Amundsen and Bellingshausen Sector (ABS) RWG Welcomes a New Leadership Team Members

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The Amundsen and Bellingshausen Sector (ABS) Regional Working Group (RWG) are delighted to announce that Andrew Thompson, Pierre Dutrieux, Tiago Dotto and Alessandro Silvano are joining the working group's leadership team. Alessandro is joining the working as the new APECS representative with previous APECS representative, Yoshihiro Nakayama completing his two-year term but remaining in the general leadership team.

Dr Tiago Segabinazzi Dotto is a Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. He studied oceanography and specialised in physical oceanography at the Federal University of Rio Grande (FURG) in Rio Grande, Brazil. He completed his PhD in 2019 in physical oceanography at the University of Southampton, UK. During that time, his research was focused on studying the ocean circulation off West Antarctica, particularly the Ross Gyre, using remote sensing, and investigating open ocean-slope exchanges in the Amundsen Sea through in situ data and high-resolution models. Currently, he is working on the TARSAN project, one of the projects under the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC). As a postdoc of TARSAN project, he is investigating heat fluxes into and out of the Thwaites Ice Shelf cavity and turbulent mixing rates using in situ measurements. Tiago's research interests are focused on exchanges between the open ocean and continental shelf, ocean-ice shelves interactions, dense water formation and export and variability of ocean properties. He is also a member of the Brazilian High Latitude Oceanography Group (GOAL) and the Brazilian National Institute of Science and Technology of the Cryosphere (INCT-CRIOSFERA).

Dr Pierre Dutrieux received his PhD in Oceanography from the University of Hawaii in 2009. His PhD work investigated tropical ocean circulation and dynamics with a particular focus on meso-scale eddy variability. Since then he directed his attention to the interaction between the oceans and the polar ice sheets, first at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS, until 2015), at the Polar Science Center, APL-UW, at the LAmont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and now back at BAS. Using pioneering autonomous platforms (Autosub 3) to roam under at least 300 m thick ice for tens of kilometers, his research demonstrated that warm waters >3° above the in situ freezing point reaches the grounding line (where the ice sheet comes afloat and eventually extends into an ice shelf) of Pine Island Glacier, in West Antarctica. This water efficiently melts the ice shelf, reduces its buttressing effect on the flow of grounded ice into the ocean, and is now shown to be a key driver of a wide-spread glacial acceleration and retreat in the Amundsen Sea, West Antarctica, with important contributions to sea level rise, the freshwater budget of the Southern Ocean and possible impacts on the global thermohaline circulation and local primary production. Using autonomous platforms, ship-borne ocean observations, ground-based and airborne radar observations, satellite observations and numerical modelling, Pierre further demonstrated that in this setting glacial melt is strongly modulated in time by remote climatic sources, and that the spatial distribution of melt is complex, varying at meters to kilometers scales, and carving and interacting with intriguing landscapes under the ice. Developing new observational tools and integrating new understanding into predictive models, Pierre continues his work to shed light on the processes controlling the oceanic melting of glacial ice and its implications for the climate system.
Dr Andrew Thomspon is a physical oceanographer and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.  Prior to coming to Caltech, he worked as a postdoc in the UK at the University of East Anglia, the University of Cambridge, and the British Antarctic Survey, and he earned his Ph.D. in physical oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego in 2006.  His research group is broadly interested in dynamical processes occurring within the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), the Southern Ocean's subpolar gyres and its continental shelf seas, with a specific interest on the formation and maintenance of frontal currents and their impact on the transport of heat and other tracers.  His group uses a combination of idealized process-based modelling, remote sensing, and observational field work -- the latter involving long-term deployments of autonomous ocean gliders in the ACC and near the Antarctic coast.  He has participated in five Southern Ocean research cruises, two as chief scientist, and contributed remotely to the deployment and piloting of ocean gliders from many other cruises in the Southern Ocean.  Currently, Andy's research interests include (i) the impact of submesoscale motions on ventilation and upper ocean turbulence in the Southern Ocean, (ii) the dynamics of the marginal ice zone, (iii) the Southern Ocean's role in global overturning circulation transitions, (iv) the influence of boundary currents on heat transport and ice-shelf melt rates, and (iv) carbon export pathways in the Southern Ocean.

Dr Alessandro Silvano is a research fellow at the University of Southampton (UK), investigating how currents in the Southern Ocean regulate the oceanic heat transport toward the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Alessandro has recently completed a PhD at the University of Tasmania and CSIRO, where he worked on ice-ocean interaction in East Antarctica. Alessandro joins ABS co-chairs Bastien Queste and Patricia Yager, as well as the ABS leadership team in implementing the SOOS activities in the Southern Ocean Indian sector in accordance with SOOS's 5-year implementation plan.