Upwelling of global deep waters to the sea surface in the Southern Ocean closes the global overturning circulation and is fundamentally important for oceanic uptake of carbon and heat, nutrient resupply for sustaining oceanic biological production, and the melt rate of ice shelves. However, the exact pathways and role of topography in Southern Ocean upwelling remain largely unknown. Here we show detailed upwelling pathways in three dimensions, using hydrographic observations and particle tracking in high-resolution models. The analysis reveals that the northern-sourced deep waters enter the Antarctic Circumpolar Current via southward flow along the boundaries of the three ocean basins, before spiraling southeastward and upward through the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Upwelling is greatly enhanced at five major topographic features, associated with vigorous mesoscale eddy activity. Deep water reaches the upper ocean predominantly south of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, with a spatially nonuniform distribution. The timescale for half of the deep water to upwell from 30° S to the mixed layer is ~60–90 years.

Ensuring that global warming remains <2 °C requires rapid CO2 emissions reduction. Additionally, 100–900 gigatons CO2 must be removed from the atmosphere by 2100 using a portfolio of CO2 removal (CDR) methods. Ocean afforestation, CDR through basin-scale seaweed farming in the open ocean, is seen as a key component of the marine portfolio. Here, we analyse the CDR potential of recent re-occurring trans-basin belts of the floating seaweed Sargassum in the (sub)tropical North Atlantic as a natural analogue for ocean afforestation. We show that two biogeochemical feedbacks, nutrient reallocation and calcification by encrusting marine life, reduce the CDR efficacy of Sargassum by 20–100%. Atmospheric CO2 influx into the surface seawater, after CO2-fixation by Sargassum, takes 2.5–18 times longer than the CO2-deficient seawater remains in contact with the atmosphere, potentially hindering CDR verification. Furthermore, we estimate that increased ocean albedo, due to floating Sargassum, could influence climate radiative forcing more than Sargassum-CDR. Our analysis shows that multifaceted Earth-system feedbacks determine the efficacy of ocean afforestation.

The spatial structure of the upper ocean heat budget in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is investigated using the ⅙°, data-assimilating Southern Ocean State Estimate (SOSE) for 2005–10. The ACC circumpolar integrated budget shows that 0.27 PW of ocean heat gain from the atmosphere and 0.38 PW heat gain from divergence of geostrophic heat transport are balanced by −0.58 PW cooling by divergence of Ekman heat transport and −0.09 PW divergence of vertical heat transport. However, this circumpolar integrated balance obscures important zonal variations in the heat budget. The air–sea heat flux shows a zonally asymmetric pattern of ocean heat gain in the Indian and Atlantic sectors and ocean heat loss in the Pacific sector of the ACC. In the Atlantic and Indian sectors of the ACC, the surface ocean heat gain is primarily balanced by divergence of equatorward Ekman heat transport that cools the upper ocean. In the Pacific sector, surface ocean heat loss and cooling due to divergence of Ekman heat transport are balanced by warming due to divergence of geostrophic heat advection, which is similar to the dominant heat balance in the subtropical Agulhas Return Current. The divergence of horizontal and vertical eddy advection of heat is important for warming the upper ocean close to major topographic features, while the divergence of mean vertical heat advection is a weak cooling term. The results herein show that topographic steering and zonal asymmetry in air–sea exchange lead to substantial zonal asymmetries in the heat budget, which is important for understanding the upper cell of the overturning circulation.