Abstract

Ocean pollution is becoming a bigger and bigger problem with time.  To mitigate, manage and reduce this, it is important to understand the paths different types of pollution will follow in the Ocean.   Understanding ocean dynamics, namely ocean currents, is thus very important to determine the pathways of different pollutants.  The world's ocean currents have the potential to transport material like plastic over global scales, connecting continents, but the sources and sinks of that pollution have also been found to be sometimes very local.  Different oceanic scales affect these pathways, and thanks to new data we can start to understand how finer-scale process are affecting larger-scale ones. In this seminar, I will present the work I carried out during my previous postdoc as part of the parcels team at Utrecht University (The Netherlands), where we use ocean physics to understand different aspects of marine pollution in very different regions from the Netherlands to different areas of the Pacific Ocean like Japan. The main tool we use for our Lagrangian ocean analysis simulations is the OceanParcels tool, which is open software. I will close by highlighting the importance of Open Science and the role this has in our research.

Link to the video here

Link to the video here