Supervisors:
- Dr Jan Zika (j.zika@unsw.edu.au)
- Dr Ryan Holmes (ryan.holmes@unsw.edu.au)
Location: UNSW
Time: Summer
How the ocean stores and moves heat and carbon around the globe is critical to Earth’s climate. The ocean stores vast amounts of heat and carbon in distinct reservoirs. These reservoirs tend to reside in distinct geographical regions delineated by both solid barriers such as continents and dynamic barriers such as strong ocean currents.
These reservoirs appear clearly as an octopus like shape in phase diagrams describing sea water properties. Each tentacle of the octopus is a different reservoir.
As the climate changes these reservoirs change shape – the tentacles drifting in a coherent but as yet un-explained way.
We seek a student to help develop a simple mathematical model to describe the ocean’s octopus like shape and what the movement of its tentacles tells us about climate change.
If you are interested in this project, please fill out the application form.