• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.227-236
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• 2002

For ten firn cores, from both the eastern and the western side of Lambert Glacier basin (LGB), snow accumulation rate and isotopic temperature were measured far the recent 50 years. Results show that snow accumulation for five cores over the eastern side of LGB (GC30, GD03, GD15, DT001, and DT085) at Wilks Land and Princess Elizabeth Land increases, whereas it decreases at the western side (Core E, DML05, W200, LGB 16, and MGA) at Dronning Maud Land, Mizuho Plateau and Kamp Land. For the past decades, the increasing rate was $0.34-2.36kg\;m^{-2}a^{-1}$ at the eastern side and the decreasing rate was $-0.01\;-\;-2.36kg\;m^{-2}\;a^{-1}$ at the western side. Temperatures at the eastern LGB were also increased with the rate of $0.02%o\;a^{-l}$. At the western LGB it was difficult to see clear trends, which were confirmed by Instrumental temperature records at coastal stations. Although statistic analysis and modeling results display that both surface temperature and accumulation rate has increased trends in Antarctic ice sheet during 1950-2000, the regional distributions were much more different for different geographic areas. We believe that ice-core records at Wilks Land and Princess Elizabeth Land reflect the real variations of SST and moisture change in the southern India Ocean. For the Kamp Land and Dronning Maud Land, however circulation pattern was different, by which the climate was more complicated. The International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) aimed to reveal an overall spatial pattern of climate change over Antarctic ice sheet for the past 200 years. This study points the importance of continental to regional circulation to annual-decadal scale climate change in Antarctica.

• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.45 no.3
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• pp.155-172
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• 2023

The collapse of ice shelves is a process that can severely increase the rise of global sea-levels through the reduction of the buttressing effect of ice shelves and the consequent acceleration of the ice flow of ice sheets. In recent years, the West Antarctic ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea, whose buttressing effect is essential for a great part of the West Antarctic ice sheet, have been experiencing the most rapid melting and thinning in the world. The melting of the West Antarctic ice shelves is caused primarily by heat transported by Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW). For this reason, it is important to investigate ice-ocean interactions that could influence the melting of ice shelves and evaluate the stability of West Antarctic ice shelves. A lot of researchers have been actively investigating the West Antarctic ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea. High-impact journals have recognized the importance of and published studies on ice-ocean interactions occurring near and under the ice shelves as well as the connections among ice shelves. However, in situ observations are limited due to extreme weather and sea-ice conditions near the ice shelves; therefore, many scientific questions remain unanswered. This study introduces the characteristics of the Amundsen Sea and investigate the past and latest research issues in this region. This study also gives suggestions regarding important scientific questions and directions for future research that should help early-career scientists take the lead in future research on the melting dynamics of the West Antarctic ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.48 no.2
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• pp.293-298
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• 2016

Thirty-eight spherules from the Antarctic ice sheet were analyzed using neutron activation analysis under two different conditions to investigate their origin. In almost all of these spherules, the contents of iron, cobalt, and manganese were determined to be 31% to 88%, 17 mg/kg to 810 mg/kg, and 0.017% to 7%, respectively. A detectable iridium content of 0.84 mg/kg was found in only one spherule, which was judged to be extraterrestrial in origin. A comparison of elemental compositions of the Antarctic spherules analyzed in this study with those of deep-sea sediment spherules and those of terrestrial materials revealed that most of the Antarctic spherules except for the sample in which iridium was detected could not be identified as extraterrestrial in origin.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.147-157
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• 2020

Mass change in the Antarctic Ice Sheet(AIS) is the most important indicator of changes in Earth's climate system including global mean sea level rise that are largely affected by ongoing global warming. In this study, AIS mass variations are examined with satellite gravity data and outputs from a regional climate model. The analysis of gravity data shows that along the coastal region the Western AIS has experienced a continuous and significant ice loss while a slight increasing in the Eastern AIS during the study period (2002.08-2016.08). The temporal and spatial variations in ice mass changes are recovered by a regional climate model, but the recovered amplitudes are much smaller than those of observations. This under-estimation is remarkably resolved by modifying a base flow field for the ice discharge. The recovered estimates based on the ice-flow field can explain about 97% of the rate of mass change in observations before 2009. This implies that changes in ice flow dynamics along the coast line plays a pivotal role in regulating long-term budget of ice mass in AIS.

