A massive vortex of ocean water encircling Antarctica, a swirling volume 100-times larger than all the world's rivers combined, is getting faster due to climate change. 

At least, that's the finding a new study that examined the past 5.3 million years of this polar ocean vortex's behavior, using sediment cores samples take from Earth's roughest and most remote waters.

The vortex, known as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), slows down in cooler eras, like the Ice Age, and speeds up with global warming, they found.


Now scientists fear it's hastening the rise of global sea levels as it stirs Antarctica's thousands of square miles of ice shelves — like a straw stirring ice into a cold drink.

 

As one co-author of the new research, a geochemist at Columbia University, put it,  'This is the mightiest and fastest current on the planet.' 

'It is arguably the most important current of the Earth climate system.'





Sea ice plays an important role maintaining the Earth's energy balance while helping keep polar regions cool due to its ability to reflect more sunlight back to space. Pictured above, some of that very same sea ice, in the water off Cuverville Island in the Antarctic

That geochemist, Dr. Gisela Winckler of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said that the new study 'implies that the retreat or collapse of Antarctic ice is mechanistically linked to enhanced ACC flow.' 

It's 'a scenario,' she said, Neo Drops Stiftung Warentest 'we are observing today under global warming.'

Driven by the continuous westerly winds, the ACC rotates clockwise around the southernmost icy continent at a speed of approximately 2.5 miles per hour, swirling along with it about 6 billion cubic-feet of water per second.

Geologists currently believe that the conditions for creating the vortex first emerged after Antarctica separated from Australia 34 millions years ago, during tectonic shifts in the Eocene epoch. 

But the vortex, scientists say, only got into its modern grove 12-14 million years ago.




Above is map of simulated ocean velocities at 328 feet below the surface, with the bluish gray areas showing weaker current and the white areas showing the stronger currents of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) vortex. ACC behavior here was derived from the satellite 'altimetry16.'  The white stars above denote the research team's sediment core drilling sites





In 2021, French explorer and environmentalist Jean-Louis Etienne announced a Polar Pod that will complete two circuits around Antarctica every three years, carried by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, for similar polar research