OMG Irma. It is going through the Caribbean and slamming everything in its path. I’ve been getting updates from friends in the Virgin Islands and it sounds like it was harrowing. Thankfully they made it through which is the most important part (even though their stuff may not have). Other islands have not been so lucky.

This is a monster hurricane, fueled by warm waters in the Atlantic. Just to get a sense of how insane it got in Barbuda, here is the atmospheric data from a water level station there. The eye of the hurricane passed right overhead, which is why you see the insane drop in air pressure.

The wind speeds got up to 100 knots before the anemometer conked out. These winds are no joke, reports indicate that nearly every building on the island suffered damage, if not completely destroyed.

Update: The anemometer was completely destroyed.

Just saw highest wind speed I've ever seen on a WX ob. Anemometer at #Barbuda blew away after recording gust to 155 mph. #Irma pic.twitter.com/aNwT5i04gf

— Dan Satterfield (@wildweatherdan) September 6, 2017

Another problem for this tiny island with wide areas of low elevation, storm surge. Preliminary data shows it got up to 8 feet.

There’s also some oceanographic data from a buoy located south of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands that’s part of the Caribbean Integrated Coastal Ocean Observing System (CarICOOS) . Strong winds with gusts over 60 km/h accompany the pressure drop. 

The water temperature data is intermittent, but you can definitely see seawater getting colder. Wave and wind mixing churns up cold water from the deep ocean, causing surface water temperatures to drop. 

This buoy also has salinity data, and you can also see the effect of the mixing in the increase in salinity, as deeper saltier water is mixed to the surface. There is also a drop in salinity right before the hurricane hits which could be caused by rain freshening the sea surface or just fresher water being pushed past the buoy. From this data, you can’t distinguish the two causes.

Lastly, let’s take a look at the wave data. Wave heights got up to nearly 19 feet at the peak of the storm. Some waves might have been larger as this plot shows averaged values.

Another fascinating plot is the wave direction which shows how waves emanating from the center of the hurricane. The wave are coming steadily from the East (90 degrees on the compass rose) until the eye passes overhead, at which point the wave direction turns 180 degrees completely to the West (270 degrees on the compass rose).

That was my oceanographic quick look. I’m hunting around for some ocean robot data, as NOAA AOML deploys their gliders into hurricanes, but haven’t found any yet. I’ll post when I do. For another take on the storm, take a look at my friend Jyotika’s Tropical Storm Blog.  It’s got good science and a good rundown of where Irma has been and where it’s going.

For those of you in Irma’s path, make sure you are prepared and take the necessary precautions to stay safe. Here are tips from NOAA’s Hurricane Preparedness site.

The post A quick look at the data from inside Hurricane Irma first appeared on Deep Sea News.

On the second day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me:
Two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the third day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me:
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the fourth day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me:
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the fifth day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the sixth day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the seventh day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
seven seas to sail in,
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the eight day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
eight less viruses to die from,
seven seas to sail in,
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the ninth day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
nine giant zucchinis,
eight less viruses to die from,
seven seas to safely sail in,
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the tenth day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
ten cups of water,
nine giant zucchinis,
eight less viruses to die from,
seven seas to safely sail in,
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the eleventh day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
eleventh hour rescues,
ten cups of water,
nine giant zucchinis,
eight less viruses to die from,
seven seas to safely sail in,
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the twelfth day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
twelve hundred degree cooling,
eleventh hour rescues,
ten cups of water,
nine giant zucchinis,
eight less viruses to die from,
seven seas to safely sail in,
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

THE END.

We’ve reached the end of this song, but we have also may have reached the end of NASA Earth Science too. In case you haven’t heard, NASA Earth Science may be on the chopping block. Yeah NASA Earth Science studies change, but it also figures out how we can safely live and move about this complicated environmental system that exists on our planet. Our way of life has been ridiculously improved by pointing the science lens inward from space as well as outward. If we lose NASA earth science, we lose all the verses in this song. If these are products that make your life better and safer, then support NASA Earth Science by sharing all the good things it does for you.