• The Korean Journal of Quaternary Research
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• v.32 no.1_2
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• pp.30-40
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• 2018

In response to the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases, the Arctic temperature is increasing rapidly by 2-3 times other regions. This larger Arctic warming than lower latitudes is called 'Arctic Amplification'(Overland et al., 2017; Goose et al., 2018). Associated with the Arctic Amplification, the Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly and Greenland ice sheet is melting rapidly, especially around the coastal margins (State of Climate, 2018). However, Antarctic climate change appears to be different from the Arctic. In the western part of Antarctica, surface temperature is rising rapidly with large sea and land ice melting, but in the eastern part, there is little temperature change with slight increase in sea ice extent. The contrasting east-west temperature response is illustrated by the deepening of the Amundsen Sea Low whose upstream brings warm maritime air to the Antarctic peninsula and Amundsen-Bellingshausen Seas, but downstream air provides cold air to the Ross Sea, increasing sea ice. Besides, the increase in Southern Annular Mode (SAM) phase due to stratospheric ozone reduction enhances westerly winds, pushing sea ice northward by Ekman divergence and cooling east Antarctica. In this study, we review the recent Antarctic climate change and its possible causes.

• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.617-623
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• 2003

Organisms living in the Arctic and Antarctic regions are exposed to strong constraints, of which temperature is a driving factor. Evolution has led to special adaptations, some with important implications at the biochemical, physiological, and molecular levels. The northern and southern polar oceans have very different characteristics. Tectonic and oceanographic events have played a key role in delimiting the two polar ecosystems and influencing evolution. Antarctica has been isolated and cold longer than the Arctic; its ice sheet developed at least 10 million years earlier. As an intermediate system, the Arctic is a connection between the more extreme, simpler Antarctic system and the very complex temperate and tropical systems. By studying the molecular bases of cold adaptation in polar fish, and taking advantage of the information available on hemoglobin structure and function, we analysed the evolutionary history of the ${\alpha}\;and\;{\beta}globins$ of Antarctic and Arctic hemoglobin using the molecular clock hypothesis as a basis for reconstructing the phylogenetic relationships among species.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.216-233
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• 2003

This study delineates the phenomena related with global environmental changes such as global warming, ozone depletion, and El Ni${\tilde{n}}$o/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) noted in the Antarctic. Retreat of ice cliffs, glaciers, and calving of ice shelves indicate the effects of recently aggravated global warming. The ice cliff located at Marian Cove, King George Island, South Shetland Islands off the Antarctic Peninsula has been observed to be retreating faster in the last 7 years than in the previous 38 years since 1956. There are some indications of temperature and precipitation changes associated with ENSO around King Sejong Station. The regression analyses indicate significant trends such as a decrease in the total amount of ozone and an increase in ultraviolet radiation which was seen by a satellite (TOMS-EUV) in September and October which correspond to ozone-hole season over King Sejong Station. Increase of UV radiation due to the ozone depletion in the Antarctic has changed the growth rate of marine organisms. It may also result in changes to the productivity, biomass, and species composition of marine organisms which can affect the whole marine ecosystem. The recent ice-core drilling over Lake Vostok has been reviewed with emphasis on the four cycles of glacial stages over the past 420,000 years. It is time to show more interest in mainland Antarctica through investigations of the coring and vast ice sheet, terrestrial geology, and upper atmospheric sciences in order to understand the past environmental changes and to predict possible changes to the environment in the future.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.39 no.5
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• pp.473-482
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• 2018

