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Question 9 transcript:
"I would think most people would feel very uncomfortable trying to reduce your work to questions like that. Again, primarily I guess because its such an evolving process, what I might think of as important today may not be at all important a few years from now. In a general sense, of course, I certainly hope that what we are doing will help us to understand better how the ocean works. At a more particular level, or local level, taking the "Meddies" or these lenses in speeding water as an example. We now know they're quite ubiquitous in the ocean. But, I don't know if we really have a good sense of how important they are or in what way they are important. Clearly if they are long lived and can travel great distances or long lived even as they interact with others, can actually coalesce or break up -they're providing some form of mixing in the ocean. That is a pretty difficult thing to quantify and I know there are a lot of smart people working on this, but I don't know how far they have gotten in translating these kinds of observations into some kind of numerical representation of them that you could use for example in numerical models where your trying to accurately recreate what the ocean circulation looks like. I have a funny feeling that most people would agree that these are important, but how far we have gotten in parameterizing, which is a word that people often use to represent these processes in ocean models, I don't know. That would be one example of potential importance but not necessarily important and the answer may evolve over time."

1. How did you first become interested in science?
2. What is the focus of your research and why did you choose this field of study?
3. What have been some recent discoveries in the study of ocean currents?
4. How do you use acoustics to study ocean currents?
5. What challenges have you faced in studying ocean currents?
6. What has most surprised you about studying ocean currents?
7. What skills are important in your area of research?
8. What are the opportunities in the study of ocean currents? Can people with out PhDs participate in some way in this type of research?
9. What is the greatest impact/relevance of your research?
10. What continues to inspire you about your work?
11. What advice would you give a high school student who expressed an interst in pursuing a career in your field?