Thanks! *steps off tiny soapbox*

The post The Twelve Days of Christmas – NASA Earth Science Edition first appeared on Deep Sea News.

It is no secret that I find many denizens of the deep icky. Crustaceans are among them. But this video of a swarm of crabs is both beguiling and horrifying. TEEMING MASSES OF CRABS WALKING AND SWIMMING ACROSS THE SEA FLOOR.

Due to a wonderful confluence of ocean physics, seamounts are biological hotspots. Currents formed by upwelling and tides can bring deep nutrients up the slopes of these underwater mountains, and is probably what attracted the red pelagic crab, Pleuroncodes planipes, to this very location. Crabs live for the NOMS. Peak crab density is 77 crabs per square meter, roughly equivalent to having 77 one-inch sized crabs scuttling across a 4-person dining room table! Depending on how much you love seafood, this would either make or break your seafood dinner party.

The crabs also exhibited classic swarm behavior, where many animals moved together as a singular creepy mass and smaller groups of crabs merged with larger ones. Swarms may also have an important ecological function. This crab swarm stirred the benthic muck at the seafloor, creating a turbid cloud of sediment and nutrients 4-10 m high that could be used by other organisms. Be still my physical oceanography heart, but could the swarm also cause the little dips in seawater temperature and salinity near the seafloor? We can’t tell unless comparing to other swarmless casts, but it be a lot would be cooler if they did.

Want to know more about this crustacean chase? Check out the video below.

REFERENCES:

Pineda J, Cho W, Starczak V, Govindarajan AF, Guzman HM, Girdhar Y, Holleman RC, Churchill J, Singh H, Ralston DK. (2016) A crab swarm at an ecological hotspot: patchiness and population density from AUV observations at a coastal, tropical seamount. PeerJ 4:e1770https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.1770

The post CRAB SWARM! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Now I give the eye of disdain to another two fisherman, who found a detached piece of an mooring and have decided to hold it for ransom. It’s not unusual that oceanographic moorings break free and sometimes float to the surface. It’s also not unusual that fisherman sometimes scoop them up. I’ve had that happen twice and both times they were nice and cooperative we got the instruments back. But this is absolutely ridiculous.

Here’s the timeline of events:

January 15th: There was a strong bottom current event during an underwater storm that caused the mooring to detach from its anchor and float to the surface. Other floats also detached during this event which MBARI also chased after and found. These mooring were actually designed to capture and measure these types of underwater storms, which are more like crazy sediment landslide, and they are actually notoriously awesome at ripping moorings from the seafloor.

January 17th:  The broken bit of mooring phoned home and told researchers at USGS it was in Moss Landing.

January 19th: Fisherman tells USGS he has the mooring and demands money for it. They say no. They tell him they want it back.

January 20th: Fisherman drives away with mooring.

And here we are at the current legal scuffle. USGS wants its mooring back and one of the fisherman has his father, an attorney, arguing that the fisherman are now “OWNERS” of the mooring and will “SELL” it back to USGS (their capitalization, not mine).

If you lose something in the ocean, it doesn’t stay yours forever.

I’m just going to file this under arcane misinterpretation of salvaging laws by a lawyer out of his element. It had a homing beacon on it. It was SUPPOSED TO BE FOUND. That’s how they found it on the dock. And it had a tag indicating it was owned by USGS with a phone number because you know, they wanted it back.

I don’t need a million dollars—I just want to be compensated for my days lost

Two words: GHOST NETS. Seriously, if that fisherman wants to be compensated for losing money and time for getting his propeller entangled in a rogue floating piece of rope, then all fishers better pony up and make a fund to reimburse all the other boat owners that have been entangled in discarded fishing nets. I absolutely agree it sucks, but one mooring is literally a drop in the bucket of ALL THE CRAP we throw into the ocean. And this thing was actually designed to be retrieved unlike the majority of other marine debris!

“It’s his rollerskate and he can sell it to whoever or keep it all he wants

YOU GUYS. I’ve always wanted an ocean rollerskate. If that’s the way current salvaging laws work I’m totes headed down to the marina to sit on your boat, claim it as my own and sell it on ebay. But for reals, the mooring was not abandoned so these guys can’t just lay claim to it.

