Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean

This statement in the article is a real head-scratcher:

> Until now, the Southern Ocean region was virtually inaccessible to satellites due to its low temperatures and the complex, ever-changing dynamics of sea ice.

I hate to cast doubt on the veracity of such an interesting story, but this really makes me wonder whether the entire article is just AI garbage.

Doesn't need to be AI to be garbage per se, popular science should always be read with some skepticism as it's often a translation (pop sci) of a translation (news publication) of a paper (the actual source).

Example, pop sci will show a rendering of a lush green planet with a headline like "EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE FOUND!11", the news release will be something like "Potentially life-supporting planet discovered by xyz", and the actual paper will be something like "measuring device foobar123 noticed a 0.2% decrease in luminance of star aybabtu-1337 at a period of .6 frotz/picoyear indicating this planet probably isn't cooked or frozen but what do we know lol"

That sentence is garbage for sure but if you read it with good intentions from the journalistic view it almost makes sense. It is about remote sensing from satellites, not about the satellites themselves. There are lots of interesting edge cases where remote sensing does not work. The problem is usually that it is expensive to get on the ground data to validate models.

It's a real danger that what is not immediately easy for non-experts to understand gets flagged with the suspicion of being "AI garbage".

If you want to understand the challenges of satellites in the Southern Ocean, there's plenty of info about it online.

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/105/12/BAMS-...

(I am also non an expert, and I also didn't understand it at first. That's to be expected. The real world is complex and hard to understand.)

There is nothing in the article you linked that explains why "low temperatures and the complex, ever-changing dynamics of sea ice" used to make the region "virtually inaccessible to satellites" but now no longer does.

Further, I did a search using "challenges of satellites in the Southern Ocean" and found no info, rather than plenty of info.

edit: I eventually found the following link which does seem to discuss some challenges, but does not indicate that they have been solved. It certainly does not support the claim that the region is "inaccessible to satellites".

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15481603.2023.21...

Just watch a pop sci docummentary on something you know about.

I was lucky enough to run into "how computers are made" on Discovery when I was fairly young. It was a serious shock and a learning experience.