Nick Pizzo

A close-up, black-and-white portrait of a man with short, graying hair and a well-trimmed beard smiling warmly at the camera. He is wearing a collared, striped shirt layered under a dark, zip-up sweater. The background is a soft, out-of-focus outdoor setting featuring blurred trees and a covered walkway.

@baylorfk.bsky.social is not actually a fox. He's a Professor at @brown.edu whose research focuses on ocean physics and its role in the global climate system, and in particular, submesoscale turbulence, mixed-layer dynamics, and improving climate model accuracy through advanced parameterizations

6pm Monday 2/23 - Green Hill, South Kingstown RI

Gusts and heavy snow have dissipated.

Physical controls on heterogeneous mesopelagic biogeochemistry Communications Earth & Environment - A patchy distribution of biogeochemical properties in the ocean interior arises from the combined influence of biological and physical processes.

Surface ocean processes impact structure deep into the ocean interior. In our perspective paper, @maratimes.bsky.social, grad student Katarina Merk, and I discuss using physical perspectives to interpret subsurface biogeochemical distributions and why we as a community should care! 🌊

Turbulence and mixing in a Scottish Loch Abstract. It is nearly three-quarters of a century since E. R. Watson (1904) and E. M. Wedderburn (1907) made the observations in Loch Ness which showed co

The most important study in Loch Ness: royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article...

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🌿🌊 #WorldWetlandsDay

A recent #URIGSO-led study analyzed 23,000+ sediment samples and found a key gap in a common method for measuring carbon in salt marshes. Addressing this gap is essential for understanding marsh resilience and for guiding blue carbon strategies.

➡️ Read more: buff.ly/T2ubRtp

Sylvester and Clifford on Curved Space Einstein realized that gravity is due to the curvature of spacetime, but let’s go back earlier: On the 18th of August 1869, the eminent mathematician Sylvester gave a speech arguing that geom…

In 1869, long before Einstein, the famous mathematician Sylvester announced that Clifford - the Clifford algebra guy - was studying whether space is curved!

Clifford's mission to study this was almost thwarted by a shipwreck. But that didn't stop him!

johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2026/01/10/s...

Using the normal transformation of variables via Jacobians, u_v = partial (u,w)/partial (v,w), v_w = partial (v,u)/partial(w,u), w_u = partial (w,v)/partial(u,v), so that u_v v_w w_u = partial(u,w)/partial (w,u) partial (v,u)/partial (u,v) partial (w,v)/partial(v,w) = (-1)(-1)(-1) = -1

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And the paper is out! Great to work with my good friend @rocangel.bsky.social who led the way.

www.seismosoc.org/news/tsunami...

Like I'm 5 involves the canals argument, like I'm 20 follows Maclaurin's approach and like I'm 35 employs virial theorems. [I am much older than 5 and it took me a long time to get past page 2 of Chandrasekhar's book on ellipsoidal figures.].

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Coastal Physical Oceanography School of Marine Science and Policy, College of Earth, Ocean and Environment University of Delaware Newark, DE Starting Date: 2026-2027 academic year The School of Marine Science and Policy (SMSP) seeks to hire a tenure-track coastal physical oceanographer with research interests in estuaries, continental shelves, or the interface between coastal and open oceans. We seek candidates with research interests from any area of coastal physical oceanography, including a broad set of processes and varying scales: turbulence and mixing, meso- and submesoscale dynamics, boundary layers, shelf-wide circulation and property budgets, and the impact of climate on the coastal ocean, among others. Applications of candidates that integrate field observations, theory, or numerical modeling are welcome.

The School of Marine Science & Policy at the University of Delaware is hiring! We are looking for a talented Coastal Physical Oceanographer to join us.

More information is available here, and don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.

careers.udel.edu/en-us/job/50...

🌊🧪 Go see Lulabel's talk at DFD if you want to learn more about how wind makes waves! An old question, yet one we still don't know the full answer to.

Awesome picture! We have seen this at submesoscale features, where currents couple strongly to the short (and steep) waves as they travel at comparable speeds, leading to enhanced breaking depending on the orientation of the waves/currents. Here's a photo off the coast of California showing this.

