Welcome to Biological Oceanography

The goal of biological oceanography is to understand what controls the abundances, kinds, and temporal variation of organisms in the sea. Our research and teaching programs are oriented toward a mechanistic understanding of processes. To this end we employ a variety of approaches including field observations, laboratory experiments and theoretical models.

 

The School benefits from its location on the campus of a major research university.  Opportunities for collaboration, coursework, and use of state of the art facilities are available through the Departments of Biology, Microbiology, Genome Sciences, the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and Friday Harbor Laboratories.

 

Research and teaching programs in biological oceanography at the University of Washington are oriented toward a mechanistic understanding of processes in the sea. The strengths of the graduate program are a core of modern summary courses ensuring an up-to-date overview of the discipline combined with a research program having the flexibility and resources to advance in virtually any direction. Each graduate student learns the basics of water-column and benthic approaches as they pertain to microbes and macroscopic organisms. On a campus offering 5,000 courses in 200 academic disciplines and with 3,500 faculty, it is possible to tailor graduate committees and more specialized course work precisely to a student's needs and interests. The nationally recognized Departments of Biology, Microbiology and the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences are typically utilized in this tailoring, but expertise is also drawn from other faculty, such as applied mathematicians, geophysicists, and chemical and electrical engineers.

Meet Our Faculty

---

Areas of Research

Microbiology of extreme environments

• The study of microbes in high pressure deep sea environments, physiology of survival and growth and high temperatures and in sea ice.

 

Phytoplankton Ecology

• Physiology, genetic diversity and genomics of the oceans primary producers

 

Food web dynamics

• Interactions between zooplankton, phytoplankton and protists, their distributions in time and space, connections between individual behavior and populations level demographics

Welcome to Chemical Oceanography

Chemical oceanography is the study of the mechanisms that control the distribution of elements and compounds in the ocean. Following the exploration of the 1960's and '70s, chemical oceanography is now focused on specific processes and their rates distributed throughout the world's oceans. Our school takes pride in being a leader in an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the chemical distribution of inorganic and organic, stable, and radioactive elements.

 

Chemical oceanographers at the University of Washington study the mechanisms that control the distribution of elements and compounds in the ocean. The period of the 1960's and 1970's was occupied by exploration, by chemical mapping of the oceans. Now that the first order chemical distributions are known, attention has shifted to detailed studies of specific processes and their rates. Almost invariably such studies are interdisciplinary and involve integration of chemical concepts with the physical, biological, and geological dynamics of marine systems. In a sense we are involved in a massive study of reverse engineering. While the chemical engineer designs an apparatus to achieve a desired chemical result, we seek to discover the important environmental processes that control chemical distributions in the atmosphere, ocean and its sediments. Part of the motivation for these studies is to evaluate and predict present and future anthropogenic impacts on the environment.

Meet Our Faculty

---

Areas of Research

Carbon Dynamics

• This research area includes problems that encompass the role of the ocean in absorbing anthropogenic CO2 to mechanisms controlling organic carbon burial and the long-term maintenance of oxygen in the atmosphere.

 

Solute-Particle Interactions

• Immobilization of seawater solutes on to particulate matter and sediments plays a key role in controlling trace element distributions in the ocean and perhaps the organic matter content of marine sediments.

 

Hydrothermal Systems

• The focus is the 550 km long Juan de Fuca ridge located about 300 miles off the coast of Washington. This study has employed both surface ships and submersible investigations of the geological, geophysical, chemical, and microbiological processes active in seafloor hydrothermal vents.

Welcome to Marine Geology and Geophysics

The Marine Geology and Geophysics program at the University of Washington focuses on two primary areas of education and research.

 

Mid-Ocean Ridge Processes involves the examination of the flow of energy and materials from the Earth's interior, through the ocean crust and its associated hydrothermal systems, and into the deep sea. The School of Oceanography's proximity to the Juan de Fuca/Gorda Ridge system and Cascadia subduction zone provides ready access to an ideal natural laboratory for study of the active components of a geological plate. This local focus is complemented by additional work along the global mid-ocean ridge.

Marine Sediment Dynamics concerns the genesis, transport and accumulation of particulate material in the marine environment. Individual faculty members also pursue a number of research themes outside these two focus areas. Our approach to graduate student education builds on a solid academic foundation in the fundamentals of transport phenomena, fluid and continuum mechanics, geochemistry, and data analysis as a basis for understanding the geological processes within the marine environment.

Meet Our Faculty

Welcome to Physical Oceanography

Physical oceanography focuses on describing and understanding the evolving patterns of ocean circulation and fluid motion, along with the distribution of its properties such as temperature, salinity and the concentration of dissolved chemical elements and gases. The ocean as a dynamic fluid is studied at a wide range of spatial scales, from the centimeter scales relevant to turbulent microstructure through the many thousand kilometer scales of the ocean gyres and global overturning circulation. Approaches include theory, direct observation, and computer simulation. Our research frequently takes place in the context of important multidisciplinary issues including the dynamics and predictability of global climate and the sustainability of human use in coastal and estuarine regions.

 

The diversity of the program in physical oceanography is greatly increased by numerous joint and affiliate positions with two world-class research laboratories, the University's Applied Physics Laboratory and with the nearby NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, where many of our graduate students choose to do their research.

Meet Our Faculty

---

Areas of Student Research

Acoustical Oceanography - Research on the propagation and scattering of sound in the ocean spans a wide range of the acoustic wave frequency spectrum and uses approaches drawn from theory, numerical modeling and observations.

 

The Ocean in Climate and Circulation - The planetary-scale ocean circulation is the keystone of physical, chemical and biological oceanography and an important part of the Earth's climate system.

 

Coastal and Estuarine Processes - Polluted runoff and sewage, overfishing, and even global climate change, are affecting these regions far more rapidly and extensively than the deep sea, threatening marine ecosystems, human health, and sustainable fisheries.

 

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics - Geophysical fluid dynamics is the study of fluid motion on a rotating planet.

 

Polar Oceanography - Oceanographers in the APL's Polar Science Center study the physical mechanisms responsible for the distribution of sea ice and polar ice sheets, the circulation of high-latitude oceans, and the interactions between the atmosphere, ocean and cryosphere that play an important role in regulating Earth's climate.

 

Tropical Oceanography - The tropical oceans illustrate the effects of close coupling with the atmosphere on many timescales.

 

Waves, Turbulence and Mixing - Ocean processes occur on a huge range of spatial scales, from the global circulation many megameters in size, to the scales of millimeters to centimeters where molecular diffusion and viscosity act.