Scientists embark on first study of Antarctica’s underwater avalanches

University of Plymouth

Antarctica’s turbidity currents and the role they play in helping to regulate Earth’s climate are to be studied for the first time through a groundbreaking international project.

The Antarctic Canyon Experiment (ACE) will see scientists using state of the art technology to assess the causes and effects of the currents – also known as underwater avalanches – occurring deep in the Southern Ocean.

They hope this will enable them to develop a better understanding of Antarctica’s role as one of the planet’s primary carbon sinks, given it currently stores around 40% of all the anthropogenic carbon in the ocean.

They also want to explore how its effectiveness in doing this has changed over time, particularly during warmer periods in Earth’s history, and how it could be affected by present and future changes in the global climate.

The ACE project, supported by a £2.4million grant from the European Research Council, is being conducted by an international consortium led by Dr Jenny Gales, Associate Professor in Hydrography and Ocean Exploration at the University of Plymouth.

She said: “Turbidity currents, also known as underwater avalanches, are natural hazards that can transport huge amounts of sediment that travel thousands of kilometres across the ocean. They can damage infrastructure, such as the underwater cabling that transports most of the world’s internet, but are also of critical importance in the global carbon cycle. However, the exact scale of that is something of a mystery and through this project we hope to generate the first detailed understanding of how these currents take shape around Antarctica. Given its disproportionate role in the global climate, that information will be vital in helping us predict what might happen unless we take immediate action to halt the advance of climate change.”

The ACE project is one of around 300 awarded a total of €678million in grants through the ERC’s Consolidator Grants programme. Provided through the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, the grants aim to support outstanding scientists and scholars to establish independent research teams and develop promising scientific ideas.

For the ACE project, Dr Gales will be working alongside an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), Northern Illinois University (USA), the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (New Zealand), National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (Italy), The Australian National University (Australia) and the Alfred Wegener Institute (Germany).

Over the course of the five-year project, they will use scientific research cruises to deploy and collect a series of underwater monitoring equipment deployed in the canyon for a whole year, as well as using autonomous underwater vehicles, enabling them to observe Antarctic turbidity currents in unprecedented detail. 

Sediment traps will also be lowered to the ocean floor so that samples can be taken directly from the currents and later analysed in the lab to show the quantities of organic carbon and other materials they contain.

The researchers hope this new data can be used to drive forward global carbon models and climate mitigation policies by providing the first detailed measures of the processes, in turn enabling improved representation of processes influencing the global carbon cycle.

They also believe the project’s outputs will represent a paradigm shift in quantifying the role of high-latitude turbidity currents in carbon cycling.