A deep blue image of sea water, with a semi-circular turquoise shape (the river plume waters) in the top center. Data from Copernicus Browser (https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu), Sentinel-2 on 17 November

Here's a view by #Sentinel-2 of the Rhone river plume within the Gulf of Lion waters. Other the change in water colour, and the strong front between the two water masses, I love how there are more wind-induced whitecaps in the bluer waters, although I do not have a direct explanation about it... 🧐🌊

Aurora visible over the beginning of stick season in southern Rhode Island.

South County Rhode Island 9pm 11/11. Aurora is visible to the naked eye, but this is taken with 3s exposure.

Job Opening **ASSISTANT PROFESSOR MARINE ECOLOGY**, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Rhode Island. The Department of Biological Sciences in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences (CELS) at the University of Rhode Island (URI) invites applications for an academic year (9 month), tenure-track Assistant Professor position specializing in Marine Ecology. URI, the top public university in New England, is a land and sea grant research university located in Kingston, Rhode Island, a beautiful seaside community that is well connected by car, bus, and rail about 40 min from Providence, an hour from Boston and 3 hours from New York City.

Job Opening **ASSISTANT PROFESSOR MARINE ECOLOGY**, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Rhode Island.

jobs.uri.edu/postings/15960

Equatorial upwelling of phosphorus drives Atlantic N2 fixation and Sargassum blooms - Nature Geoscience High near-surface nitrogen-fixation rates that promoted the recent growth of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt were tied to greater upwelling of phosphorus from the equatorial Atlantic, according to c...

Check out our latest work, led by Jon Jung, Ph.D. student in the @amglab.bsky.social at @mpic.de:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Here we show that the supply of excess phosphorous from accounts for the majority of observed Sargassum variability since 2011.

🌊 🧪 #Paleosky #CoralReefs

Shaken and Stirred: Teaching the Next Generation of Oceanographers about Ocean Turbulence and Mixing If you’ve ever been on an airplane, you know how turbulence feels: shaky and chaotic. Just like there is turbulence in the air, there is turbulence in the ocean, except ocean turbulence doesn’t requir...

Our amazing students rand a whole class, including a week at sea, to teach other students about turbulence and mixing. 🌊

scripps.ucsd.edu/news/shaken-...

A modern treatment of water waves from one of the few people alive who is an expert on the whole story, from theory to practice. I will use sections of this for my classes. 🌊

Most people know how to draw an ellipse by pinning two ends of a string to a board and sweeping a pencil around inside the string, keeping it taut.

But what about the 3D equivalent?

Start with an ellipse and a hyperbola in orthogonal planes, with each curve’s vertices being the other’s foci.

I took a class on analog electronics (using Horowitz and Hill, of course) at UCSB from Martinis as an undergraduate and I remember him as an enthusiastic teacher who always had time to answer questions.

Hey fluids friends, we're recruiting in my department this year!

It's great that @johncarlosbaez.bsky.social is on bluesky -- I've learned a ton from him about math and physics over the years. 🧪🔭

🦞💙 Happy #NationalLobsterDay!

Meet the star of the Ann Gall Durbin Aquarium on the University of Rhode Island's Bay Campus: a rare blue lobster, found in the wild in about one in two million! 🦑 🌊

Also read about this on Tom's blog! 🌊

mrtomsblog.com/instruments/

How Climate Scientists Saw the Future Before It Arrived | Quanta Magazine Over the past 60 years, scientists have largely succeeded in building a computer model of Earth to see what the future holds. One of the most ambitious projects humankind has ever undertaken has now…

In the 1960s and 70s, Syukuro Manabe pioneered ways to model Earth’s atmosphere. In 2021, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, which is often cited as foundational to modern climate science.

Bon voyage to our lab member Katie Stone on the very last @urigso.bsky.social R/V Endeavor cruise! As the sole URI scientist aboard, Katie is the last URI scientist to sail on this historic vessel that began its work in 1976.

Video is almost certainly real. From colleagues in Russia:

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