Let’s just summarize by saying that the arguments for keeping the buoy are at boorish and incorrect. Coincidentally or not, it sounds like this fisherman has fired his lawyer dad. What I am really hoping is that these dudes just give the mooring back. I feel for you, propeller entanglements are the worst, but holding public property hostage is just not the way to go.

SOURCES:

2 men take US gov’t ocean science buoy, now want to “sell” it back for $13,000

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2777911/1-Main.pdf

Fisherman who has kept USGS buoy for 10 weeks: All I want is compensation

Fishermen Ransom Uncle Sam’s Sea Gizmo

The post Two California fishermen pretend they are maritime pirates and hold an oceanographic mooring for ransom first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Oh little pufferfish. Your tiny little fins are no match for a mini-ocean maelstrom. You and your buddy are trapped in a small ocean vortex that keeps spinning you around and around. Other fish just idly swim by watching your sad little tumbles. I’ll admit your awkward rolls made me chuckle.

Although the narrator claims the vortex happens at the interface of the warm Equatorial Current and the cold California current, it’s probably caused by more local process such as upwelling or tides along the reef edge where this was filmed. I would guess this vortex is usually invisible, but can be seen here because it captured the bubbles emitted from the videographers dive gear. And this train of captured air bubbles shows that it is a very, very long vortex. If bubbles are trapped in the vortex, there are probably small fish and plankton in there too. I bet that’s why the other bigger fish are hanging around, easy snacking on fluid dynamics induced food balls. Let’s just hope this eddy dissipates soon and you and your ungainly puffer-friends can eventually escape to a less dizzy life.

The post Ocean spin cycle traps hapless pufferfish. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Now imagine you are an ROV sampling whilst exploring in majestic submarine Mendocino Canyon. You see a brown wall of poo-colored water heading towards you. You, unfortunately, are about to be engulfed by the undersea version of an avalanche: a turbidity current.

In case you can’t really imagine exactly what that means, here is that ROV just sciencing along in Mendocino Canyon in normal conditions.

Now here’s that same ROV inside the turbidity current.

Turbidity currents are ridiculously fast, bottom-trapped currents that flow down steep ocean slopes. They are turbulent: the currents inside them are a mess of chaotic eddies and turbid: filled with sediment. In the GIF above, the billows and eddies are the turbulence, the poo-color is sediment. Sediment can be made up of a variety of things: mud, sand, tiny rocks, big rocks, boulders, dead plants and animals, and even animal poo. Thus the poo-color.

While it’s the turbulence that causes the turbidity currents surface to form gorgeous undulations, it’s the sediment that makes them flow. Turbidity currents are gravity currents, driven by gravity pulling a heavy sediment-laden density current down a slope through lighter sediment-free water around it.

All it takes to form a turbidity current is a jostle of the seafloor by either an earthquake, landslide, submarine with obnoxiously loud subwoofers or even pulses of river outflow. Murky sea floor goo becomes suspended in the water. The goo makes the water denser and heavier. Then the goo-filled water flows downhill picking up speed until it becomes a turbidity current.

Just like avalanches, turbidity currents are incredibly fast (up to 60 miles per hour!) and have been known to take out anything that gets in their way. After the Grand Banks earthquake in 1929, a turbidity current proceeded to sequentially snap a submarine telegraph cable in 12 places as it hauled ass down the continental slope. GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY FISHIES.

While the dance of 1000 turbulent billows may just look like a pretty side effect, they are important for turbidity current growth and death. The billows sour the seafloor, scooping up sediment into the turbidity current in a process known as entrainment. With more sediment, the current becomes bigger, denser, faster, and even more turbulent. MOAR turbulence -> MOAR turbidity -> MOAR speed ->MOAR turbulence. It’s like a perpetual motion machine of turbid turbulence. But eventually all turbidity currents must leave their slopey racetracks and die on the flat plains of the deep ocean. The current slows down, the billows start to fade and all that sediment is deposited on the seafloor again.

