It’s exciting times for a new generation of lunar scientists looking at the samples returned from the Apollo 17 mission almost exactly 50 years ago, in December 1972. Hawai‘i Institute for Geophysics and Planetology‘s Lingzhi Sun and Paul Lucey are working at the Lunar Curatorial Facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston with HIPG graduate students Chiara Ferrari-Wong and Abigail Flom to conduct some preliminary inspections of never-before-open soil core tubes collected from the Taurus-Littrow landing site on the Moon.

On their return to Earth, these cores were locked away to await the development of better instrumentation to make more detailed measurements and now is the time that they will finally be studied. The Principal Investigator for the project is Chip Shearer at the University of New Mexico. Collectively, the team is conducting multispectral measurements of these “new” cores to map the concentration of iron and titanium within the core, as well as determine the degree of exposure of the material space prior to burial and, hence, the relative age of different parts of the sample.

Most interesting is the fact that the HIGP investigators have already detected the presence of black pyroclastic glass produced by explosive eruptions that has also been found in other lunar samples. The new core samples will soon be made available to the broader scientific community for more detailed analysis, so this is a great opportunity for our Team to gain first-hand knowledge of what the samples contain.

Read also on HIGP News.

Nearly 30 members of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa SOEST community gathered recently to learn about the traditional art of bark cloth making from world-renowned kapa maker Dalani Tanahy. With funding from the UH Mānoa Office of Student Equity, Excellence & Diversity (SEED) and the SOEST Maile Mentoring Bridge Program, faculty, staff and students joined the event.

Kapa is a traditional fabric created from the bast fibers of trees and shrubs in the orders Rosales and Malvales and is used primarily for clothing, bedding, robes and also as banners and funerary wrappings. This craft involves removing the outer bark from branches, pounding the fiber into cloth and designing and decorating the materials with symbolic prints.

A practitioner of the art of Hawaiian kapa for nearly 25 years, Tanahy has created pieces for notable figures including the Dalai Llama and the King of Morocco, among others. Her work has been featured in exhibits at the Bishop Museum to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC, and the British Museum.

During the workshop, Tanahy and her apprentice Kehau, shared the prevalence of kapa throughout Polynesia and the revival of the practice in Hawai‘i as well as tools used and examples of kapa from various Pacific Island communities. With warm encouragement from the kumu, attendees were offered the opportunity to create their own kapa starting from a small portion of a paper mulberry branch.

Tanahy and Kehau’s passion for the craft and generosity in sharing the traditional art shone through in each step of the workshop. Participants were awed and elated to witness the transformation from a small, stiff section of bark into a larger, flexible, cloth-like material.

“Dalani and Kehau were great teachers, open to all our questions, and shared the fascinating history and diversity of kapa from islands across the Pacific,” said Noah Howins, oceanography graduate student and event organizer. “I hope the kapa workshop was just the first of many culture-oriented workshops in SOEST during 2022. Based on participant feedback there is a strong desire for more cross-cutting events that bring in cultural practitioners to share their knowledge.”

Read also on UH News.

A newly published study by researchers at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa revealed that bacteria alter their swimming patterns when they get into tight spaces—making a beeline to escape from confinement. 

Nearly all organisms host bacteria that live symbiotically on or within their bodies. The Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes, forms an exclusive symbiotic relationship with the marine bacterium Vibrio fischeri which has a whip-like tail that it uses to swim to specific places in the squid’s body.

A research team, led by Jonathan Lynch, who was a postdoctoral fellow at the Pacific Biosciences Research Center (PBRC) at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), designed controlled chambers in which they could observe the Vibrio bacteria swimming. Using microscopy, the team discovered that as the bacteria moved between open areas and tight spaces they swim differently.

In open spaces, without chemicals to be attracted to or repelled from, bacteria appeared to meander with no discernible pattern—changing direction randomly and at different points in time. Upon entry into confined spaces, the bacteria straightened their swimming paths to escape from confinement. 

