Antarctic Peninsula Region of the Southern Ocean Oceanography and Ecology

About this book

The book is based on results from the Russian expedition in the region of the Antarctic Peninsula and Powell Basin in the northern part of the Weddell Sea, as well as on the review of earlier research in the region. The main goal of the research was to collect the newest data and study the physical properties and ecology of this key region of the Southern Ocean. Data analysis is supplemented with numerical modelling of the atmosphere-ocean interaction and circulation in the adjacent region, including research on rogue waves.

The focus of the study was the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, currents and water properties in the Bransfield Strait and Antarctic Sound, properties of seawater, currents, ecosystem and biological communities in the Powell Basin of the northwestern Weddell Sea, and their variations.

An attempt is made to reveal the role of various components of the Antarctic environment in the formation of biological productivity and maintenance of the Antarctic krill population. This is especially important as in the last decades the Antarctic environment has experienced significant changes related to the global climatic trends.

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Biography

Eugene Morozov is Head of Laboratory of Hydrological Processes at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow (Russia). His research is focused on oceanic internal waves and large-scale circulation of the ocean. He is a field oceanographer and a specialist in observations in the open ocean. In 1999 he became a member of the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Ocean (IAPSO). From 2011 to 2015 he was the President of this Association. He was also a member of the Executive Committee of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG) and a member of the Executive Committee of the Scientific Council on Oceanic Research (SCOR).

Mikhail V. Flint is a specialist in marine ecology, a Doctor of Biological Science, and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He graduated from the Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1972 and since then have been affiliated with the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Russian Academy of Sciences. His main fields of research interest are marine zoo- and phytoplankton, plankton population ecology, biological productivity, physical-biological interactions in marine ecosystems, the role of mesoscale processes in pelagic ecosystems functioning, and marine ecosystems conservation. Beginning from 2007 till now is a head of long-term research program “Ecosystems of Siberian Arctic Seas”, in the frame of which 14 expeditions to the Kara, Laptev, and East-Siberian seas have been performed.

Vassily Spiridonov (1957-2020) was a renowned Russian scholar of carcinology, marine ecology and conservation. He graduated from the Lomonosov Moscow University in 1980 and then worked at the Antarctic laboratory of the All-Union Research Institute of Fishery and Oceanography (VNIRO) in Moscow. During his numerous expeditions to the Antarctic, he studied the biology and ecology of krill, which resulted in his PhD dissertation “The biology of krill distribution in the vicinity of the Antarctic Peninsula” in 1988.