Arctic and Antarctic submarine gullies—A comparison of high latitude continental margins

Low clouds suppress Arctic air formation and amplify high-latitude continental winter warming.

High-latitude continents have warmed much more rapidly in recent decades than the rest of the globe, especially in winter, and the maintenance of warm, frost-free conditions in continental interiors in winter has been a long-standing problem of past equable climates. We use an idealized single-column atmospheric model across a range of conditions to study the polar night process of air mass tra...

Environmental change, hydrate dissociation, and submarine slope failure along continental margins: the role of saturation anomalies in landslide triggering

Submarine landslides occur along active and passive continental margins and are potentially triggered by numerous factors including the dissociation of gas hydrates. The hazard produced by such landslides can damage infrastructure (oil platforms, telecommunication lines), generate tsunamis, and cause a catastrophic release of methane to the atmosphere and ocean. Here we develop numerical models...

Numerical Geodynamic Modeling of Continental Convergent Margins

Fourteen degrees of latitude and a continent apart: comparison of lichen activity over two years at continental and maritime Antarctic sites

There are marked declines in precipitation, mean temperatures and the number of lichen species with increasing latitude in Antarctica. However, it is not known which factors are the predominant controllers of biodiversity changes. Results are presented from over two years of almost continuous monitoring of both microclimate and activity in lichens at Livingston Island, South Shetland Islands, 6...

Pan-Arctic distributions of continental runoff in the Arctic Ocean

Continental runoff is a major source of freshwater, nutrients and terrigenous material to the Arctic Ocean. As such, it influences water column stratification, light attenuation, surface heating, gas exchange, biological productivity and carbon sequestration. Increasing river discharge and thawing permafrost suggest that the impacts of continental runoff on these processes are changing. Here, a...