The meeting officially starts tomorrow (Sunday) night, so why did I fly out on Friday? Science has always relied on communication and collaboration--hence, the need for conferences. Oceanography is an inherently interdisciplinary field, but it is very hard to get truly interdisciplinary projects funded. One way to get some interdisciplinary work done is to organize a workshop. The idea behind a workshop is to get a few very busy people to take a few days from their day-to-day work in order to work together on a common problem. So, this is why I'm spending this weekend in a conference room instead of hiking with my family.
The point of this weekend's workshop is to develop a better understanding of how changes in the Arctic affect the North Atlantic. I've stumbled into this line of research by uncovering a dramatic change in the Gulf of Maine plankton community that took place around 1990. Turns out, lots of other things changed right around that time: the waters became less salty and began flowing faster, herring became more abundant and right whale calves became rarer. Many of these changes were observed from New Jersey up to Newfoundland. The best explanation so far is that these changes originated when the winds over the Arctic pushed a slug of fresh water and ice into the North Atlantic. This created a pocket of fresher water that eventually moved down to the Gulf of Maine:
The conditions that created this slug persisted through much of the 1990s. The workshop, organized by my colleague (and former Ph. D. advisor) Chuck Greene, has brought together biologists like me, physical oceanographers, and Arctic climate specialists to try to get a better understanding of exactly what happened.
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