“This finding was quite surprising,” said Lynch, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. “At first, we were looking for how bacterial cells changed the shape of their tails when they moved into tight spaces, but discovered that we were having trouble actually finding cells in the tight spaces. After looking more closely, we figured out that it was because the bacteria were actively swimming out of the tight spaces, which we did not expect.”

The relationship between the squid and this bacterium is a useful model of how bacteria live with other animals, such as the human microbiome. Microbes often traverse complicated routes, sometimes squeezing through tight spaces in tissues, before colonizing preferred sites in their host organism. A variety of chemicals and nutrients within hosts are known to guide bacteria toward their eventual destination. However, less is known about how physical features like walls, corners, and tight spaces affect bacterial swimming, despite the fact that these physical features are found across many bacteria-animal relationships. 

“Our findings demonstrate that tight spaces may serve as an additional, crucial cue for bacteria while they navigate complex environments to enter specific habitats,” said Lynch. “Changing swimming patterns in tight spaces may allow some bacteria to quickly swim through the tight spaces to get to the other side, but for the others, they turn around before the get stuck—kind of like choosing whether to run across a rickety bridge or turn around before you go too far.”

In the future, the researchers hope to figure out how these bacteria are changing their swimming activity, as well as determining if other bacteria show the same behaviors.

This work was funded through a UH C-MAIKI Initiative seed grant and by the Ford Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Read also on Hawaiʻi Public Radio, UH News, Phys.org, Eurekalert and Science Daily.

Six faculty members at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa have been listed among the top 1,000 scientists in the disciplines of ecology and evolution as evaluated by Research.com.

School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology’s (SOEST) Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) Researcher Brian Bowen; SOEST Pacific Biosciences Research Center Professor Emeritus Michael Hadfield; School of Life Sciences Professor Mark Hixon; SOEST Department of Oceanography Professor Emeritus Craig Smith; SOEST HIMB Researcher Robert Toonen; and SOEST HIMB former director, the late Ruth Gates, were ranked among the world’s top scientists for ecology and evolution.

The ranking is constructed using the H-index data (a metric for evaluating the cumulative impact of an author’s scholarly output and performance) gathered by Microsoft Academic and included only prominent scientists with an H-index of at least 30 for scientific papers published in the field of ecology and evolution.

“This recognition demonstrates the superior quality of work by our faculty, providing further evidence of our status as one of the world’s great research universities,” said UH Mānoa Provost Michael Bruno. “Their research in ecology, conservation, and human impacts on the environment have led the way toward countless impactful discoveries, and we are proud to have them as part of our UH ʻohana.”

Brian Bowen

Bowen’s research program is designed to resolve the origins of marine biodiversity in the service of conservation. Since joining the HIMB faculty in 2003, he has conducted range-wide genetic inventories of Hawaiian and Indo-Pacific reef fishes to inform the design of marine protected areas. Bowen is co-author of the best-selling textbook Diversity of Fishes, which will be published in a third edition later this year.

Michael Hadfield

Hadfield’s scientific interests lie mainly in marine invertebrate larval ecology and metamorphosis and the roles of marine bacteria films as cues for larval settlement. His long-term research goals are aimed at understanding the factors that determine where larvae of bottom-living invertebrate animals settle and metamorphose—a key to understanding how seafloor communities are established and maintained on all surfaces under salt water.

Mark Hixon

Hixon’s expertise is the ecology and conservation biology of coral reefs, presently focusing on how seaweed-eating fishes benefit corals. He has also studied kelp forest fishes, hummingbird behavior, deep-sea communities, fisheries ecology, and the invasion of the Caribbean Sea by Pacific lionfish.

Craig Smith

Smith has strong interests in biodiversity, disturbance ecology and human impacts in seafloor ecosystems. He has conducted research in Antarctica, mangroves, submarine canyons, whale-fall communities, cold seeps, continental slopes, and abyssal plains to obtain a broad perspective of natural and stressed marine ecosystems. His most recent work includes assessing the impacts of climate warming on Antarctic fjord ecosystems, and designing marine protected areas to mitigate biodiversity loss from deep-sea mining.

