ABSTRACT
Like the Southern Ocean, the Antarctica continent too plays a key role in the global climate change. Among the factors that are critical to understand the Earth’s climatic history is the changing extent of the ice. The ice extent regulates the Earth’s albedo and thus can significantly enhance or reduce the climate change. The highly barotropic Antarctic circumpolar current reaches the ocean floor and can mix the North Atlantic deep water and deep waters from the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The mixture of these deep waters, the circumpolar deep water, then spreads back into other ocean basins in one form or another. Foraminifera, being extremely sensitive to slight changes in the ambient conditions, have widely been used for reconstructing the past changes in the thermohaline circulation in the Southern Ocean. Seawater temperature is one of the most important climatic parameters.