To my knowledge, this is a pretty unique video because turbidity currents occur intermittently and are rarely observed (because they’ve probably trashed your instruments as they went by). But in geological time, turbidity currents occur pretty frequently because we can map and date their remains, turbidites (That’s turbidite with a b, not to be confused with the turdidite your coworker forgot to flush). As the turbidity currents flows downhill it not only entrains sediment, but it also deposits sediment on the seafloor. Like a slug, the turbidity current leaves a tell-tale trail behind it made up of pebbles, silt, sand and probably some slime that is really hard to get off your hands. Slice through the seafloor and you can see hundreds and even thousands of these trails layered on top of each other stretching out over hundreds of miles.

It’s notoriously hard to put in moorings in Monterey canyon because turbidity currents have a penchant for ripping them from the sea floor. The fact that this ROV got caught in one and managed not only to survive but also keep on sciencing in the process is pretty badass. I’m just glad neither myself nor my instruments have ever been in the path of one.

Sumner, E. J., & Paull, C. K. (2014). Swept away by a turbidity current in Mendocino submarine canyon, California. Geophysical Research Letters,41(21), 7611-7618.

Want to see MOAR turbidity current? Check out the whole video with the ROV in Mendocino Canyon.

And for no particular reason, here are 4 minutes of turbidity currents with a dubstep soundtrack.

The post ROV gets caught in turbidity current, lives to tell the tale. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Biomixing, where the ocean is mixed by swimming animals, has long been a hot topic in oceanography. Some people think all that biological flapping and stroking could be a major source of oceanic turbulence. Others, not so much. But a new laboratory study by M. Wilhelmus and J. Dabiri from Caltech is certainly going to ignite scientists love of arguing about these kinds of things.

The concept of sea beasties as ocean swizzle sticks has been around for a long time. But most studies found the turbulence produced by animals was small and probably insignificant. Biomixing was even mentioned in Walter Munk’s 1966 seminal paper Abyssal Recipes, but he really had no idea how to estimate how much animals really stirred the ocean so he just ignored it.

That changed in 2005, when a bunch of scientists from the University of Victoria deployed their fancy turbulence detecting instrument at dusk into a swarm of upward swimming zooplankton*. Everyday zooplankton participate in a phenomena known as diel vertical migration, heading to the surface when the sun sets and descending to the dark depths when it rises again. It was during this upward vertical migration, that researchers observed some big ass turbulence, nearly 100 to 1000 times larger than what is usually seen in the ocean. Since this daily migration in the largest in the world in terms of the net biomass alone, this suggested there could be a significant amount of unmeasured biological mixing all over the world’s ocean.

Of course this got scientists all excited…because OOH BRIGHT AND SHINY NEW TURBULENCE! There were studies on mixing by algae, nekton, paramecia, jellyfish, and even whales (which I am not citing because I think the analysis is flawed). And there were dissenters as well, arguing that the turbulent eddies formed by zooplankton are too small to create any globally significant amount of mixing. It was a good ol’ fashinoned biomixing science brawl.

But one thing all these studies had in common is that it is really hard to measure turbulence, AND it is even harder to measure biomixing because animals have behaviors such as naughtily swimming away from boats with turbulence profilers. In this new study, the researchers basically decided TO HELL WITH THE SEA. We’ll just make our own mini-sea and populate it with vertically migrating zooplankton. In this case the sea is a tank, the zooplankton are brine shrimp from Sea Monkey kits, and the sun a frickin’ laser beam. The brine shrimp were coerced to swim to the surface as a swarm with an orchestrated laser light show (manuscript did not indicate whether the accompanying soundtrack was pink floyd or gorillaz). Currents produced by the upward swimming brine shrimp were measured by a technique called Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). That’s just a fancy term for saying we seed the water with lots of little shiny spheres, take lots of pictures, and track their whirly paths from one frame to the next to calculate current speeds.

When the researchers looked at a single brine shrimp, the eddies it created were sized as predicted: about the length of one of it’s flailing appendages. But when you have a cloud of brine shrimp, the tiny currents each beastie makes interacts with each other creating a complex flow field, including a downward squirt of water. Instabilities along this jet that then creates these eddies that are now much larger than the brine shrimp. In other words, to get big turbulence you need a party!

