Foresight Workshop: Microscale Ocean Biophysics

This interdisciplinary foresight workshop will focus on the biophysics of microscale marine processes, i.e., how small-scale interactions between marine microorganisms and their physico-chemical environment overwhelmingly govern global ocean processes. If we are to advance our understanding of aquatic ecosystems, we need to replace current statistical and heuristic descriptions with a mechanistic understanding of the component processes. Ecosystem structure and function ultimately depend on interactions at the level of individual organism. Small organisms that live in a non-intuitive physical world dominate the biological processes in the ocean. This world and the organisms inhabiting it cannot be understood without a strong appeal to small-scale fluid physics, mass transport, active suspensions, turbulence, and mechanics in general.