The West Antarctic Peninsula and the Scotia Arc (WAPSA) are home to an extremely productive marine ecosystem that supports large krill populations that in turn fuel abundant larger marine organisms.  The high productivity and its close proximity to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current makes the WAPSA an important region for biogeochemical cycling in the Southern Ocean.  The atmospheric, sea ice and oceanic forcing is critical to driving the high biological activity.  The system shows significant variability in the physical environment which is modulated by climate processes operating over interannual and decadal timescales.  Temperature records for the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) have shown the largest average atmospheric warming in the southern hemisphere during the twentieth century. This has been accompanied with the warming of surface and deeper waters and changes in ocean salinity over large parts of the WAP shelf. Widespread glacial retreat along the WAP has been related to the increasing ocean temperatures. These changes have motivated many nations to focus on collecting sustained physical-chemical-biological measurements on the WAP to understand how potential changes associated with long term climate change will ripple through the marine food webs. The WAPSA is home to multiple decade long time series that are providing detailed annual measurements that have increased our understanding of ecological dynamics for this marine system, the impact of physical disturbance on these polar communities, and potential ecosystem trajectories given predicted future warming.  The fact that this region has multiple multi-decade time series makes the WAPSA a scientifically unique and valuable location for climate change research.

The global COVID pandemic has been a major disruption for annual time series sampling which will be visualized as a data gap in the decadal time series. While the impact of the data gap will be scientifically hard to quantify, it will be a conspicuous gap given the high interannual variability in the sea ice, wind and the associated impacts on the WAPSA ecosystem.  The year of COVID also drove home the need to expand the ability to remotely sample Antarctic regions to maintain measurements during major regional/global disruptions and the increasing financial pressures for countries to maintain sustained integrated data collection.  Increasingly, the answer will be to grow sustained automated sampling networks.  As technologies are rapidly maturing, and what was a speculative vision is now a realizable goal.  To that end, the SOOS WAPSA working group has and will be increasingly focused on bringing together an international vision for developing, deploying and operating a physical-chemical-biological ocean observing network.

During the past year of COVID, the WAPSA working group held a virtual science symposium in July of 2020. Beyond the enjoyment of ZOOMing with international colleagues/friends, the meeting provided several recommendations to move the science and sampling of the WAP forward.  These recommendations included 1) developing an integrated international vision for sustained automated sampling of the WAP, 2) virtually bring together the modeling community working along the WAP and Scotia Arc to leverage off the wide range efforts focused high priority science needs, and 3) continue to build a comprehensive capability to access data from throughout the many science efforts being conducted along the WAP. Additionally the WAPSA group is editing a special issue of the Marine Technology Society Journal on polar technologies which will provide a means of sharing the WAPSA working group vision with the wider community.  The special issue is slated for publication in February 2022.  So as the world hopefully reopens the WAPSA group is looking forward to a productive and exciting year complete with great science, a return to fieldwork, and shared vision.  The WAPSA team welcomes all interested and don’t hesitate to reach out to Oscar Schofield and Juan Höfer.

Oscar Schofield and Juan Höfer (WAPSA Co-Chairs)