Our goal in T-TIDE is to understand the life cycle of internal waves — what happens to internal waves as they propagate across an ocean basin and the multitude of other motions that exist in the ocean.

Most importantly, we want to understand what happens when these waves hit the continental shelf.

Just like ocean swell generated from a distant storm, the internal waves propagate away from the region where they were generated and all the way across the ocean. They either dissipate by putting their energy near a continental shelf or reflect and go elsewhere.

We tend to think of the internal tide as something very regular. But every time we profiled the CTD from the ship, we captured only one image... we saw snapshots of the internal waves deep beneath the ship.

In the Tasman Sea there are temperature fronts, mesoscale eddies, near-inertial currents, and internal waves generated by the wind. The reason we made surveys by ship is to understand the three-dimensionality of the semidiurnal waves (generated by the tidal interaction with typography) and separate them from all the other motions in the ocean. —Luc Rainville

Why do you study the ocean? by Hayley Dosser

Shrinking foam cups for Salmon Bay School by Hayley Dosser

Why study internal waves? Because across the world's oceans they contain terawatts of energy. They move that energy from one place to another, and if you want to understand the energy budget for the ocean, you need to know where that energy ends up.

While aboard the Falkor in the middle of Tasman Sea, Hayley Dosser, Dmitry Brazhnikov (UAF), and Randall Lee (EPA Victoria) conducted live web chats with elementary, middle school, and high school students from California, New Mexico, and Melbourne, Australia. Luc and Hayley visited the Salmon Bay Elementary School in Seattle in person, where the students learned about ocean density and pressure. The children decorated styrofoam cups, which were attached to the CTD cage during the cruise and shrunk - a demonstration of high pressures at depth.