I think I've mentioned that there was a certain amount of fraternisation across party lines at the reception after the Cambridge Conference. Josh and I had a nice chat to Dr Emily Shuckburgh, who works at the British Antarctic Survey as well as being a scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change.
Since that time we've exchanged a few emails and, with my recent blog posts touching on the issue of ocean heat mixing, Dr Shuckburgh thought her own research might be of interest:
Here's Dr Shuckburgh's introduction:
"Sometimes you have to go to the ends of the earth in the pursuit of scientific progress. The oceans cover 70% of our planet and yet there is still much we don’t know about the flow of water around and through them.
To predict future climate we need to find out how global ocean flows may be changing over time. Some ocean waters are very salty and some are very cold. The big unknown is how much these different waters mix together because this has a massive effect on ocean flows.
For a while now scientists have suspected that there are a few key mixing hot-spots in the world’s oceans and that one of them may be in Drake Passage. But how can we check? Well, satellites can give us information about the sea surface, but to look below the surface we are largely dependent on scientists going to sea and taking measurements themselves.
So recently I helped lead a team of UK and US colleagues to the remote and inhospitable Southern Ocean on a mission to investigate…
The more technical version is on the project website, where there is also a link to a semi-technical description.
And here's Dr Shuckburgh herself.