Welcome to the fourth Campfire of the EGU Ocean Sciences Division! These seminar-style Campfires aim to give early career scientists a platform to communicate their work and connect with peers in a relaxed atmosphere. In this session, we will host Maxime Keutgen De Greef, a PhD candidate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Princeton University. Please find more details on his talk below.

Conveners:

Ocean Sciences Early Career Scientists team.

Talk:

Maxime Keutgen De Greef (Princeton University) - "Do eddies actually transport that much carbon? A global view of the eddy subduction pump"

Phytoplankton use sunlight to turn dissolved carbon dioxide into organic matter. Some of this carbon leaves the surface ocean, is transported into the interior, and only comes back to the surface decades to millennia later: this is the biological carbon pump. One of its pathways, the eddy subduction pump, occurs when swirling kilometer-scale eddies along ocean fronts push filaments of carbon-rich surface water downward. 

Because these events are small and short-lived, they have been difficult to observe. In this talk I'll show how we used measurements from ~1000 Argo floats to detect these events worldwide for the first time. Most occur in springtime in the Southern Ocean and the subpolar North Atlantic. We find that the eddy subduction pump contributes to less than 5% of the ocean's biological carbon pump, a surprisingly small contribution.

We are seeking speakers for the upcoming EGU-Ocean Sciences Campfires. If you are interested in giving a talk, please reach out to us with a preliminary talk title and information about your availability at ecs-os@egu.eu.

Similarly, if you have any questions about the event, please contact the Ocean Sciences ECS Team via ecs-os@egu.eu

Need help?
If you have any questions about the campfire "Ocean Sciences Campfire", please contact us via webinars@egu.eu.

Need help?

If you have any questions about the campfire "Ocean Sciences Campfire", please contact us via ecs-os@egu.eu.

Campfire

Ocean Sciences Campfire

Start time

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:00 CEST

Duration

ca. 1h 00m

Contact

ecs-os@egu.eu