Antarctica’s Current: Feeling the Seafloor*

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current feels their way over the polar seafloor, inscribing their journey all the way up through the water column.

Being barotropic, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) reaches all the way to the bottom . As they move indiscriminately and relationally across basins, they connect seafloor to sea surface. In a passage describing the ACC’s dynamics and sensory responsiveness, Gordon describes the current’s affective ability to ‘feel’ the shape of the seafloor.[i] As the ACC feels along the seafloor topography, their long journey projects up into the water column in equivalent sea surface temperature patterns. How might the watery imprints of other currents, in different locations or times, resonate through the water column? Though not yet near Antarctica’s shores, mining machinery, coral colonised drilling pylons, sunken ships, and dumped space craft already scaffold industrialised seafloor-scapes. Thinking with the ACC’s affective agency offers another way to imagine an industrial future for the polar seafloor. Will favourable mineral prices, advanced technologies, corporate appetite and the material demands of increasing human populations eventually embrittle the sanctity of Antarctica’s environment? How might we speculate on a watery imprint projected by a future ACC as they feel the topography of an possible industrialised seafloor? What new organisms would live in the changing multibeing realms of such a future; which would depart?

*Adapted from: Reid, S. (2018). “Transitioning Currents in Times of Climate Change.” In Living with the Sea, 114–28. London: Routledge. 

Image source: commons.wikimedia.org

[i] Gordon, A. L. (2001) Current systems in the Southern Ocean. In Encyclopedia of Ocean Sciences. Oxford: Academic Press, pp. 613‒621.