Mark Hopwood

Visiting the flower market for new year trinkets and decorations

Family meal out in Dapeng Fortress city

Our little dragon

Friends enjoying the Shenzhen winter sun

Best wishes for the Spring festival. As our lab breaks for Chinese New Year my family are visiting to spend some time with our little dragon 🧧🏮🐎

AGU is now accepting applications for Editors-in-Chief across five publications, with terms starting Jan 1, 2027. These roles help shape editorial standards, research quality, and peer review in Earth & space science. Apply by May 1, 2026.
buff.ly/8Mxy8vq

Quote from the cruise log of Maria S Merian on science expedition MSM130

In 2024, we encountered a perilous MAYDAY.

A small yacht sailed blind into dense ice with heavy fog and got stuck for 3 days. Drinking water froze, ice pressed the hull & polar bears were nearby. With 0 chance of rescue by helicopter or icebreaker, only a lucky change in weather saved 6 people.

In July, I will be teaching in Shanghai at SJTU for their UN Sustainable Development Goals summer school. 9 summer courses are available suitable for any interested students. I will co-teach "The marine carbon pump jigsaw: science, sustainability and management"

global.sjtu.edu.cn/en/study-sjt...

YouTube video by Fukushima InFORM Polar Bears Trying to Eat Research Equipment in the Beaufort Sea

Not all earthlings appreciate CTD’s but the can be very curious about them. Here are a mother polar bear 🐻‍❄️ with her two cubs inspecting our sea cable in the Canadian 🇨🇦 Arctic Ocean back in 2015 youtu.be/JC2befsNa1Y The CTD is 2000 m down. The bears were not hurt and swam off shortly after 🌊

This is often suggested (& some grant agencies do 😆👍). Yet the difficulty with society journals is reviewer fees would presumably get added to article charges... which already deter most scientists

e.g. JGR:Oceans in 2024 used 2967 reviews for 461 publications, $50 per review is +$320 to our fees

This is unfortunately normal... in the AGU system the average response time of scientists to reviews ranges from a few days to over 6 months... Editors are only as good as the community...

Hundreds of Scientists “Vehemently Oppose” U.S. Effort to Purchase Greenland - Eos About 350 scientists scientists have signed a letter condemning U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to acquire Greenland.

“President Trump’s talk of ‘buying’ Greenland is not only an affront to Greenland’s autonomy but also a dangerous distraction from the urgent work of addressing environmental change impacts to US citizens,” the letter reads. eos.org/research-and...

Greenland

Very happy to welcome Dr Abby Guo to our group today as a postdoc. She will be using data from China's largest Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement trials to understand how well the concept works as a C sink and what the potential side-effects are on marine ecosystems 🌊

www.hopwood-marine-science.com/about

I love how capable some of my students think I am. They will email me a huge draft, a thesis chapter, paper or long assignment, 2 to 5 minutes before we meet, then walk into my office and ask me what I thought about it and how it can be improved.

I can read quite fast, but not that fast.... 😅😅😅

Greenlanders express fear and indignation as Trump eyes territory Greenlanders tell the BBC they have no interest in becoming American as the White House restates its desire for annexation.

#Greenland is a wonderful place. Its people are warm, open, welcoming and very observant about the natural environment of their home. They are not a colony to be bought, sold, occupied or invaded. They are an independent nation to be respected in the global community.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

US discussing options to acquire Greenland, including use of military - White House It came as European allies rallied behind Denmark after renewed US insistence it must have Greenland.

Time to wake up and smell the coffee. The US is an aggressive military state with no respect for the rule of law.

What sort of country kidnaps foreign leaders and charges them with fabricated crimes, or threatens to invade their neighbors if they don't surrender land?

www.bbc.com/news/article...

I use a 20-minute rule... If I cannot access documents for review within 20 minutes of trying, I apologize that I will not be completing the review and kindly request the workflow is improved to save reviewer time (a rule developed after once spending over 2 hours to access a text for review 😅)

Trump's Maduro raid could set precedent for authoritarian powers across globe Trump seems to believe he makes the rules and others cannot have the same privileges.

When the west bangs on about freedom and democracy, the east hears hypocrisy, double-standards and civil disasters in the making.

"America's record of achieving regime change by force in the last 30 years is disastrous."

www.bbc.com/news/article...

