Our Scientists – From Coast to Coast to Coast – Peter Galbraith
Learn more about the science performed at the Maurice-Lamontagne Instititute.
Transcript
My name is Peter Galbraith and I'm a research scientist in physical oceanography at DFO's Maurice Lamontagne Institute.
My research interest includes the climate of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, particularly the winter conditions when nearly half of the volume of the waters are cold and are freezing before ice starts to be formed.
This layer has a really persisting influence throughout the rest of the year, as even after the spring warming occurs and ice melts, the sun warms the surface, and this will imprison a cold intermediate layer where by even in august we'll measure a temperature profile in the Gulf and find temperatures colder than zero degree celsius.
Now to study the evolution of this cold layer, I've been doing a winter survey on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence since 1996. We initially started this using a helicopter, land it on in the ice, where we get out of the helicopter, drill a hole, do a profile through the ice of the water conditions.
This evolved to a survey done in a helicopter in stationary flight, where we arrive at a station, open the door, drop a profiler in the water, do a station in about eight minutes.
In the last few years, we've been doing this using more traditional method in oceanography of using an icebreaker and deploying a larger water collector.
Contrasting to these cold conditions, the water underneath, the deeper waters in the Gulf Saint Lawrence; they're a mix of really warm Gulf Stream waters and cold Labrador Shelf waters.
And after a hundred years of observations of the bottom waters of the Gulf Saint Lawrence we're now at record high conditions and this really preoccupying situation is something that we monitor really closely.
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