Warm water, not melting ice raising sea levels.

Creeping rises in ocean water levels around Antarctica over the past 10 years are almost certainly due to an increase in sea water temperature is and not an increase in melting ice. That is the claim of an Australian scientist who has conducted a 15 year salinity and temperature study in the Southern Ocean. He says that the average temperatures have increased by approximately 3/10 of a degree Celsius.

Satellites have also been utilised to measure rising sea levels in the southern polar region, and by their estimates, there has been an increase of around 2 cm in water levels. The French, Australian and US team of scientists is being led by Steve Rintoulho, who has said: “The biggest contribution so far has been from warming of the oceans through expansion,”

He also claims sea ice that is melting and ice shelves jutting out into Antarctic do not increase sea levels, his comments come as a French survey ship, named L’Astrolabe was preparing to depart from Tasmania for its fifth summer season of surveying in the Antarctic.

Over the last 15 years the same research programme has been measuring the salinity and water levels along the 2750km corridor between Hobart and Antarctica, and the temperature up to a depth of 700m.

The survey is easily the longest and most continuous record of changes in salinity and water temperature taking place in the southern ocean, Rintoul stated: “The survey has given us a foundation for much of what is known about the way the ocean in this inhospitable and difficult-to-access region controls the global climate,”

He also said that these increases in water temperature were not uniform across the Antarctic Ocean, and he had no way of knowing if the increases in temperature continue at the same rates for the foreseeable future.

Their measurements have also discovered that the Southern Ocean’s carbon dioxide uptake changed with the seasons; in the colder months it is absorbed less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it did during the summer months.

In the warmer summer, the carbon dioxide absorbing phytoplankton were found further south than during the winter, he stated that he was unclear as to exactly what effect and importance these finding might have and more research was needed.

He did say that “What’s significant is that we’ve detected changes in the physical environment and now we’re also detecting changes in the biology in response to those physical changes.”The next challenge is to figure out what these biological changes mean for carbon uptake and for higher levels of the food chain,”

Minute phytoplankton are at the lowest level of the food chain and are an essential food source for a number of species.

The findings by the L’Astrolabe in the world’s largest ocean current between Hobart and Antarctica show that deep streams of water were pushing the warming water deep into the ocean.