank R. Timmermann and C. Lichey for providing model forcing fields. C. Rodehacke thanks B. Klein and the team of the Institute for (Tracer) Oceanography at University of Bremen for their contribution to the data processing. This project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Nr. Ro 318/43 and the Alfred-Wegener-Institute contribution n15744.

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Author notes

  1. Aike Beckmann

    Present address: University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Christian B. Rodehacke & Oliver Huhn

  2. Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany

    Hartmut H. Hellmer & Aike Beckmann

  3. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, USA

    Christian B. Rodehacke

Authors
  1. Christian B. Rodehacke
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  2. Hartmut H. Hellmer
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  3. Oliver Huhn
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  4. Aike Beckmann
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Correspondence to Christian B. Rodehacke.

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Responsible editor: John Wilkin

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Rodehacke, C.B., Hellmer, H.H., Huhn, O. et al. Ocean/ice shelf interaction in the southern Weddell Sea: results of a regional numerical helium/neon simulation. Ocean Dynamics 57, 1–11 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-006-0073-2

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