Australian Antarctic Program Partnership

🌊 Antarctica and the sea ice of the Southern Ocean is a beating heart at the centre of our global #climate system. Stay in touch with #Antarctic #science via our quarterly newsletter 'Southern Signals'. Please sign up at aappartnership.org.au/contact-us/ to receive yours by email. 🌏 Pat Wongpan

The ice core lab is operated as a partnership between the Australian Antarctic Division and @utas.edu.au. Measuring different chemical components trapped in the ice, this state-of-the-art lab is one of only a few of its kind in the world. Find out more ▶️ aapp.shorthandstories.com/the-memory-o...

Icon on ice: Moves to enhance protection of emperor penguins blocked at annual meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations (@news.abc.net.au @southernsky.bsky.social) ▶️ www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05... Emperors at Auster colony 📸 Jan Wallace

🌊 SEAMAP ANTARCTICA: A new digital mapping platform makes environmental information about Antarctica more discoverable, accessible and useful for scientists, policy makers, educators and the community. ▶️ www.utas.edu.au/about/news-a... 👏 @imas-utas.bsky.social @antarcticsciaus.bsky.social

The MYIC @millionyearice.bsky.social project by the Australian Antarctic Program is drilling an ice core to 3,000 metres depth in three-metre segments, and returning the cores in pristine condition to Hobart, Tasmania. Why? And how? Find out at aapp.shorthandstories.com/the-memory-of-ice

🚨 Four new PhD projects in Hobart at @utas.edu.au! Work on precision #climate tracking in the Southern Ocean: 1️⃣ ocean heat uptake 2️⃣ human-induced salinity shifts 3️⃣ energy and sea level budgets 4️⃣ changes in the overturning circulation ⚠️ Applications close 1 April ▶️ www.utas.edu.au/research/deg...

1️⃣ Over the last 30 years, #Antarctica has lost 12,820 square kilometres of grounded ice – larger than the area of Greater Sydney – a new study led by @ucirvine.bsky.social reports. [animation of satellite images from @esa.int shows the evolution of cracks in the Pine Island Glacier during 2019]

The Antarctic Ice Sheet is making an increasing contribution to global sea-level rise. Find out more in this explainer from @antarctic.bsky.social and @antarcticsciaus.bsky.social. ▶️ aapp.shorthandstories.com/opening-the-...

1️⃣ Antarctic sea ice during winter didn’t use to change very much from year to year. But in recent winters, the extent of ice has crashed to unusually low levels. Which begs the question: what controls how much sea ice can form in winter? 🌊 plot by @edoddridge.bsky.social

🌊 Ocean fronts are boundaries where different water masses collide. They cover about 1/3 of the global ocean but account for nearly 3/4 of total ocean CO2 uptake, absorbing about 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon each year. Research led @utas.edu.au ▶️ tinyurl.com/jtxddyt9 Anim: Kuroshio current by NASA

1/ The coldest densest water on the planet – Antarctic Bottom Water formed in just 4 places around Antarctica – drives global currents which influence Earth's climate. One of these areas is Cape Darnley. This animation shows melting beneath Amery Ice shelf and ocean temperatures around Cape Darnley.

1/ The overturning circulation is a network of ocean currents transporting heat, carbon, oxygen and nutrients around the world. At the heart of this circulatory system is the global pumphouse of #Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Animation: NASA-SVS

5/ That’s where floats can help, bumping their heads on the underside of ice shelves, measuring melt where it happens. Deploying an array of floats around Antarctica's continental shelf would reduce the large uncertainties in estimating future sea level rise. ▶️ theconversation.com/what-our-mis...

3/ Ice shelves resist the flow of continental ice to the sea. If warm ocean waters weaken the ice shelves, more ice will reach the ocean and melt, causing sea level to rise. Ocean measurements are critical to determine how much and how fast. ▶️ aapp.shorthandstories.com/opening-the-...

🌊 1/ A robotic float has measured temperature and salinity from parts of the Southern Ocean never sampled before — underneath massive floating Denman and Shackleton ice shelves in East #Antarctica. New in @science.org #ScienceAdvances: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

4/ Turns out it's all to do with how the wind interacts with the ocean. The weakening of winds leads to less ocean water being pushed toward the Antarctic coast, which allows warm water that sits below the surface to flow in that direction instead. The ACCESS-OM2-01 model runs from 1958 to 2018.

🌊 AAPP works to turn our research @imas-utas.bsky.social into real-world impact, to inform decision-making that recognises the centrality of #Antarctica and the Southern Ocean to the global #climate system. What we do (best on a large screen or laptop) ▶️ aapp.shorthandstories.com/research-and...

It's a powerful feedback loop: more ice shelf melting changes salinities which generates more ocean turbulence, which in turn causes more melting — with major implications for ice shelf stability and global sea level rise. (arrow shows max melt ratio) Paper in @nature.com Geoscience ▶️ rdcu.be/eQEEg

Researchers at @ucirvine.bsky.social and NASA-JPL have identified stormlike circulation patterns beneath #Antarctic ice shelves that cause rapid melting. This model output shows the turbulence around the Thwaites ice shelf at different depths and the resulting melt rates in the ice shelf cavity.

The amount of ice flowing from Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica has doubled in the span of three decades. These satellite images from 2001 and 2019 show the fracture and retreat of the glacier ice tongue floating on the Amundsen Sea, as it's melted from below. 🛰️ NASA

4/ Emissions cuts? Temperature limits? 🧊 As @iccinet.bsky.social says, we cannot negotiate with the melting point of ice. “Losing sea ice is making climate change up to 15 percent worse than it would otherwise be.” — @edoddridge.bsky.social @utas.edu.au ▶️ aapp.shorthandstories.com/a-world-with...

🧵 BY 2030: "The remaining carbon budget to limit global warming to 1.5°C is virtually exhausted and is equivalent to only four years of current emissions." — @pfriedling.bsky.social and @hausfath.bsky.social on the 2025 Global Carbon Budget in @carbonbrief.org ▶️ www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-fos...

3/ This year-long visualisation of PACE chlorophyll data shows areas with high chlorophyll concentration in red and yellow, medium chlorophyll in green and low chlorophyll in blue and purple. This covers one year, revealing the seasonal cycle of phytoplankton activity.

1/ More than 600km above 🌏, NASA's PACE (standing for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ecosystem) satellite is in a polar orbit. Covering the globe in about two days, it gathers data on ocean colour, aerosols, and clouds enabling the study of climate change and ocean ecosystems.

🌊⚠️ "Understanding and predicting marine-terminating glacier instability presents one of the greatest challenges to forecasting future sea level rise" — case of the Hektoria Glacier in #Antarctica, which retreated ~25 km from Jan 2022 to March 2023. Research briefing @nature.com ▶️ rdcu.be/eN9DL