How phytoplankton survive in subtropical ocean gyres

MIT News are running a story on former DPhil student, Ed Doddridge‘s paper, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, on The role of ocean eddies in maintaining biological activity in subtropical gyres. Wind-driven downwelling exports nutrients away from the sunlit zone, preventing phytoplankton from thriving. In this paper, we show that eddies, by opposing this wind-driven downwelling, can change how much fluid is exchanged between the sunlit layer and the homogenous layer below, thereby allowing the nutrient concentration at the surface to increase. See MIT News for the full story and JGR Oceans for the published paper.

Leave a Reply