As the seasons change, so too does the strength of ocean currents. A new study from MIT researchers published last month in Nature Communications provides evidence that not only do certain currents become stronger in certain seasons, but also that this seasonality affects both marine life and climate.
The paleoclimate record for the last ice age — a time 21,000 years ago called the “Last Glacial Maximum” (LGM) — tells of a cold Earth whose northern continents were covered by vast ice sheets. Chemical traces from plankton fossils in deep-sea sediments reveal rearranged…
The paleoclimate record for the last ice age — a time 21,000 years ago called the “Last Glacial Maximum” (LGM) — tells of a cold Earth whose northern continents were covered by vast ice sheets. Chemical traces from plankton fossils in deep-sea sediments…
MIT-WHOI graduate student Jörn Callies’ research on atmospheric and oceanic wave fluctuations garnered him an award at the recent American Geophysical Union Conference—the largest worldwide conference of its kind.
September’s here, and classes in MIT’s Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate (PAOC) have begun. Faculty, post docs, researchers, and graduate students continue to explore the ocean on computers, in lab experiments, and on oceanographic research cruises. At the same time, we’re hearing echoes of PAOC’s programs in oceanography and the ocean’s role in climate far beyond MIT, as several past graduates and post docs gain new faculty appointments at top universities.
Internal lee waves are a player in ocean dynamics that may make an important contribution to deep-ocean mixing. They warrant serious consideration for inclusion in the next generation of climate models.
Malte Jansen, PhD’13 for Equilibration of an Atmosphere by Geostrophic Turbulence.
Dr. Jansen’s thesis work was supervised by Prof. Raffaele Ferrari. Dr. Jansen is now a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow working with Isaac Held at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL)/ Princeton to work on polar amplification of climate signals
Study finds fronts are hot spots for phytoplankton blooms.
John Taylor, who worked with Raffaele Ferrari as an NSF funded Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow, is moving to Cambridge University in the U.K. at the end of the month, to take up a faculty position as a University Lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.
Malte Jansen is a third year graduate student in PAOC at MIT. He has been using MITgcm in an idealized study to explore how mixing by eddies may influence the equilibrium state of the extra-tropical atmosphere and the Southern Ocean and in particular why the two regimes exhibit such a different equilibrium state. His advisor is Raffaele Ferrari.