Lingfei Jin

South China Sea Biological Research Center, Hainan Institute of Tropical Agricultural Resources, Sanya, 572025, China
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Marine Science, 2024, Vol. 14, No. 1   doi: 10.5376/ijms.2024.14.0007
Received: 28 Mar., 2024    Accepted: 10 Apr., 2024    Published: 15 Apr., 2024

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Jin L.F., 2024, Exploring the antarctic circumpolar current: a five million year climate journey synchronized with earth's orbital symphony, International Journal of Marine Science, 14(1): 51-56 (doi: 10.5376/ijms.2024.14.0007)

On March 27, 2024, Frank Lamy, Gisela Winckler, Helge W. Arz, and scientists from various global research institutions published a research paper in Nature titled "Five million years of Antarctic Circumpolar Current strength variability." The research team, through analyzing sediment cores from the seafloor of the Southern Pacific Ocean, unveiled the long-term variability of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) strength since the late Neogene. As the largest oceanic current system on Earth, the ACC has profound effects on global climate patterns, ocean circulation, and the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet. The study found that over the past five million years, the strength of the ACC did not show a linear trend but experienced a shift from intensification to weakening over a scale of millions of years, closely related to Earth's orbital cycles and the reconfiguration of the Southern Ocean. This discovery provides important new insights into the role of the ACC in the global climate system and for predicting future climate change.

The Southern Pacific Ocean; Sediment cores; Oceanic current system