Indian Scientific Expeditions to the Southern Ocean (ISESO) have been implemented since 2004 to explore the unknown areas of the Indian Sector of the SO (ISSO) with the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research (NCPOR) as the nodal centre for the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India. The studies conducted in these expeditions have prime importance to understand the role of the SO on regional and global climatic variability. Surveys have been designed to explore the interconnections between physical, chemical and biological components across the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). Further aims are to understand the ocean-ice-atmosphere interaction, aerosols, other trace gases, thermohaline variations, carbon sequestration and biogeochemical processes. Valuable sediment cores have also been recovered in some critical locations for the reconstruction of the paleo-environmental conditions for selected time slices during the last glacial-interglacial cycles. This special issue presents multidisciplinary data collected during ISESO from 2010 to 2018 that shed light on the present understanding of one of the sparsely explored regions in the SO.

自2004年以来，印度进行了南印度洋科学考察（ISESO），以国家极地和海洋研究中心（NCPOR）作为印度海洋部的节点中心，探索了印度洋SO（ISSO）领域的未知地区。印度政府地球科学。在这些考察中进行的研究对于了解SO在区域和全球气候变化中的作用至关重要。设计调查旨在探索整个南极绕极电流（ACC）的物理，化学和生物成分之间的相互关系。进一步的目标是了解海冰与大气的相互作用，气溶胶，其他痕量气体，热盐变化，碳固存和生物地球化学过程。在某些关键位置还回收了宝贵的沉积物核心，以重建最后的冰川-冰川间周期内选定时间段的古环境条件。本期专刊介绍了ISESO在2010年至2018年期间收集的多学科数据，阐明了目前对SO中稀疏勘探区之一的了解。