C3 Seminar: Chasing Water
Topic - Chasing Water: Lagrangian tracking of 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 carries heat and nutrients, as well as 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 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 marine microbiology and ecology, palaeoclimatology and 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.
About the speaker
Erik van Sebille
Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, Utrecht University, Netherlands
Erik is an oceanographer and climate scientist. His research focuses on how ocean currents transport heat, nutrients, marine organisms and plastic litter between different regions of the ocean. He currently leads the "Tracking Of Plastic In Our Seas" (TOPIOS) project, funded by a 5-year (2017-2022) European Research Council Starting Grant.
Erik is the winner of the 2016 European Geosciences Union (EGU) Ocean Division Outstanding Young Scientist Award. In 2013, Erik was awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) by the Australian Research Council, based at UNSW.
