• Question: can you summarise your latest experiment please?

    Asked by boomshot to Maxime on 11 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Maxime Savatier

      Maxime Savatier answered on 11 Nov 2019: last edited 11 Nov 2019 6:59 pm


      I will try to summarize my latest work:)
      Water flowing to the sea from a river, or a spring tends to float on the surface of the sea, because it contains less salt (thus less dense). As a result, bay with river or spring coming to them can have two layers, one fresher on the top, and one more saline at the bottom. This is called stratification, and is generally variable depending on tides, freshwater fluxes, winds… Sometimes, it takes a week or more for this river or spring water to be fully mixed with the rest of the sea sometimes a few days. When a bay is stratified, its nutrients content and type of organism are different compared to mixed situations. This is especially important in places like the west of ireland where people are growing mussels, oyster or salmons in these waters. To know when and how much a bay is stratified help a lot to understand how things will change for them.
      So i created a new method to describe the effect of stratification for bays across the seasons, which i hope will be able to help to understand why some years are more difficult than others for people there, and what can be done about this.

Comments