During the period of 2002 to 2017, the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) had observed time-varying gravity changes with unprecedented accuracy. The GRACE science data centers provide the monthly gravity solutions after removing the sub-monthly mass fluctuation using geophysical models. However, model misfit makes the solutions to be contaminated by aliasing errors, which exhibits peculiar north-south stripes. Two conventional filters are used to reduce the errors, but signals with similar spatial patterns to the errors are also removed during the filtering procedure. This would be particularly problematic for estimating the ice mass changes in Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and Antarctic Peninsula (AP) due to their similar spatial pattern to the elongated north-south direction. In this study, we introduce an alternative filter to remove aliasing errors using the Empirical Orthogonal Functions (EOF) analysis. EOF can decompose data into different modes, and thus is useful to separate signals from noise. Therefore, the aliasing errors are effectively suppressed through EOF method. In particular, the month-to-month mass changes in WAIS and AP, which have been significantly contaminated by aliasing errors, can be recovered using EOF method.

• Ocean and Polar Research
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.265-274
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• 2019

To trace the provenance of fine-grained sediments in response to the growth and retreat of glaciers (i.e., Ross Ice Sheet) that affects the depositional process, various kinds of analyses including magnetic susceptibility, granulometry, and clay mineral composition with AMS ¹⁴C age dating were carried out using a gravity core KI-13-GC2 obtained from the Central Basin of the Ross Sea continental margin. The sediments mostly consist of silty mud to sand with ice-rafted debris, the sediment colors alternate repeatedly between light brown and gray, and the sedimentary structures are almost bioturbated with some faint laminations. Among the fine-grained clay mineral compositions, illite is highest (59.1-76.2%), followed by chlorite (12.4-21.4%), kaolinite (4.1-11.6%), and smectite (1.2-22.6%). Illite and chlorite originated from the Transantarctic mountains (metamorphic rocks and granitic rocks) situated to the south of the Ross Sea. Kaolinite might be supplied from the sedimentary rocks of Antarctic continent underneath the ice sheet. The provenance of smectite was considered as McMurdo volcanic group around the Victoria Land in the western part of the Ross Sea. Chlorite content was higher and smectite content was lower during the glacial periods, although illite and kaolinite contents are almost consistent between the glacial and interglacial periods. The glacial increase of chlorite content may be due to more supply of the reworked continental shelf sediments deposited during the interglacial periods to the Central Basin. On the contrary, the glacial decrease of smectite content may be attributed to less transport from the McMurdo volcanic group to the Central Basin due to the advanced ice sheet. Although the source areas of the clay minerals in the Central Basin have not changed significantly between the interglacial and glacial periods, the transport pathways and delivery mechanism of the clay minerals were different between the glacial and interglacial periods in response to the growth and retreat of Ross Ice Sheet in the Ross Sea.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
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• v.34 no.6_2
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• pp.1165-1178
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• 2018

Collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf and its flow velocity changes has the potential to reduce the restraining stress to the seaward flow of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which can cause sea level rising. In this study, variations in ice velocity from 2000 to 2017 for the Nansen Ice Shelf in East Antarctica that experienced a large-scale collapse in April 2016 were analyzed using Landsat-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) and Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images. To extract ice velocity, image matching based on orientation correlation was applied to the image pairs of blue, green, red, near-infrared, panchromatic, and the first principal component image of the Landsat multispectral data, from which the results were combined. The Landsat multispectral image matching produced reliable ice velocities for at least 14% wider area on the Nansen Ice Shelf than for the case of using single band (i.e., panchromatic) image matching. The ice velocities derived from the Landsat multispectral image matching have the error of $2.1m\;a^{-1}$ compared to the in situ Global Positioning System (GPS) observation data. The region adjacent to the Drygalski Ice Tongue showed the fastest increase in ice velocity between 2000 and 2017. The ice velocity along the central flow line of the Nansen Ice Shelf was stable before 2010 (${\sim}228m\;a^{-1}$). In 2011-2012, when a rift began to develop near the ice front, the ice flow was accelerated (${\sim}255m\;a^{-1}$) but the velocity was only about 11% faster than 2010. Since 2014, the massive rift had been fully developed, and the ice velocity of the upper region of the rift slightly decreased (${\sim}225m\;a^{-1}$) and stabilized. This means that the development of the rift and the resulting collapse of the ice front had little effect on the ice velocity of the Nansen Ice Shelf.