Robert Toonen

Toonen has used lab and field experiments, molecular genetics, and computer modeling and more in an effort to address a variety of biological questions. From assessing cues for larval settlement to population genetics of marine invertebrates, sharks and turtles, to coral bleaching and conservation, Toonen approaches research from an ecological perspective—to scale up from genes to individuals to populations.

Ruth Gates

Gates was a tireless innovator and advocate for coral reef conservation. Coral reefs around the world have experienced massive die off as a result of warming ocean temperatures, increasing acidity, pollution runoff from land and other threats. The focus of her most recent research was creating “super corals,” coral species occurring naturally in the ocean that could be trained to become more resilient to these harsh conditions. Gates passed away in 2018.

For more information, see Research.com.

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The 2022 UH Mānoa Awards are given to recognize the dedication and service of UH Mānoa faculty, staff, and students who are committed to enhancing the University’s mission of excellence. This year, three SOEST faculty members were selected as recipients of awards in teaching, research and graduate mentorship.

Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Teaching

Bridget Smith-Konter, professor in the Department of Earth Sciences, received the Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Teaching. This medal is awarded by the Board of Regents as tribute to faculty members who exhibit an extraordinary level of subject mastery and scholarship, teaching effectiveness and creativity, and personal values that benefit students.

Smith-Konter is masterful at connecting with students of all academic interests, abilities, learning styles and personal backgrounds. Her classes mix lectures with interactive Q&A sessions highlighted with stunning still or animated imagery, and punctuated with short videos and group activities. One student said “most noteworthy, she makes us feel like a valuable addition to a research team and as a human being in her life.” Outside the classroom, “her contributions and influence on STEM education is truly extraordinary and may well be unmatched.” She leads by example and brings her heart into all her university and community projects. Her endeavors to “make Earth science accessible to underrepresented groups including Native Hawaiians are pertinent to an enriched and sustainable livelihood within Hawaiʻi.” It is a testament to her quality as an educator that she can communicate scientific principles to a diverse group of people, effectively tailoring information and learning from her audience in return.

Read more on the UH News story.

Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Research

Brian N. Popp, a professor of Earth Sciences, was honored with the Regents’ Medal for Excellence in Research. This is awarded by the University of Hawaiʻi Board of Regents in recognition of scholarly contributions that expand the boundaries of knowledge and enrich the lives of students and the community.

Popp joined the UH Mānoa faculty in 1990 and is best known for his contributions to the field of stable isotope biogeochemistry. He published a landmark series of papers on the fractionation of carbon isotopes by marine microalgae, which allowed estimates of ancient atmospheric CO₂ levels. These results led to honors, including the Geochemical Society Best Paper of the Year award and his election as a Geochemistry Fellow within the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society. Popp contributed significantly to the demonstration that archaea are largely responsible for ammonia oxidation in the marine environment and that rates of archaeal ammonia oxidation are sensitive to small changes in ocean pH that will occur in a future acidifying ocean. His high productivity and impact are demonstrated by his more than 165 papers in international peer-reviewed journals. His career publications have amassed more than 15,000 citations.

Read more on the UH News story.

Peter V. Garrod Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award

Henrietta Dulai, professor in the Department of Earth Sciences and graduate chair in the Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) Graduate Program was selected for the Peter V. Garrod Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award. Established by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Graduate Division in 2005, this award allows graduate students to nominate faculty for excellent mentoring, one of the foundations of outstanding graduate education.

Dulai’s research program addresses pressing issues such as groundwater pollution and its effects on the sustainability of water resources and coastal environments, environmental radionuclide contamination, and application of chemical tracers to study the environmental impact of high population density, sea-level rise and climate change. Dulai is passionate about advising graduate students and supports their enthusiasm for research and scientific progress. She has advised nine MS students, three of whom continued on to a PhD track with her, and served on additional 15 PhD dissertation committees including 10 PhD comprehensive exam committees. The graduate students she worked with are lead or co-authors on 25 peer-reviewed publications. Dulai contributes to the efforts transforming academia into a more inclusive and diverse space, by fostering an inclusive and respectful atmosphere in the EPS graduate program.

Read more on the UH Mānoa announcement.

Robert Richmond, research professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology and director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory, was selected to join an independent panel of global experts on nuclear issues to support Pacific nations in their consultations with Japan over its intentions to discharge treated nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean.

