Ocean-Cryosphere Exchanges in ANtarctica: Impacts on Climate and the Earth System
OCEAN:ICE is a new Horizon Europe project, funded by the European Commission and UKRI. The project will start on the 1st November 2022 and will run for 4 years until 31st October 2026.
OCEAN:ICE is an exciting new project that will push forward the boundaries in our understanding of how the Antarctic ice sheet and surrounding Southern Ocean influences our global climate, as well as reduce the dangerous levels of uncertainty around how much it will melt in the coming centuries. Many past and present projects focus on single elements of this question; ocean circulation, ice sheet change and tipping points. OCEAN:ICE will bring these aspects together and consider the important role of feedbacks between them and the global climate. It will combine both observational and modelling approaches to improve our understanding of fundamental ice-ocean interactions and our ability to model them, as well as rigorous approaches to quantifying our present uncertainty in predictions of future change. Bringing together 17 centres from across the EU and UK, was well as numerous partner nations and organisations, it will produce several key outcome including: An improved estimate of Antarctic Ice Sheet melt over the last 40 years, with contributions from surface runoff, basal melt and iceberg calving; Numerically robust uncertainty estimates on projections of these freshwater flows into the ocean to the year 2300 and; The first estimates of the role of coupled feedbacks between the ice sheet and global climate on future warming and sea level rise projections and the potential for Antarctic or Southern Ocean climate ‘tipping points’. OCEAN:ICE includes a strong outreach component to ensure that its findings contribute both to international scientific assessments such as the IPCC, as well as are communicated to the public and policymakers.