The motion of the ocean is often thought of in horizontal terms, for instance in the powerful currents that sweep around the planet, or the waves that ride in and out along a coastline. But there is also plenty of vertical motion, particularly in the open seas, where water from the deep can rise up, bringing nutrients to the upper ocean, while surface waters sink, sending dead organisms, along with oxygen and carbon, to the deep interior. Oceanographers use instruments to characterise the vertical mixing of the ocean's waters and the biological communities that live there. But these tools are limited in their ability to capture small-scale features, such as the up- and down-welling of water and organisms over a small, kilometre-wide ocean region. Such features are essential for understanding the makeup of marine life that exists in a given volume of the ocean (such as in a fishery), as well as the amount of carbon that the ocean can absorb and sequester away.
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