Dell on powerful currents in deep-sea gorges
On my first major research cruise, the ship was hit by a hurricane. On the second, the weather was even worse. In one particularly nasty storm, I remember standing braced on the ship’s bridge late at night, watching bolts of lightning light up the world. Each one revealed waves taller than the ship extending to the horizon in every direction. We bobbed haplessly among them. At a time like that, it’s hard not to feel philosophical about the power of nature.
In a very different context, the power of nature is something I spend a lot of my time thinking about. Energy—where it comes from, what form it takes, how it is transformed—is central to my work as a graduate student at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In my case, it is the energy that controls currents in the deep ocean and ultimately influences the ocean’s global circulation.
I research the way the shape of the ocean floor affects the ocean’s circulation. More particularly, I explore the fundamental physics that transforms energy, drives currents, and mixes up water masses in the deep ocean. It turns out that features of the undersea landscape might play a big and previously unknown role.