My Christmas present this year. A painting of the RV Tangaroa in the Ross Sea Antarctica by Alfred Memelink memelink.nz. Anyone have nice paintings or artwork of research vessels in beautiful places? 🌊🚢 please share.

KTV (Chinese style Karaoke)

Dinner with the team

It may not be a holiday in China, but the research group went for "traditional" KTV (Karaoke) after dinner anyway 🎄🎅🎁

Finished -what I hope😅- is my last #peerreview for 2025

The number I get asked to do keeps going up. In 2025 I finished 30 reviews which is about as many as I can accept. Curiously, either I got kinder or Editors are sending me better drafts (or maybe both!)- only 3 recommended rejections this year

Getting students to fill in their end of course evaluations...🤔

A little cake moves things along much faster than weeks of badgering emails, from 29% to 96% completion in an hour 😆

#Academicchat

#OnThisDay in 1872, the expedition of HMS Challenger set sail from Portsmouth, travelling nearly 70,00 nautical miles and cataloguing over 4000 unknown species over 4 years. This pioneering expedition, organised by the Royal Society, laid the foundations of oceanography.

The Arctic Ocean is a net sink for anthropogenic lead deposited into the Atlantic Ocean - Nature Communications Humans released millions of tons of toxic Pb into the air. The authors show that the Arctic Ocean is a sink for Pb emissions in North America and Eurasia that deposited into the North Atlantic Ocean l...

The Arctic is sparsely populated but still functions as a sink for a large amount of the Pb humans have released into the environment. Atlantic water doesn't only carry heat into the Arctic, but also Pb from European/American industry @geotraces.bsky.social 🌊

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

Executive Summary - NOAA Arctic DOI: 10.25923/nrzf-j897 M. L. Druckenmiller1, R. L. Thoman2,3, and T. A. Moon1 1National Snow and Ice Data Center, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado ...

The 2025 #Arctic Report Card is out! #AGU25 🧪🌊🦑🐻‍❄️

Check out the executive summary by the editors M.L. Drunkenmiller, R.L. Thoman, and T.A. Moon. @alaskawx.bsky.social

arctic.noaa.gov/report-card/...

Complete with a new logo for our work 😆

I'm not the most creative person 😅, but fortunately some of our students are and they made our working group a new logo and a fantastic webpage with all our projects and research areas 🐻‍❄️ 🐧 🐳 🌎

www.hopwood-marine-science.com

Chart of the study area

Concept diagram showing the main fjord inflow patterns by season

Greenland's fjords are pathways for exchange of heat and freshwater between the continental shelf and outlet glaciers of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Vries et al., present year-round water column velocity observations for Nuup Kangerlua in SW Greenland 🌊

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

View over the working deck on RV Sanna in Disko Bay

Drone shot of RV Sanna working around an iceberg in Disko Bay

Landscape along the West Antarctic Peninsula

View from the RS Karpuj sailing through the Gerlache Strait

It's well known meltwater has some peculiar effects in the ocean, but we're always happy to find a few more! Ambient conditions are very different in Greenland & Antarctica, but curiously in both cases we see short-term negative responses of plankton to meltwater 🌊
online.ucpress.edu/elementa/art...

A weedy sea dragon drifts along above a sandy bottom with various seaweed in the background.

A male weedy sea dragon, about 30cm long, shown from the side. It has a large patch of old eggs below its tail and they are becoming encrusted in algae. The dragon itself is yellow and purple with darker areas around the edges and white/yellow spots throughout.

A closeup of a weedy sea dragon’s head in profile. It’s purple, brown and yellow with spots throughout.

Fun day poking around with a bunch of weedy sea dragons. Lucky me! #WeedySeaDragon #MarineLife #UnderwaterPhotography #PortseaPier

Be careful under the mistletoe this year 😉 😘
🎨: @lizclimo.bsky.social

#WhaleTales #Whalemas

Some of Nicolas Horniblow’s most profound experiences happen on night dives. Once the light drops, the reef shifts. Species that hide during the day move out, and the whole community runs on a different rhythm.

greatsouthernreef.com/nicolas-horn...

Publication fees are a drain of scientific resources, but individual scientists can't change the system.

"Funding agencies hold all the cards". They can and should mandate change; set reasonable terms and ensure good value for public money.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-o....