New research

Adrienne Silver, a former WHOI postdoc working with Glen Gawarkiewicz and me, recently published her first postdoc paper in ICES Journal of Marine Science, which describes an index to forecast the movements the foot of the New England shelfbreak front. Congratulations Adrienne! Why the front matters: The shelfbreak front in the Northern Middle Atlantic Bight…

Coccolithophores, unicellular calcifying phytoplankton, grow in a region spanning the entire Southern Ocean termed the “Great Calcite Belt” (GCB). Particulate inorganic carbon (PIC) is generated through the process of coccolithophore calcification, and the GCB is thought to host over a quarter of globally suspended PIC. Sensitive to changes in temperature and ocean alkalinity, coccolithophore growth…

In our new paper “Environmental Drivers of Coccolithophore Growth in the Pacific Sector of the Southern Ocean” we use both observations (shipboard and remote sensing) in combinations with simple growth models (parameterized using CESM/MARBL) to understand what are the major driving factors controlling calcification in the Subantarctic Zone, particularly far from any sedimentary sources. This…

Much of Greenland runoff is delivered to the coastal ocean at marine-terminating glaciers, potentially hundreds of meters below the sea surface. The resulting turbulent buoyant plumes can entrain nurtrient-rich deeper waters, potentially delivering these nutrients to the upper water column which can support elevated primary productivity. The importance of this buoyant plume-productivity effect around Greenland…

Our new SPIROPA paper led by Gordon Zhang on cross-shelf tracer exchange by a streamer of shelf water on the eastern periphery of a warm-core ring in the Middle Atlantic Bight has been published in Progress in Oceanography! Find the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2022.102931

Check out our new paper characterizing buoyant plume dynamics across Greenland, led by Donald Slater “Characteristic depths, fluxes, and timescales for Greenland’s tidewater glacier fjords from subglacial discharge-driven upwelling during summer”. Watch Donald’s IGS seminar on this work here. (Article PDF)  

Our new SPIROPA paper is now out in JGR: “Ephemeral surface chlorophyll enhancement at the New England shelf break driven by Ekman restratification”.