News

21 March 2015. Giddings and SIO graduate students Julia, May-Linn, Sasha, Erica, and Shantong, joined with the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve (TRNERR) team to present hands-on experiments to kids and parents at the San Diego Science EXPO Day. It was a fun filled day with exhibitors presenting hands-on STEM experiences ranging from operating and building robots to making concrete. There were even math rap and dance performances! With over 20,000 participants, it was an amazing day of science and fun. The TRNERR group had a demo where kids dug through fake mud cores to search for the various creatures that live in estuary marshes and microscopes to check them out in more detail. While the TRNERR group covered the biology, we covered the physics of estuaries and guided kids in experiments of what happens when river water meets the ocean.Read More

Angelica Gilroy helped organize the Giddings’ group and some other Scripps students to attend San Diego’s Expanding Your Horizon conference. Expanding Your Horizons is an annual conference aimed to interest girls, aged 11 to 16, in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in fun, informative, hands-on workshops. The goals include helping the girls learn about STEM based careers, providing them with positive role models, and showing the excitement and fun of science. Our group presented a series of hands-on activities demonstrating the effects of density in mini water tanks. This included having the girls explore gravity currents, intrusions, stratification, internal waves, melting ice, and much more. We related the dynamics they were seeing to oceanic processes that we all study. Everyone had a great time, the scientists and the students… in fact we had a hard time prying the girls (and sometimes ourselves!) away from the tanks!

Above is the group of scientists leading our workshop. From left to right: Julia Fiedler, Angelica Gilroy, Olavo Marques, Isabella Arzeno, and Sarah Giddings.

Left: an intrusion layer of intermediate density (blue) between a dense (red) and fresh (clear) layer about to hit the wall of the mini-tank.

04 March 2015. Giddings briefly spoke at a STAY COOL event where Dr. Ron Flick was the lead speaker. Dr Flick discussed climate change impacts as they relate to sea level on a global and regional scale, including his recent work in Antarctica. Dr. Giddings described her work on local estuarine response to extreme sea level events including her PhD students’ Angelica and Maddie’s projects. STAY COOL is a non-partisan organization of grandparents working to help protect their grandkids from global warming by staying informed and expanding education. It was inspiring to see such a large group of citizens actively engaged in advocacy and education.

19 February 2015. Giddings (holding poster) helps lead a tour of Scripps Pier and a discussion of sea level change with sea level expert Dr. Ron Flick (with the ballcap) for the group, STAY COOL. STAY COOL is a non-partisan organization of grandparents working to help protect their grandkids from global warming by staying informed and expanding education. The group visit was planned to coincide with a moderately high spring tide.

Giddings’ group received an Environment Blaskar Grant from the San Diego Foundation to examine the response of local lagoons to extreme events through numerical models. The work will be used to consider these system’s response to future change. See the press-release here.

Check out The Oceanography Society (TOS) special issue on women in oceanography for a series of inspiring profiles and information on how far oceanography has come in the past decade.

Check out the exciting Ignite! talks at the 2013 Coastal Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) conference, 1 year ago in San Diego. I was invited to give one of these talks, you can see me at minute 19:40 but it is well worth watching the whole bunch!

Ignite Session: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger (Or at Least a Better Scientist) from CERF on Vimeo.

Giddings et al. 2014 publication “Hindcasts of potential harmful algal bloom transport pathways on the Pacific Northwest coast” was featured as the weekly highlighted publication by Scripps Institution of Oceanography in July and was recently featured in the University of Washington news!

Angelica Gilroy and Madeleine Harvey are recent PhD students joining the lab. They both will be working on local Southern California estuaries and their interactions with the ocean. Gilroy and Harvey have both completed 1 year of coursework at SIO and are actively starting their research projects this summer.