In 2011, a massive earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima, Japan damaged the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. To prevent further damage and overheating, workers pumped water through the remains. Last year, Japan announced its intentions to begin discharging the accumulated radioactively contaminated cooling water into the Pacific Ocean starting in 2023, claiming that after treatment, it is safe to do so. Some Pacific nations are concerned about whether that can be done safely.

The Pacific Islands Forum, made up of 18 independent Pacific Island countries, composed the expert panel to provide independent technical advice into the ongoing dialogue with Japan officials and representatives of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima where the wastewater has accumulated since the tsunami.

“At this point, we’re unanimous in saying we don’t see enough information to support dumping the radioactively contaminated water into the ocean,” said Richmond, who has conducted marine conservation research in the Pacific for over four decades, studied the uptake of radioactive Ru-106 in crayfish as an indicator of leakage from nuclear powerplants while working at the Dept. of Radiation Biology and Biophysics at the University of Rochester Medical School and spent two years performing research on Enewetak Atoll, home to the U.S. nuclear testing program from 1948-58. “Our first recommendation to the group is take that option off the table for now.”

Through the movement of ocean currents and transport by pelagic fishes that can take up and accumulate radionuclides, more widespread distribution can and will take place. 

“This is truly a trans-boundary issue,” said Richmond. “Fish don’t respect political lines, and neither do radionuclides or pollutants in the ocean. I really commend the members of the Pacific Islands Forum for recognizing that this is an issue that they need additional information on.”

In announcing the formation of the panel, PIF Secretary General Henry Puna emphasized, “Our ultimate goal is to safeguard the Blue Pacific – our ocean, our environment, and our peoples – from any further nuclear contamination. This is the legacy we must leave for our children.”

Richmond presented at the 7^th Our Oceans Conference in Palau recently. This event, co-hosted by the Republic of Palau and the United States, offered a key moment for countries, civil society, and industry to commit to concrete and significant actions to protect the ocean. He emphasized the need for adequate and accurate information for decision makers to make sound decisions to protect and conserve marine habitats and life, and all those who depend on ocean resources.

“This is not the first nuclear incident, and it won’t be the last,” said Richmond. “Perhaps this can be an opportunity to try different approaches that have never been tried before. Maybe this could be a learning opportunity to really set the bar for the future of not continuing to use our oceans as the dumping ground.”

Additional panel members are Ken Buesseler, senior scientist and Oceanographer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research; Antony Hooker, associate professor and director, Centre for Radiation Research, Education and Innovation, The University of Adelaide; Ferenc (Jacob Rolf) Dalnoki-Veress, scientist-in-residence and adjunct professor at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

The panel recently shared a detailed set of initial recommendations to the Secretariat that will be made available soon.

Read more on Hawai‘i Public Radio and Island Times.

A record-setting rainstorm over Kaua‘i, Hawai‘i in April 2018 resulted in severe flash flooding and estimated damage of nearly $180 million.  The deluge damaged or destroyed 532 homes, and landslides left people along Kaua‘i’s north coast without access to their homes. In a recently published study, atmospheric scientists at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa revealed that severe supercell thunderstorms were to blame.

The rainstorm inundated some areas with nearly 50 inches of rainfall in a 24-hour period, smashing the previous 24-hour U.S. rainfall record of 42 inches set in Texas in 1979. An interesting finding is that the rainstorm described in this paper was associated with a kona low and not a tropical cyclone as featured in previous U.S. rainfall records. 

Terrence Corrigan, a doctoral candidate, and professor Steven Businger, both in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, sifted through copious weather radar data from NOAA’s National Weather Service to unveil the factors contributing to this historic event. Their analysis revealed large changes in the direction and speed of the winds in the lower atmosphere. When these shifting winds collided with Kaua‘i steep cliffs, thunderstorms with rotating updrafts were triggered. The scale of rotation seen in radar data, and the strength of rainfall seen as reflectivity echos are consistent with supercell thunderstorms. 

“This finding was a surprise, which has interesting implications for other mountainous areas of the world,” said Businger. 