Eddies larger than the size of the migrating zooplankton had been observed during that first study in Victoria, but it wasn’t until this tank experiment that researchers understood why. It’s hard to find a clump of vertically migrating zooplankton to repeat the initial experiment in the ocean. And computer models only looked at lone swimmers because it’s computationally expensive to model a clump of swimmers, so they didn’t find big eddies in their simulations either.

In the university press release the authors estimate that vertically migrating zooplankton input as much energy into the ocean as winds and tides, but I am a bit more skeptical about this number because this experiment doesn’t address that. That estimate comes from a previous study and isn’t well constrained, it was more of a deliberately provocative thought experiment with big uncertainties. There are also other factors that could lessen the effect of biomixing by vertically migrating zooplankton. Zooplankton hang out in the upper ocean, so this doesn’t do anything in the deep ocean. Ocean water is stratified (made up of layers of water with different densities) which suppresses eddy size, while this experiment was done in unstratified fresh water. And maybe the flow fields created by other schools of ocean animals don’t make the same supersized eddies.

That being said, this is still a neat little experiment that shows biological mixing can be bigger than expected. Do they drive ocean currents? Sort of. The observed mixing definitely moves water vertically and ocean currents are sensitive to the magnitude of mixing. The patchy nature of zooplankton means that in some places and at some times, biomixing can have a big impact. Half the fun is figuring out where that is!

*The lead author of this study E. Kunze was on my Ph.D. thesis committee, a coauthor on some of my papers. and an all around helpful guy.

SOURCES:

Observations of large-scale fluid transport by laser-guided plankton aggregations,
Wilhelmus, Monica M. and Dabiri, John O., Physics of Fluids (1994-present), 26, 101302 (2014), DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4895655

Kunze, E., Dower, J. F., Beveridge, I., Dewey, R., & Bartlett, K. P. (2006). Observations of biologically generated turbulence in a coastal inlet. Science,313(5794), 1768-1770.

Visser, A. W. (2007). Biomixing of the Oceans?. SCIENCE-NEW YORK THEN WASHINGTON-, 316(5826), 838.

E. Kunze, Dower, J.F., Dewey, R., D’Asaro, E. A., & Visser, A. W. (2007). Mixing it up with krill. Science, 318, 1239-1239.

Do fish stir the ocean?

The post Are swimming zooplankton driving ocean currents? Sort of. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In the meantime, check out teh datas. Here is Zissou-i-fication of a CTD cast and Microstructure turbulence profiler deployment. I don’t know how I lived without this.

And for those that heart the details like me, here’s the pseudo-technical play by play :

• 0:02 min- DEPLOY TEH CTD ROSETTE!
• 0:09 – Horrifyingly large fish scares rosette back to the surface
• 0:12 – Dramatic snap whilst popping the Niskin Bottle to take a water sample
• 0:18 – Hell yeah, here comes the Microstructure profiler to measure teh turbulenz.
• 0:21 – Delicate sensors must not ram the sea floor. Hit the squib, release the weights and the profiler becomes positively buoyant and floats back up to the surface.
• 0:28 – PAN OUT to the Southern Ocean and the Drake Passage, site of DIMES.
• 0:31 – What does water do when it goes thorough a constriction? It makez teh eddies!  AWWW…..

And there is also the Zissou-i-fication of our data. Karthik Ram made these beautiful color palettes for R based on Wes Anderson Films.  Of course I needed these for myself, so I translated the Zissou color palette into Matlab, then went another step forward and made another script to ZissouMyPlot. Final step, Zissou your own ocean!

(Confession: I may have been listening to the Life Aquatic soundtrack the entire time while writing this.)

The post Zissou my Ocean first appeared on Deep Sea News.

But now, giant turbulence your time has finally come! *insert mad cackling and background lighting strikes here*

In the Strait of Georgia, which lies between mainland Canada and Vancouver Island, super fast tidal currents flow over sills and bumps. Deep, cold, dense water is forced up and over theses ridges, which then plummets back downward into slower moving water below. The plunging water is arrested by the sluggish water below and has no other choice but to come up in the form of huge blobs of water known as boils!

