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. 2019 Jul 12;9:10125. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-46253-1

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© The Author(s) 2019

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Southern Ocean circulation and circumpolar oceanic fronts. (a) The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) marked by blue arrows and main oceanic fronts from north to south are represented by the sub-Tropical Front (STF), Subantarctic Front (SAF), the Polar Front (PF), and the Southern ACC Front (SACC). Figure adapted from ref.⁷¹. (b) Simplified schematic representation of the present-day Southern Ocean overturning circulation^3,5. Ekman transport (ET) resulting from the Antarctic Coastal Current flowing counter-clockwise around Antarctica under the influence of the Polar easterlies causes waters to move towards Antarctica, while a northbound Ekman transport resulting from an eastbound ACC drives the waters away from Antarctica. It creates an area of divergence called the Antarctic Divergence Zone, where the Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) upwells to the surface south of the Polar Front (PF). Northward advection of nutrient-rich upwelled water takes place by Ekman transport⁷¹ and references therein. Its subsequent subduction to intermediate depths forms the Antarctic Intermediate Water (AAIW). Part of the upwelled waters moves southwards forming the Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW). During the northward advection, some part of the Antarctic surface water mixes with subtropical surface water to form Subantarctic Mode Water (SAMW).