“Updrafts with rotation are more intense and longer lived, and have been observed to produce large hail and tornados in Hawai‘i,” said Businger. “In this case, the updrafts were forced by Kaua‘i’s steep mountain cliffs, with the result that the thunderstorms were more vigorous and anchored to the terrain, thus setting a new US 24-hour rainfall record!”

Although supercells thunderstorms are the least common type of thunderstorm in Hawaii, they have the greatest likelihood of producing severe weather, including large hail, tornados, and strong straight-line winds.

“Understanding the dynamic interaction of our tropical atmosphere and steep mountains will help weather forecasters better anticipate severe weather events and flash floods in our state and elsewhere.”

Businger and Corrigan’s next steps are to use computer models to simulate the interaction between various wind flows and terrain configurations to further shed light on the interaction of mountains and severe thunderstorms.

Read also on Hawai‘i Public Radio, KHON2, Honolulu Star-Advertiser (subscription required), UH News, Eurekalert and Environmental News Network.

Microbes may be small, but they are highly impactful to environmental and human health amid a changing climate. The American Society for Microbiology (ASM) issued a new report, Microbes and Climate Change: Science, People, & Impacts, co-authored by David Karl, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa oceanographer, and more than 30 experts from diverse disciplines, illuminating how microbes can help us adapt to climate change.

As major drivers of elemental cycles and producers and consumers of three of the gases responsible for 98% of increased global warming (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide), microbes have a pivotal impact on climate change and are, in turn, impacted by it. To fully understand how to adapt to climate change, it is critical to learn how our changing climate will impact microbes and how they relate to humans and the environment.

“It has been said that the very great is achieved by the very small,” said Karl. “Micobes matter!”  Since 1988 Karl and his colleagues have been tracking changes in the ecology of marine microbes in response to climate change at UH’s deep sea observatory, Station ALOHA.

The World Health Organization identified climate change as “single biggest health threat facing humanity in 2021,” having adverse impacts on water quality, food security and global economies. Additionally, a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found changes to Earth’s climate in every region of the world, noting the unprecedented scale and speed in warming of the planet’s surface over the last 200 years.

“ASM’s new colloquium report underscores that in the quest to find solutions for climate change, we, as a society and scientific community, have new opportunities to use microbes to our benefit,” said Nguyen K. Nguyen, Director of ASM’s American Academy of Microbiology.

This report is the outcome of ASM’s November 2021 colloquium meeting, which brought together more than 30 experts from diverse disciplines and sectors who provided multifaceted perspectives and insights. The American Academy of Microbiology, the honorific leadership group and think tank within ASM, convened the colloquium.

Karl, who is also the director of the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, was a key participant in the colloquium and contributed to the report. He was also an author on the companion paper, Microbes and Climate Change, a Research Prospectus for the Future, published this week in ASM’s open-access journal, mBio. The mBio paper builds on concepts discussed at the November colloquium meeting and provides an extended view and opinions on research needed to fill in the knowledge gaps.

The microbial sciences can provide us with invaluable insights in how to adapt to climate change and its cascading effects. From developing alternative fuels to preventing the spread of pathogens, the applications of microbes are vast and far-reaching. The report details major recommendations for researchers, policymakers and regulators.

Key report recommendations:

• Emphasize interdisciplinary research focused on understanding how microbial activities and metabolic flux alter as climate, precipitation, and temperatures change globally.
• Provide guidance for experimental design and data collection for studying microbial communities that allows for data comparison across diverse and global ecosystems.
• Incorporate existing data about microbial diversity and activity on consuming and producing greenhouse gases into Earth-climate models to improve the current and predictive performance of models.
• Increase research investments to generate knowledge and awareness of the contribution of microbes to the generation and consumption of warming gases; incorporate these findings into evidence-based policy and regulatory strategies to address climate change.
• Deploy increased surveillance and detection of zoonotic and vector-borne diseases in animals and humans, including through next generation sequencing technologies, and incorporate a One Health approach to addressing climate changes’ effects on humans, animals, and our environment.

