Conference: 2026 Ocean Mixing GRC/GRS: Competing Energy Cascades and Their Implications for Ocean Mixing Across a Spectrum of Environments

This project is to support the Gordon Research Conference on Ocean Mixing and the Gordon Research Seminar for early career scientists. The conference and seminar will provide a forum to improve the understanding of turbulent mixing in the ocean, including the interactions across scales, and the applications to problems such as weather prediction and ocean forecasts and solutions. The Gordon Research Conference format is designed to generate vigorous discussion and foster new collaborations, stimulating new understanding. The chairs, vice chairs, and discussion leaders have a deep familiarity with the field and as such have designed a program that highlights cutting-edge research in ocean mixing. The conference will strengthen the connection between fundamental studies of ocean mixing and applications to societally relevant problems such as predictability of currents and weather, fisheries, and the utilization of ocean resources such as minerals in the seabed. It will also lead to workforce development by promoting new interactions between people working on different aspects of ocean mixing, using different approaches, and at varied career levels, through focused discussions and facilitated informal networking activities. NSF support will be explicitly used to support attendance of early career scientists.

Ocean mixing is time-variable motion which increases fluxes of tracers above levels set by molecular diffusion, encompasses a wide variety of processes taking place over a large range of scales, from the 10-100 kilometer scales of mesoscale geostrophic eddies down to the smallest scales of isotropic turbulence. Between these scales many different instability processes excite motions which lead to mixing. These processes, except for the largest mesoscale eddies, have in common scales which are too small to explicitly simulate, requiring parameterizations of their impact on tracer fluxes to accurately capture their effect on the large-scale ocean. The development of parameterizations requires experts in different aspects of ocean mixing - observations, theory, process simulation, laboratory experiments, regional and global scale modeling - to work together. The Gordon Research Conference is intended to stimulate this collaboration between scientists using different approaches and focused on different scales, to better understand the difficult problem of ocean turbulence. While ocean mixing is still poorly understood, it has important impacts in many areas of relevance. Small-scale mixing processes are recognized to play an important role in setting the stratification of the ocean, fluxes of heat and chemical constituents between the ocean and adjacent atmosphere or ice, fluxes of nutrients into the euphotic zone, and ocean overturning leading to impacts on the predictability of currents and weather, fisheries, and the utilization of ocean resources such as minerals in the seabed.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Award Number: 2620530
Principal Investigator: Leif Thomas
Funds Obligated: $49,940
State: RI