Abstract

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is today the world’s largest ocean current, dominating the transfer of heat, salt, and tracers around the Southern Ocean. The ACC also helps to draw carbon-rich deep waters to the surface, prying open the window between the ocean interior and the atmosphere. In this talk, I will present a new 1.9 Million Year record of deep flow speeds at the northern edge of the ACC . Using this record as a proxy for the vigour/latitudinal position of the Subantarctic Front jet, I show that the ACC responds sensitively to climate forcing through the Pleistocene. In particular, I will focus on anomalously intense reorganisations of the ACC which occur during “super-interglacial” intervals, punctuating the glacial-interglacial pattern and providing potential clues into how Southern Ocean circulation might respond to ongoing and future warming.