Southern Ocean Sentinel
An international program to assess climate change impacts on marine ecosystems
Climate Change in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean will have profound effects on the almost pristine last great wilderness on earth. However climate change effects in the Southern Ocean can also have far-reaching effects on the rest of the planet as well. To date research into how quickly the continent is changing has been limited by its isolation and extreme weather conditions.
To combat this lack of knowledge, WWF and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre and the Australian Antarctic Division jointly held a workshop to look at establishing a Southern Ocean Sentinel for monitoring and assessing current and future climate change in the Southern Ocean. The results of that workshop are published in the Southern Ocean Sentinel report. The report presents a clear snapshot of the state of our knowledge on the effects of climate change on the region, how those impacts have and can extend to Australia and the world and what is needed to ensure we have an effective monitoring program in place to monitor future change.
The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report indicated our current understanding of climate change in Antarctica and the Southern Oceans has made it difficult to predict with certainty when key climate change tipping points will be reached in this region and how quickly those changes will affect the rest of the world. The Sentinel program aims to facilitate a long term collaborative international program to gather data on climate change and its effects on the Southern Ocean. This information can be used to improve management practices and predict future climate change impacts on the Southern Ocean and the rest of the world. With recent research indicating climate change is proceeding more rapidly than was predicted by the IPCC, the Sentinel program is an urgently needed component in our understanding of climate change.
