March 9, 2008 - Is the Antarctic Convergence breaking?
by Kate Laird

Alarmingly, the water here is 40.5 F / 4.5 C which is way too hot for Antarctica. This is despite an enormous quantity of 32 F / 0 C water which is running off the glacier (so much that we filled our water tanks), which should be cooling the seawater around the glacier. We found a lot of plastic on the beach here -- several bottles and two types of plastic strapping -- which is the first plastic Hamish has seen on the beach in the 20 years he has been coming here. Either people are throwing stuff off boats here, which is pretty unthinkable (though we have found beer cans over the last two years, which is probably yachties) or it's really scary because it means the Convergence is breaking ... the Antarctic Convergence normally keeps the pollution of the rest of the world out of Antarctica, because it doesn't allow any interchange of surface water. A friend of ours has a thermometer in his depth sounder (annoyingly ours doesn't, so we've been taking spot measurements around the place) and he read 9 C water all the way to the South Shetlands. Normally, the water temperature suddenly shifts to about 1 C in the middle of the Drake Passage...normally, everyone on deck knows exactly where the convergence is, because in one watch you suddenly need two more layers of clothing. That didn't happen on the passage to Antarctica this time. If warm water is coming into the Peninsula because the Convergence has broken, then the melting patterns we have seen this trip will accelerate enormously.

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