M. Josefina Olascoaga
Professor, Ocean Sciences
Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science
jolascoaga@miami.edu
M. Josefina Olascoaga is a physical oceanographer who applies modern tools from nonlinear dynamical systems theory to investigate processes in the ocean that depend on transport by currents. Her research integrates theoretical analysis with observational field work and controlled laboratory experiments. In complex systems such as the ocean, many transport-related phenomena are not immediately intuitive and were long attributed to randomness or chaos. However, closer examination of data often reveals coherent structures that organize and explain how water masses move. Identifying these structures has, for example, enabled the detection of retention regions that help sustain red tide outbreaks on the West Florida Shelf. More recently, research has focused on understanding the transport of floating material such as plastic debris and sargassum. The Maxey–Riley equation from fluid mechanics indicates that inertial particles, those with finite size and nonneutral buoyancy, trajectories differ from those of idealized Lagrangian particles, which are assumed to be infinitesimally small and neutrally buoyant. Expanding on this theoretical basis, Olascoaga and colleagues proposed a model for inertial particle motion at the ocean–atmosphere boundary. The resulting BOM equation (named after Beron-Vera, Olascoaga, and Miron) reveals that inertial effects speed up the development of large garbage accumulations in the centers of subtropical gyres, exceeding what would be expected from Ekman-driven convergence alone. Understanding how plastic debris and sargassum are transported by ocean currents is critical for both environmental management and public health because transport pathways determine where these materials accumulate, how long they persist, and who or what is exposed to them.
Keywords: physical oceanography, ocean transport dynamics, marine debris transport, plastic, garbage, sargassum
