Kerguelen Island area is a oceanographically dynamic area, part of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current system, and a very sensitive biological hotspot. It has been the focus of several oceanographic campaigns, with ocean color, eddies and currents measurements. A number of marine animals around the archipelago have also been tracked, turning around eddies, or reaching fronts as pinpointed by altimetry-extracted filament data (FSLE). However, the elephant seals are also diving when foraging. The Argos beacons used to track their positions at the surface is also recording information on those dives: temperature, salinity (conductivity), depth (pressure). Much like an Argo float, but with much shorter and numerous measurement cycles. Thus they enable to measure sections along their paths in the ocean depths. 

From those measurements, density (or its reverse, buoyancy) can be deduced. With this information, and the Absolute Dynamic Topography from altimetry (providing surface pressure), plus the filaments the fronts, an analysis of the in-depth structure of the ocean in the area has been done. It appears that in addition with warm water getting down in large scale fronts, the vertical heat transport in the deep-reaching fronts at submesoscale around Kerguelen is "warm water upwards". This can be important for the atmosphere cooling effect of the ocean, and lead to more studies in other places, ideally at submesocale. Swot should provide with this level of ocean feature at the surface in the future. In-depth data will still be needed, from living auxiliaries such as elephant seals, or from automated floats.