To learn more about the impact of microbes on climate change, visit the American Society for Microbiology’s Microbes and Climate Change resource page and read the article, What Microbes Can Teach Us About Adapting to Climate Change.

Read also on Maui Now and UH News.

Antarctic sea-ice has expanded over the period of continuous satellite monitoring, which seemingly contradicts ongoing global warming resulting from increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. In a new study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, an international team of scientists from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, NOAA, and South Korea shows that a multi-decadal swing of the tropical sea surface temperatures and its ability to change the atmospheric circulation across large distances is in large part responsible for the observed sea-ice expansion since the late 1970s.

Sea ice, which covers a substantial portion of the ocean surface in the polar regions, plays an important role in controlling global temperatures by reflecting incoming solar radiation. Decreases in sea-ice coverage, therefore, are expected to amplify greenhouse gas-induced global warming. Changes in sea ice also affect energy exchanges between the ocean and atmosphere, carbon uptake by the ocean, ecosystems, and the thermohaline oceanic circulation. Thus, it is of great importance to monitor long-term changes in global sea ice and to ensure that physical processes that lead to those changes are accurately depicted in climate prediction models.

Continuous satellite observations, which started at the end of the 1970s, indicate marked decreases in Arctic sea ice over the satellite era, which is consistent with the global warming trend. In contrast, small but increasing trends have been observed, especially over the period 1979–2014, in the other hemisphere. Furthermore, while climate models are able to broadly reproduce the observed Arctic sea-ice decreases, the majority of them are not able to capture the Antarctic sea-ice expansion over the period 1979–2014.

“The observed Antarctic sea-ice expansion and model-observation discrepancy have perplexed climate scientists over more than a decade,” said lead author Eui-Seok Chung, from the Korea Polar Research Institute.

“Various hypotheses, such as increased freshwater fluxes due to sub-iceshelf melting, atmospheric and oceanic circulation changes associated with human-induced stratospheric ozone depletion and tropical teleconnections, have been proposed to explain the observed Antarctic sea-ice expansion, but the issue has remained as one of the biggest challenges in climate science,” said professor Axel Timmermann, Director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics at Pusan National University, and co-author of this study.

The observed Antarctic sea-ice changes are caused not only by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and/or stratospheric ozone depletion, but also linked, in part, to natural variability of the climate system, which occurs without direct connections with human activities.

To determine the main causes of the observed Antarctic sea-ice expansion and model-observation discrepancy, the scientists turned their attention to a longer record of Southern Ocean sea surface temperatures as a proxy for Antarctic sea ice and conducted comprehensive analyses of multi-model large ensemble climate model simulations.

Over a certain period of time, Southern Ocean cooling and associated atmospheric and oceanic circulation changes linked to natural variability in the tropics may temporarily outweigh the opposing human-induced changes, thus resulting in temporary sea ice expansion. However, it does not explain the model-observation discrepancy.

Malte Stuecker, co-author and assistant professor of oceanography from the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology explained, “Southern Ocean multi-decadal variability is also closely linked to tropical natural variability in climate model simulations, but the linkages are substantially weaker than in the observations. Thus, human-induced ocean surface warming dominates in the Southern Ocean in model simulations.”

Analyzing comprehensive multi-model large ensemble simulations, the researchers also found a distinct model-observation mismatch in global warming, which affects Antarctic sea ice, especially in model simulations.

“The global warming mismatch may result entirely from potential model biases in human-induced forced response, but part of the mismatch is linked to observed natural variability in the eastern equatorial Pacific,” said corresponding author Seong-Joong Kim, Director of the Division of Atmospheric Sciences at the Korea Polar Research Institute.

Although the observed Antarctic sea-ice expansion over the satellite era occurred in large part due to Southern Ocean cooling associated with multi-decadal variability in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic, the researchers acknowledge that tropical teleconnections cannot explain all aspects of the observed Antarctic sea-ice expansion and model-observation discrepancy. Therefore, given the importance of Antarctic sea ice, they emphasize that further investigation is needed to fully understand Antarctic sea-ice changes.

Adapted from a Korea Polar Research Institute news release.

Read also on UH News.