It is with good enthusiasm and excitement that I write to you today. No I'm not selling you anything nor overtly petitioning your financial support for a Townsville to Cairns charity bicycle ride that I'll be doing in July for children's cancer and I'll inevitably be beating my small drum for any contribution towards my goal of raising $500 for this event that you can afford, but more on that later. Rather, at the moment, since some of you know and others don't, I'd like to inform you about a very likely change to our lives down under.
The University of Tasmania's Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) has been offerring PhD's in the area of Quantitative Marine Science (QMS) that are both very compelling and relevant to the field of oceanography that I am most interested in. There is one project in particular that struck a cord with me: Cold Core Eddies of the East Australia Current and their fisheries potential. Now this is not the type of 1950's middle-America James Dean character type of cold core Eddy that my Dad likes to jokingly refer to.<br>
Rather this is the type of large (100 to 200 kilometres across) circulating mass of water whose inner sea surface temperature is colder than the its outer, hence cold core. I will go more into the interesting details of eddies in another post, but for now, know that they differ from the above version because they look like this:
With the cold core eddies (2 of them) apparent as a pair of green circles in the middle of the image. There are also warm core eddies on that image as well, that, again, I'll go into more detail in another post.
Ok, so hopefully I didn't lose you in that necessary little description, because fortunately (for me) that is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg of knowledge on this very interesting fluid dynamic phenomenon that occur with regularity in our oceans. So I dare not digress into more the details on the physics of cold core eddies at this moment, as this was intended to be more a mention of our (Laleña and mine's) very likely move to Hobart, Tasmania.
Obviously I can't tell you about Hobart without getting excited about what it is that is driving me to ask for the support of my wife to move us to a higher latitude and take a significant pay cut. She is an amazing woman! But there is one certified Bikram Yoga studios and a couple of others that are uncertified in Hobart and I can assure you that without those as drawcards I would not be writing this here, but then again she surprises me always with the depth of her love and I'd not put it past her.
Now while these eddies are a well study phenomenon, especially in the mid north-Atlantic ocean and some other major western boundary currents, they are poorly understood with respect to their fisheries potential in the Tasman Sea. Along with gaining valuable insight into this phenomenon this project would be tying in field measurements in-situ to force a physical-biological coupled model to analyse trends over a decade with respect to certain larval fish species and their recruitment onto the shelf of southeast Australia. Which is itself a very significant fishery for all of Australia. (If you really are wanting some detailed information then here is a good paper to read by Peter Oke at the Commonwealth Scientific and Indurstrial Research Ogranisation (CSIRO)). Dr. Oke is in fact a co-advisor on the project and is well respected in the field. CSIRO, as as I'd like to mention is well worth the click on the link above. It is Australia's leading scientific organisation and is responsible for a lot of great research in this great country. One little invention CSIRO is credited/responsible for is Wi-Fi.
xWithout going on too much longer, needless to say I am very excited about this opportunity and project. So with the support of Laleña I applied to the UTAS IMAS-CSIRO QMS PhD program and have been given initial word that my application was approved by the QMS steering committee. This is significant and I'm hoipeful to report back to you in the coming weeks with more good news on this subject and the status change of 'very likely' to 'definite commitment'.<br><br>
Until later … diver down.
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