The upwelling of warm Circumpolar Deep Water is a key process in the global climate system, transporting heat, nutrients, and carbon poleward towards Antarctic ice shelves. Dr Ali Mashayek and colleagues from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and UC San Diego have recently co-authored a paper published in Communications Earth & Environment, in which physical
The ocean plays a central role in the global carbon cycle. Ocean water can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it at depth for hundreds or thousands of years. In fact, it is estimated that the deep ocean contains a massive reservoir of carbon, which dwarfs all other reservoirs combined (including vegetation, soil
The interdisciplinary study of volcanic processes requires a multitude of approaches, ranging from analogue and numerical modelling to observations and fieldwork and extending to mathematics. In September 2025, a conference was held at the East African Institute for Fundamental Research in Kigali, affiliated with the University of Rwanda, a country which, along with the Democratic
Deep ocean water contains a very large reservoir of carbon, and so understanding how this water moves and mixes over time is essential for all climate models. Over the last few decades, observations have shown that passive tracers initially located in the deep ocean have gradually resurfaced, suggesting that there are pathways through which deep
Numerical modelling is a key tool for understanding deep ocean dynamics, where observations remain sparse, particularly at submesoscales (1–30 km). Jonathan Gula, from the Laboratoire d’Océanographie Physique et Spatiale, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, uses high-resolution basin-scale and regional simulations to investigate how interactions between currents, topography, and mixing shape abyssal circulation and tracer transport. During
Water masses are large bodies of water with distinct properties. Identifying them helps us understand how the ocean moves, mixes, and transports heat, carbon, oxygen, and other properties. This usually requires detailed chemical measurements, which are typically only available in few sparse locations along ship tracks. In a new study co-authored by Dr Ali Mashayek,
Lake Kivu is located on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, along the western branch of the East African Rift, a region of active volcanism and high seismicity. The lake deep waters contain nearly 60 cubic km of methane and over 300 cubic km of carbon dioxide. The methane can be extracted
Constraining the key controls on ice melting in glaciers and the ocean is essential for climate models. Edoardo Bellincioni is a PhD student, currently working in the Physics of Fluids group at the University of Twente under the supervision of Sander Husiman and Detlef Lohse. During his PhD, Edoardo has been running laboratory experiments to
The Arctic Ocean has been changing rapidly in a warming climate. To monitor these changes, it is useful to classify the Arctic Ocean into water masses – bodies of water with similar origin and physical and biogeochemical properties. However, there are significant barriers to Arctic water mass classification: observations of seawater properties are sparse, and
Volcanic eruptions threaten more than one in ten people worldwide, with the greatest risk at volcanoes reawakening after long quiescence. In these settings, eruptions are often explosive and nearby communities may be unprepared. After obtaining his PhD at IEEF, Dr Eric Newland has been working on the NERC-funded project “FEVER: Forecasting Eruptions at Volcanoes after