«Prix de Quervain» awarded to Alexander Haumann

As the global surface ocean warms, the Southern Ocean has cooled slightly over the past decades and the sea ice cover that forms there every year has continued to expand until 2015. In his thesis, Alexander Haumann researched the causes of this phenomenon. Based on long-term satellite observations since the 1980s, he has shown that the salinity in the Southern Ocean is mainly determined by the formation and melting of sea ice. When sea ice forms on the Antarctic coast in winter, the salt in the ocean precipitates, making the ocean saltier. This sea ice carpet is then transported over thousands of kilometres to the north, where it melts and reduces the salt content in the ocean, thus reducing the exchange between the deep and surface oceans.

Haumann pointed out that this conveyor belt of fresh water has intensified over the last decades due to stronger winds, which has led to a decrease in salinity and a cooling of the surface ocean at the sea ice edge. He was mentored by Nicolas Gruber and Matthias M¨¹nnich from the Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics (IBP) at ETH Zurich.

The Swiss Commission for Polar and Altitude Research (SKPH) of the Swiss Academies of Sciences, together with the Jungfraujoch Commission of the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences, awarded the ?Prix de Quervain? for young scientists on 22 June 2018 as part of the international POLAR2018 conference. The prize is to promote outstanding young researchers in their field.