Twentieth century sea-ice trends in the Ross Sea from a high
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TitleTwentieth century sea-ice trends in the Ross Sea from a high-resolution, coastal ice-core recordAbstractWe present the first proxy record of sea-ice area (SIA) in the Ross Sea, Antarctica, from a 130year coastal ice-core record. High-resolution deuterium excess data show prevailing stable SIA from the 1880s until the 1950s, a 2-5% reduction from the mid-1950s to the early-1990s, and a 5% increase after 1993. Additional support for this reconstruction is derived from ice-core methanesulphonic acid concentrations and whaling records. While SIA has continued to decline around much of the West Antarctic coastline since the 1950s, concurrent with increasing air and ocean temperatures, the underlying trend is masked in the Ross Sea by a switch to positive SIA anomalies since the early-1990s. This increase is associated with a strengthening of southerly winds and the enhanced northward advection of sea ice. Copyright 2014. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.AcknowledgementsThis project was funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (contracts: VICX0704, CO5X0202, RDF-VUW1103) and a N.Z. Foundation for Research, Science, and Technology Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to K.E.S. (contract CO5X0902). Antarctica New Zealand and the U.S. Antarctic Program provided logistical support for ice-core extraction (project K049), and we thank the Alfred Wegener Institute for the loan of their shallow ice-core drilling system. We are also grateful to the field team, including Julia Bull, Alex Pyne, and Sepp Kipfstuhl, and Rebecca Pyne, Jessica Dallas, and Gemma Wihare for laboratory assistance, and the staff at the Stable Isotope Laboratory at GNS Science for analytical work. The editor thanks two anonymous reviewers for their assistance in evaluating this paper.
TypeArticleCitationSinclair, K., Bertler, N. and Van Ommen, T. (2012) Twentieth-century surface temperature trends in the western ross sea, antarctica: Evidence from a high-resolution ice core. Journal of Climate, 25(10): 3629-3636 doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00496.1 IdentifierSinclair2014Relevancerank5
Arrigo, K., Twentieth century sea-ice trends in the Ross Sea from a high, [Sinclair2014]. Antarctica NZ, accessed 19/08/2026, https://adam.antarcticanz.govt.nz/nodes/view/63768, 10.1002/2014GL059821
