Do Swimming Animals Mix the Ocean?
Abstract
The world's oceans are in constant motion, transporting the sun's heat from the equator to the poles, bringing marine life fresh supplies of oxygen and nutrients, and sequestering nearly half of our carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Within this dynamic aquatic milieu exists another type of motion: the perpetual teeming of trillions of swimming animals. Are these organisms simply along for the ride, carried by the prevailing ocean currents and occasionally using their powers of locomotion to explore their surroundings; or could their propulsion result in dynamical feedbacks that influence the physical and biogeochemical structure of the ocean itself?
Copyright and License
© 2023 The Authors. Limnology and Oceanography Bulletin published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Acknowledgement
Many colleagues have contributed to our current understanding of the headline question, and not all have been referenced here due to space constraints. I want to especially thank Isabel Houghton, Monica Martinez Wilhelmus, Kakani Katija, Eckart Meiburg, Jeffrey Koseff, and Stephen Monismith for key insights along the way, and an engaged community of oceanographers for constructive and often spirited feedback.
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Additional details
- ISSN
- 1539-6088
- Caltech groups
- GALCIT