S. Swart, E.C. Campbell, C. Heuzé, K. Johnson, J.L. Lieser, M. Massom, M. Mazloff, M. Meredith, P. Reid, J-B. Sallée, and S. Stammerjohn (2018), Return of the Maud Rise polynya: climate litmus or sea ice anomaly? [in State of the Climate in 2017 chapter 6], Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., vol 99, S188-S189, doi:10.1175/2018BAMSStateoftheClimate.1.

For the first time since the 1970s, a huge hole opened in the winter sea ice cover in the Southern Ocean: the Weddell Polynya. We describe this phenomenon, hypothesise potential atmospheric causes for its opening that our PhD student, Martin Mohrmann, is currently working on (dis)proving, and show biogeochemical timeseries collected by the SOCCOM float that accidentally ended up in the polynya.

Extent of the 2017 Weddell Polynya (sea ice concentation, in %, from AMSR2). Adapted from Fig SB6.1 (b)

Download the full-text of Weddell Sea sidebar here, the entire chapter 6 about Antarctica here, or the entire State of the Climate here.

You may also be interested in my other publications featuring the Weddell Polynya:

• Heuzé et al. (2013), “Southern Ocean Bottom Water Characteristics in CMIP5 models“, Geophysical Research Letters, vol 40(7), pp 1409-1414, doi:10.1002/grl.50287
• Heuzé et al. (2015), “Increasing vertical mixing to reduce Southern Ocean deep convection in NEMO3.4“, Geoscientific Model Development, NEMO special issue, vol 8, pp 3119-3130 doi:10.5194/gmd-8-3119-2015
• Heuzé et al. (2015), “Changes in global ocean bottom properties and volume transports in CMIP5 models under climate change scenarios“, Journal of Climate, vol 28, pp 2917-2944, doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00381.1