But you don’t need a satellite or a boat to see charismatic mega turbulence, you can head on over to Deception Pass to see if for yourself. Deception Pass is narrow constriction at the north end of Whidbey Island in Washington state with whipping tidal flows and a bumpy bottom. Even better, there is a walkable bridge spanning it so you can safely look down at the fluid action while staying completely dry. Or if you dare (and are experienced), you can rent a kayak or paddleboard and experience this wicked turbulence in situ! While some may prefer their charismatic mega features to be of the cetacean kind, I would rather hang with out with my mega turbulence any day of the week. And who knows, maybe one day someone will be lucky enough to see both together!

SOURCES:

Marmorino, George O.; Smith, Geoffrey B.; Miller, W. D. 2013. “Surface Imprints of Water-Column Turbulence: A Case Study of Tidal Flow over an Estuarine Sill.” Remote Sens. 5, no. 7: 3239-3258.

Rick Pawlowicz’s research page http://www.eos.ubc.ca/~rich/research.html

The post Charismatic Mega Turbulence first appeared on Deep Sea News.

How exactly are phytoplankton ‘unmixed’? In other words, if I am a motile cell in a big turbulent sea, how should me and my buddies swim so that we can meet up and have these patchy phytoplankton parties?

First of all, don’t be dead. No seriously, dead phytoplankton in both the lab experiment and the turbulence model did not make patches. Only those that are alive and can move themselves in some way formed patches.

Second, you need to swim fast. If you swim faster than the flows in all the tiny vortices created by turbulence, you can swim to the center or edges of these eddies, meet up with your bros and rage on! But while you need to be quick, you don’t need to be the Michael Phelps of the microscopic world. The authors found that you only need to swim faster than the smallest turbulent eddies, rather than the largest and fastest eddies in a turbulent patch as previously thought.

Lastly, you also need to be swimming to the party in a particular state. Humans, when headed to a party, are typically in one of three party states: stone-cold-sober, happily-tipsy, or drunk-as-a-skunk (no phytoplankton were intentionally inebriated in this study). If your group of phytoplankton are in the stone-cold-sober state, you will be traveling in very straight lines upwards and won’t be able to find each other. NO PARTY FOR YOU. If your group of plankton are in the drunk-as-a-skunk state, you will all be wandering all over the place tumbling end over end in any random direction and also won’t be able to find each other. NO PARTY FOR YOU EITHER. But those plankter that are in the somewhat tipsy state, their path isn’t too straight and it isn’t to random which maximizes their ability to find each other. PARTY FOR YOU!! Whether phytoplankton move in a straight line or a random line is determined by their ability to stabilize their torque in turbulent shear. Luckily, the type of conditions that cause phytoplankton to be in the state of intermediate stability are readily found in the ocean.

But why patch? During periods of sexual reproduction, it is likely advantageous to have high densities of phytoplankton. A phytoplankton orgy if you will. On the other hand, it could also be bad to patch. Bad because you have to compete for nutrients (like the last beer at a party), or even make you an easy target for zooplankton predation. Hungry zooplankton have been known to hover in centimeter scale prey patches, gorging on hapless phytoplankton.

But the authors also discuss an intriguing aspect of this ‘unmixing’ due to motility. What if the plankton themselves determine their density distribution? Theoretically, a phytoplankter could choose to change how fast it swims or how much it tumbles, making it more or less likely to aggregate. Therefore if it is to their advantage, phytoplankton can cause themselves to either spread out or form patches! To patch or not to patch, that is the question. In the sprit of maritime revelry, I am going to assume they chose to patch intentionally.

REFERENCE:

William M. Durham, Eric Climent, Michael Barry, Filippo De Lillo, Guido Boffetta, Massimo Cencini, Roman Stocker. Turbulence drives microscale patches of motile phytoplankton. Nature Communications, 2013; 4 DOI:10.1038/ncomms3148

The post Wanna throw a phytoplankton party? Then call in turbulence to help round up your buddies! first appeared on Deep Sea News.