Sack Lunch Seminar (SLS)

Chasing Water: Lagrangian tracking of tracers, plastic and plankton through the global ocean



The ocean is in constant motion, with water circulating within and flowing between basins. As the water moves around, it caries heat and nutrients, as well as larger objects like planktonic organisms and litter around the globe.

The most natural way to study the pathways of water and the connections between ocean basins is using particle trajectories. The trajectories can come from either computing of virtual floats in high-resolution ocean models, or from the paths of free-flowing observational drifters (surface buoys or Argo floats) in the real ocean.

In this seminar, I'll give an overview of some recent work with Lagrangian particles. I will show applications to dynamical oceanography, marine ecology, palaeoclimatology and marine plastic pollution. Central to each of these studies is the question on how connected the different ocean basins are, and on what time scales water flows between the different regions of the ocean.