The Southern Ocean

Over the past two decades in particular there has been an

increasing emphasis on integrated studies of the Southern

Ocean (Figure 1.1) aimed at understanding what has been

termed “the Antarctic or Southern Ocean ecosystem.” While

the SouthernOcean can be considered a single ecosystem, it is

actually a series of interconnected ecosystems. These will be

discussed in subsequent chapters. Descriptions of the

Southern Ocean system have been given by several workers

over the years (Hart 1942; Currie 1964; Holdgate 1967; Knox

1970, 1983; Everson 1977a, 1984c; Bengtson 1978, 1985a;

Baker 1979; Tranter 1982; Hempel 1985a, 1985b, 1987)

The living resources of the Southern Ocean and their past

and future exploitation have been reviewed by the

SCAR/SCOR Group of Specialists on the Living Resources

of the Southern Ocean (El-Sayed 1977, 1981, 1996;

Sahrhage 1988a), and they have also been the subject of

numerous reviews: Everson (1977b), Bengston (1978,

1985a), Knox (1983, 1984), and Anonymous (USSR)

(1984a, 1984b). The physical structure of the system has

been described by Deacon (1937, 1982, 1984b), Brodie

(1965), Gordon (1967, 1983), Gordon and Goldberg (1970),

Gordon et al. (1978), Forster (1981, 1984), Gordon and

Molinelli (1982), Amos (1984), Gordon and Owens (1987),

Squire (1987), Foldvik and Gammelsrad (1988), and Smith

(1990b). Environmental data for the Southern Ocean is

available from a variety of sources. Some of the most

valuable are the Discovery Reports, the Soviet Atlas of

Antarctica (Makismov 1966), the U.S. Navy Hydrographic

Office Oceanographic Atlas of the Polar Seas, the U.S.