How the ocean works as a physical system. This covers currents, tides, heat absorption, chemistry, and the large-scale dynamics that shape ocean conditions and underpin everything that happens within them.
Stressors
The ocean rose 5.9 millimetres in 2024, above the recent trend. Atlantic Canada, sinking as seas rise, could see a metre by 2100. A major Fraser flood could cost $20 to $30 billion. That exposure is being built and financed now, at conditions the assets were never designed for.
Ocean Physics
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation keeps northwestern Europe warmer than its latitude allows and drives some of the North Atlantic's most productive fisheries. The question of whether it is slowing down is one of the most consequential in climate science right now.
Ocean Physics
A few degrees of warming in the northeastern Pacific collapsed fisheries, erased kelp forests, and ran up costs in the billions. What a marine heatwave actually does to the ocean, and why finance still struggles to price it.
Ocean Physics
Climate is usually told as an atmospheric story. It is mostly an ocean one, and once you see why, the case for connecting finance to ocean health stops looking optional.
Ocean Physics
Tides are gravitational and perfectly predictable. So why can two coastlines a few hundred kilometres apart differ by a factor of ten, and why does the Bay of Fundy have the highest tides on the planet?
Ocean Physics
The ocean moves, even in the deep and even without wind. Those movements carry the heat, the nutrients, and the fish on all three Canadian coasts. Some of the currents that built the Grand Banks and keep Europe mild are now changing, and Atlantic Canada sits in the path of what happens next.
Ocean Physics
Most of the ocean sits below a sharp temperature boundary, in cold dark water that never touches the surface but decides what happens at the top. How that hidden system works, why it is changing fast in Canadian waters, and why ocean risk is still priced as though it were not.
Ocean Physics
The atmosphere gets the headlines, but it holds the smaller share. The ocean has taken up the rest, storing it where it does not show, and some of what that heat will do is already settled, whatever emissions do next.