Hitching a Ride on the Global Ocean Conveyor Belt
Susan Lozier Studies How Currents Deep Below the Ocean's
Surface Can Affect Our Climate p.4
The Labrador Sea project represents a transition for Lozier.
After graduate school, when she undertook what she half-jokingly
calls “my other fulltime job”—raising sons
Joseph and Benjamin—she avoided research projects with
an ocean-going component. Fewer lengthy cruises enabled her
to spend more time as a reading tutor in her kids’ schools
and taking them on camping trips or bicycling jaunts along
with her husband, Philip, a Durham architect.
Meantime, the computer had become just as important
a tool for oceanographers as the research vessel. Lozier turned
to data analysis and modeling projects, earning a National
Science Foundation Early Career Award in 1996 and establishing
a reputation that her colleague Amy Bower calls “the
highest caliber in the field of physical oceanography.”
In one such early-career project, Lozier developed a new
method of analyzing existing data about the North Atlantic
ocean, and in doing so, identified recirculating eddies that
generate larger ocean movements. Her methodology was “a
nice piece of work” that produced new data still used
by other oceanographers, according to Joseph Reid of the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography, who observes that Lozier has
“an unusual combination of high confidence and theoretical
and observational abilities.”
Lozier’s primary interest is in the physical properties
of the ocean. But if the heat content of ocean water changes
or if the salinity changes, what are the implications for
plant and animal life? The convection process that is the
focus of Lozier’s research—the sinking of colder
waters and the rising of warmer waters— is responsible
for keeping the ocean surface supplied with nutrients. Any
interruption of the convection, due to climate change or other
causes, could have an enormous impact on ocean biology.
That interconnection is the focus of a project Lozier and
several colleagues from the Nicholas School began this spring,
under the auspices of Duke’s
Center on Global Change. With biological oceanographer
Richard
Barber, statistical climatologist Gabriele
Hegerl, and scientists from several other institutions,
Lozier aims to gain a better understanding of what she refers
to as “physics-induced biology changes” in the
ocean.
This project is Lozier’s first collaboration with Barber,
who was involved in recruiting her to be Duke’s first
physical oceanographer. “She had other choices of places
to go besides Duke,” Barber says, “including some
of the major oceanographic institutions. She has been very
successful at Duke and she is extremely successful in her
field.”
Rather than collecting new data, the Center on Global Change
team is using greater computational power to reexamine existing
data. By taking advantage of advances in supercomputing, they
plan to produce finer resolution models that can account for
the effect of smaller eddies not identified by earlier, lower-resolution
models.
Now that her boys are 13 and 11, Lozier sees her future work
shifting toward oceangoing or “observational”
efforts like the Labrador Sea project. Although it is too
soon to predict whether a second generation of Loziers will
become oceanographers, her sons have inherited their mother’s
love of ocean cruises. For years they have been fixtures on
oceangoing class field trips that are a feature of the Introduction
to Oceanography courses Lozier co-teaches at Duke.
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