University of Otago – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka scientists have successfully analysed more than 30 years of vital data on the thickness of landfast sea ice in Antarctica's McMurdo Sound, which will prove useful to measure future impacts of climate change.
The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, set out to discover what key influences determine the thickness of landfast sea-ice, known as fast ice, using data from 1986 to 2022.
Fast ice is frozen ocean water that is attached to shorelines and persists for at least 15 days. It provides vital habitats for penguins and seals, as well as fish, krill and algae underneath the ice.
Scientists also traverse around McMurdo Sound on fast ice to perform experiments and measure the ocean underneath and the atmosphere above. The ice needs to be stable and thick enough to do this safely.
Instead of a long-term trend of increasing or declining thickness, the researchers found storm events, air temperature and winter wind speed cause fast ice thickness to vary year to year.
Lead researcher Dr Maren Richter, who completed the research as part of her PhD at Otago, says fast ice in McMurdo Sound has not (yet) seen strong effects of climate change.
"The ocean/ice/atmosphere system there seems to still be able to balance out effects of climate change.
"We see a slight increase in air temperatures over the last 10 years of our study period, but if we look at air temperature over a longer time period (from the mid-1980s to now) there is no clear trend," she says.
