OCEAN:ICE

The Antarctic Ice Sheet and Southern Ocean represent critical components of Earth's climate system, yet their complex interactions and future behaviour remain among the most significant sources of uncertainty in climate projections. As global temperatures rise, understanding how changes in these polar regions will affect sea-level rise, ocean circulation patterns, and global climate has become increasingly urgent. The melting of Antarctic ice has profound implications not only for coastal communities worldwide but also for deep-water formation processes and major ocean circulation systems, such as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which plays a crucial role in regulating the European climate. Despite this importance, substantial data gaps in the Southern Ocean and a limited understanding of ice-sheet-ocean-climate feedbacks have hindered our ability to make reliable predictions about these changes and their cascading effects on the planet.

Against this backdrop, the OCEAN ICE project addresses these critical knowledge gaps through an innovative and ambitious approach that combines cutting-edge observations with advanced numerical modelling. The project's primary objective is to assess how key Antarctic Ice Sheet and Southern Ocean processes affect Planet Earth, examining their influence on sea-level rise, deep-water formation, ocean circulation, and climate dynamics. Recognising the interconnected nature of the polar regions, OCEAN ICE also investigates ocean-modulated feedbacks between the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, providing a truly global perspective on polar ice-sheet evolution.

To achieve these objectives, OCEAN ICE pursues several interconnected focus areas. The project tackles the well-documented data scarcity in the Southern Ocean by gathering new circumpolar and Atlantic Ocean observations, combining in-situ measurements with Earth Observation data, with particular emphasis on ESA-produced satellite datasets. These valuable observations are assimilated into improved icesheet, ocean, and climate models, enabling the production of new estimates of icesheet melt and its cascading impacts on ocean circulation, including the critical AMOC. A cornerstone of the project is the development, calibration, and evaluation of coupled ice-sheet-climate models, which are essential for reducing the profound uncertainty in the timing and magnitude of ice-sheet contributions to sea-level rise and climate change.

OCEAN ICE produces projections of societally relevant environmental changes spanning decadal to multi-centennial timescales, addressing one of the most pressing questions facing policymakers and society: how quickly and dramatically these changes will unfold. The project also assesses the potential for crossing critical ice sheet "tipping points". It evaluates their consequences for ocean circulation and global climate stability—knowledge essential for understanding whether we face gradual or potentially abrupt transitions in Earth's climate system.

Beyond its scientific ambitions, OCEAN ICE strengthens European research leadership through an extensive network of international collaborators who provide both scientific expertise and logistical support. The project contributes directly to the All-Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance through observations, collaborative logistics, and analysis, while also integrating scientists from the Ukrainian National Antarctic Science Centre into the European research ecosystem. By advancing the state of the art in coupled ice sheet-climate modelling, OCEAN ICE directly supports international climate assessments, including contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and World Ocean Assessment.

The expected impact of OCEAN ICE is substantial and multifaceted. The project will deliver improved assessments of European climate impacts resulting from melting ice sheets, providing policymakers and the public with actionable information about risks and timescales. This knowledge is critical for climate adaptation planning, coastal protection strategies, and long-term policy development. To maximise scientific collaboration and ensure broad accessibility of findings, OCEAN ICE links organically to European data centres, disseminating its data according to FAIR and INSPIRE principles, while training all Early Career Scientists in these essential data management standards.

Objectives and Mission

OCEAN ICE seeks to understand the impacts of polar (mainly Antarctic) ice sheets and Southern Ocean processes on Planet Earth, through their influence on sea level rise, deep water formation, ocean circulation, and climate. It combines new and novel observations of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and Southern Ocean with cutting-edge modelling and model development, crucially including improving and running coupled ice-sheet-climate models to observe the role of feedbacks between the cryosphere and ocean on global climate to 2300 and beyond. New observations, including campaigns beneath ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ ice shelves, and existing observations will be assimilated into improved ice sheet boundary conditions and forcing. These will be used to produce new estimates of recent past and present ice sheet melt (including Greenland). These improved ice sheet models will be used alongside rigorous numerical approaches to constrain uncertainty in future ice sheet surface runoff, basal melt and iceberg calving under various forcing scenarios and compared with uncoupled ice sheet-ocean interactions. They will also assess the ‘deep uncertainty’ associated with processes such as marine ice-cliff instability to constrain future estimates of sea-level rise. OCEAN ICE will then use these fluxes to assess impacts on ocean circulation, including the Atlantic Meridional Overturning circulation, global climate and feedbacks to the ice sheets. It will establish the potential for ice sheet 'tipping points' in the coming centuries and their consequences, including ‘tipping cascades’, out to millennial timescales. Finally, OCEAN ICE directly contributes to the All-Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance through observations, logistical collaboration, and analysis, and involves a vast network of international collaborators from South Africa, South Korea, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Germany, Japan, and New Zealand.

It will significantly advance the state-of-the-art in coupled ice-sheet-climate modelling and directly contribute to model intercomparison projects and international climate assessments, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Ocean Assessment. It will link organically to European data centres to disseminate its data, following FAIR and INSPIRE principles and will deliver improved assessments of European climate impacts from the melting ice sheets, with actionable risk and timescales, to policymakers and the public. OCEAN ICE also champion Equality, Diversity and Inclusion principles with the support of the Women in Polar Science network.