Abstract

The adjacent sea area of South Shetland Islands (SSI) is a hot-pot of bio-physical process around the Antarctic continent, with a large amount of scientific investigations and oceanic stations. The past researches of physical oceanography process in this area are often focusing on some mesoscale temporal or special phenomenon, such as the changing of seasonal ice melting, circulation, water mass. Based on the difficulty of observation and analyzation, there are few research to the tidal dynamic to drive the biological process, compare with the aforementioned physical process. The adjacent sea of SSI comprises South Shetland Trough, Bransfield Strait, north-west Antarctic Peninsula continental shelf and SSI plateau, which result in a complex terrain area. The complex terrain and saltation bathymetry generate tidal dynamic to be an important process in near-shore and slope. By using a three dimension high-resolution oceanic numerical model (FVCOM), we simulate the tide in the adjacent sea area of SSI (52-64W, 60-65S). The dominated residual current is K₁ and O₁ tidal diurnal constituents along the isobaths around the SSI plateau and near the shore of SSI in barotropic condition. Two Idealized simulations are the linear stratify and the thermocline stratify condition, to experiment the effect to the residual current by temperature and salinity of water mass. By using dye tracer, we find tidal dynamic can transport the nutrients from deep sea to near surface, and have three structures. The first one is westward from Weddle Sea through Antarctic Sound add Bransfield Strait water to north-west Antarctic Peninsula continental shelf, the second is anti-clockwise along the south slope and north near shore of SSI, and the third is westward along the north slope between the SSI plateau and South Shetland Trough. These structures can be comparative study with optics chlorophyll.