AOSC Seminar by Dr. Erik van Sebille, 10/01/2020
AOSC Seminar
Dr. Erik van Sebille
Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, Utrecht University
Title: Chasing Water: How ocean currents transport plastic and plankton around the globe
Abstract: 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 plastic 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.
In this seminar, I'll give an overview of some recent work with Lagrangian particles. I will introduce our new open-source oceanparcels.org framework. 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.
Speaker Bio: Our ocean has a dark matter problem: 99% of all the plastic that has ever gone into the ocean is missing." Erik van Sebille is an oceanographer and climate scientist. His research focuses on how ocean currents transport heat, nutrients, marine organisms and plastic litter. He currently leads the European Research Council-funded Tracking of Plastic in our Seas (TOPIOS) project with the goal to create a 3D map of marine plastic pollution and track it back to its sources. He is also lead developer of the OceanParcels code, an open source framework to simulate ocean transport. He has a passion for science communication, having done more than 300 interviews about plastic pollution and advised UK Parliament and the European Commission on the problem’s scale, was recently named as a 2019 AGU James B. Macelwane Medalist.
Contact: Jacob Wenegrat
AOSC Seminar
Pre-seminar refreshment: N/A
Seminar: 3:30-4:30pm, Zoom
!NOTE! Meet-the-Speaker will be before seminar: Time 2:30-3:15pm, Zoom [For AOSC Students only]
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