southernocean

Kirsten is an extremely accomplished blue-water sailor, with extensive experience in the high latitudes. She is an entrant in the 2022 Golden Globe Race, and a skipper of Skip Novak's expedition sailboat Pelagic. We discuss her sailing history, working for Skip Novak, South Georgia Island, anchoring, heavy weather, heaving-to, dressing for the Southern Ocean, the Golden Globe Race, safety, her Cape George 36 Minnehaha, catching rainwater, dual mainsheets vs a traveler, and singlehand sailing.

Peter is an Irish sailor who has been, for the last five years, preparing his boat, Waxwing, a Rival 41, for a solo nonstop circumnavigation via the Southern Ocean and the five great capes. We talk about his preparations, foul weather gear, his heavy weather strategy, safety gear, provisioning, wildlife, and sailing in general.

In this episode we are joined by Oceanographer and Geoscientist, Dr. Joellen Russell. Joellen is Professor and the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair of Integrative Science at the University of Arizona Department of Geosciences. Joellen is the lead for the modeling team of the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project (SOCCOM), a multi institutional program based at Princeton focused on unlocking the mysteries of the Southern Ocean. She serves as the Co-chair of the Science Advisory Board’s Climate Working Group at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA.

Before joining the University of Arizona, Dr. Russell was a Research Scientist at Princeton University and NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (NOAA/GFDL). She received her A.B. in Environmental Geoscience from Harvard and her PhD in Oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

Prof. Russell is one of the 14 scientists behind an amicus curiae brief supporting the plaintiff in the historic 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision on carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, et al. v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Joellen's research uses global climate and earth system models to simulate the climate and carbon cycle of the past, the present and the future, often utilizing satellite data, floating robotic ocean sensors known as Argo floats, and cutting edge supercomputers. Her work on the westerly winds led to the creation of a new paradigm in climate science, namely that warmer climates produce stronger westerly winds. This insight solved one of the long-standing climate paradoxes, the mechanism responsible for transferring one-third of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into the ocean and then back out again during our repeated glacial-interglacial cycles.

FV3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrbiHBmWg&t=9s

Robot Floats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AVOr-wPdqs

SOCCOM: https://soccom.princeton.edu/

Joellen Russell Presentation: Climate and the Deep Blue Sea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7aykuhkj90

In 2015, after three South African sailors went missing after sailing into the vastness of the Southern Ocean and their families desperately tried to trace their final movements. Their determination to uncover the truth, would require going to war with the world’s largest tourism conglomerate, a €20 billion-a-year monolith that had no interest in fielding questions.

In this episode we share a narration of the 10,000+ word story of sailing tragedy and loss, followed by a candid chat with its author, Kevin Bloom about the missing pieces of the puzzle that led to the deaths of three sailors and the eventual relocation of the missing 44 foot Leopard Catamaran several months later.

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