Lateral Mixing in the Argentine Basin

When I first began my research as an undergraduate, I wanted to do a paper inspired by the Gray et al., 2018 paper using BGC Argo floats to examine outgassing of CO2 in the Southern Ocean. I had chosen the area I wanted to work in (the Argentine Basin) because of the presence of the Malvinas-Brazil Confluence, which I thought would have an interesting affect on the uptaking and outgassing of the ocean. To do so, I began to familiarize myself with the Argo floats themselves, specifically SOCCOM's BGC Argo (see figure to the left). While looking at these floats, however, I found a couple of extremely low dissolved oyxgen progiles (the low values were found below 1400 m in the profiles). With time, my PI (Lynne Talley) and I decided these anomalies would be my new focus (for the time being).

By the end of my research, I had found 4 profiles that were anomalous relative to the deep water density range on which they were found (see figure on the right). These anomalies were on average -13.9 micromols/kg dissolved oxygen, -1.9 degrees C, and -0.3 psu compared to the other profiles taken by the SOCCOM floats. While 3 possible source waters were identified (Southeast Pacific, South Indian, and Subtropical Atlantic oceans) an isopycnal analysis of the pathways and a reverse trajectory analysis performed on Argo floats showed that only the Southeast Pacific was a viable option. We are currently exploring possible mechanisms for the explicit pathway from the Southeast Pacific and expect to submit a paper on the topic to GRL by early November, 2020.