Profile

I grew up in Luton, not so close to the sea! But I did love the Little Mermaid 🧜‍♀️  and David Attenborough👨‍🦳  growing up, and so I went off to Southampton University to study oceanography. I’m a physical oceanographer🧭🌍🌊🚢 , and do that job here in northern Germany. The city I live in, Bremen, is well known for having a Grimms Brothers fairy tale written about it: “The Town Musicians of Bremen”. It’s a very old, beautiful city centre filled with narrow cobbled streets and cool buildings. When I’m not doing science, I’m enjoying the small city life along the river or in the parks – I love nature🌳 and enjoy walking and hiking! When I get to travel, I also love to surf🏄‍♀️ or scuba dive, and I love to try different things! I also love to do anything arty, from painting to wood carving, to writing stories. I love penguins🐧 and polar bears, and have even seen penguins in the wild!

I am a physical oceanographer. I learn about the role of the oceans in regulating the Earths climate. I do this by collecting information about the water from different instruments. These instruments are all slightly different, but they all measure the temperature (warm🌞 or cold☃) and conductivity of the water – we use conductivity to find out how salty the water is (salty water is a very good conductor, and in some places the ocean is saltier than others, such as the very warm and salty Mediterranean Sea!). I learn how water in the ocean moves from place to place, and through different depths (from the very sea surface, all the way to the sea floor). I also learn how the water carries with it heat, salt, nutrients, oxygen and carbon. When I collect this information, I carry out detective work🕵️‍♀️ to understand the information, and then use it to tell stories📚 about how the ocean works🌏🌊❄!

My typical day involves using my computer to look at data collected from instruments. The instruments I use most are called Argo floats. These look like small torpedoes. We throw them into the water from a ship (this can be done anywhere and in any size ship from a small speedboat to a big ice-breaker research ship!). These floats go off on their own – they sink down in the water to 1000 m (about the length of 13 Airbuses 747!), and then the ocean currents carry them along. After 10 days, these floats sink down again, this time 2000 m (26 747 airplane lengths!) and then float slowly towards the sea surface, measuring how warm and salty the water is. The floats then send this information to a satellite in space, which then emails the information to us. There are hundreds of floats in the oceans all around the world! We can use these floats to learn so much about the oceans, but there’s a lot of data we have to look through and make sense out of!

Diagram of an Argo float. Argo Program (https://argo.ucsd.edu)

Diagram of the life cycle of an Argo float. Argo Program (https://argo.ucsd.edu)

Argo float floating in the sea surrounded by sea ice. From Argo Program (https://argo.ucsd.edu)