Nick Pizzo
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nickpizzooceans.bsky.social
Nick Pizzo
@nickpizzooceans.bsky.social
Asst. Prof. of Oceanography. Interested in fluid mechanics, waves, air-sea interaction, physics, geometry, applied math and the history of science. He/him. https://www.nickpizzooceans.com
South County Rhode Island 9pm 11/11. Aurora is visible to the naked eye, but this is taken with 3s exposure.
November 12, 2025 at 2:17 AM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Job Opening **ASSISTANT PROFESSOR MARINE ECOLOGY**, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Rhode Island.

jobs.uri.edu/postings/15960
November 10, 2025 at 4:03 PM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Check out our latest work, led by Jon Jung, Ph.D. student in the @amglab.bsky.social at @mpic.de:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Here we show that the supply of excess phosphorous from accounts for the majority of observed Sargassum variability since 2011.

🌊 🧪 #Paleosky #CoralReefs
Equatorial upwelling of phosphorus drives Atlantic N2 fixation and Sargassum blooms - Nature Geoscience
High near-surface nitrogen-fixation rates that promoted the recent growth of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt were tied to greater upwelling of phosphorus from the equatorial Atlantic, according to c...
www.nature.com
November 6, 2025 at 1:10 PM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Our amazing students rand a whole class, including a week at sea, to teach other students about turbulence and mixing. 🌊

scripps.ucsd.edu/news/shaken-...
Shaken and Stirred: Teaching the Next Generation of Oceanographers about Ocean Turbulence and Mixing
If you’ve ever been on an airplane, you know how turbulence feels: shaky and chaotic. Just like there is turbulence in the air, there is turbulence in the ocean, except ocean turbulence doesn’t requir...
scripps.ucsd.edu
November 5, 2025 at 5:44 PM
A modern treatment of water waves from one of the few people alive who is an expert on the whole story, from theory to practice. I will use sections of this for my classes. 🌊
I have not updated all I wanted ... but it is here now : github.com/ardhuin/wave...
So much new stuff from SWOT that should be in there, but we will have to write the papers first. Here is a teaser from chapter 5. And if you are wondering what is H_L=5 km,T > 18 s, well that is "some" wave height.
November 1, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Most people know how to draw an ellipse by pinning two ends of a string to a board and sweeping a pencil around inside the string, keeping it taut.

But what about the 3D equivalent?

Start with an ellipse and a hyperbola in orthogonal planes, with each curve’s vertices being the other’s foci.
October 31, 2025 at 10:53 AM
I took a class on analog electronics (using Horowitz and Hill, of course) at UCSB from Martinis as an undergraduate and I remember him as an enthusiastic teacher who always had time to answer questions.
October 7, 2025 at 7:43 PM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Hey fluids friends, we're recruiting in my department this year!
September 30, 2025 at 5:11 PM
It's great that @johncarlosbaez.bsky.social is on bluesky -- I've learned a ton from him about math and physics over the years. 🧪🔭
If you had a negative mass star next to a positive mass star, what would it do? It would *chase after* the positive mass star, with the both accelerating toward the speed of light!

A negative mass black hole is not a white hole. What is it?

Fun with physics....

mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosb...
John Carlos Baez (@[email protected])
I've been trying to lose weight, so I've been studying the physics of negative mass. Basically it doesn't exist. But physicists are have run into a serious problem. They think they can use astro...
mathstodon.xyz
September 28, 2025 at 2:41 PM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
🦞💙 Happy #NationalLobsterDay!

Meet the star of the Ann Gall Durbin Aquarium on the University of Rhode Island's Bay Campus: a rare blue lobster, found in the wild in about one in two million! 🦑 🌊
September 25, 2025 at 6:29 PM
Also read about this on Tom's blog! 🌊

mrtomsblog.com/instruments/
September 24, 2025 at 6:39 PM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
In the 1960s and 70s, Syukuro Manabe pioneered ways to model Earth’s atmosphere. In 2021, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, which is often cited as foundational to modern climate science.
How Climate Scientists Saw the Future Before It Arrived | Quanta Magazine
Over the past 60 years, scientists have largely succeeded in building a computer model of Earth to see what the future holds. One of the most ambitious projects humankind has ever undertaken has now…
www.quantamagazine.org
September 21, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Bon voyage to our lab member Katie Stone on the very last @urigso.bsky.social R/V Endeavor cruise! As the sole URI scientist aboard, Katie is the last URI scientist to sail on this historic vessel that began its work in 1976.
August 26, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Video is almost certainly real. From colleagues in Russia:
August 5, 2025 at 1:49 PM
🧪
You might have heard that the elliptical orbits of a planet around a star under Newtonian gravity have a kind of *four*-dimensional symmetry. There is a lot of beautiful mathematics behind the ideas that make this notion precise, but here is a simple way to get a handle on the underlying symmetry.
July 29, 2025 at 2:08 PM
🧪
Some eye candy: Görtler vortices in an underexpanded jet by PhD graduate Meet Patel
July 22, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
If you happen to be interested in ocean mixing variability, stratified turbulence, or the fate of shoaling nonlinear internal waves on the inner shelf, our recent study has just appeared in JPO: journals.ametsoc.org/view/journal.... Fun to work on this with @alexisonfluids.bsky.social & crew! 🌊🌊🌊
journals.ametsoc.org
July 9, 2025 at 8:21 PM
Happy #WorldOceanDay! 🌊🧪 Photo of Kelvin-Helmoltz instability: Nick Statom
June 8, 2025 at 2:59 PM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
Fun new paper at #SIGGRAPH2025:

What if instead of two 6-sided dice, you could roll a single "funky-shaped" die that gives the same statistics (e.g, 7 is twice as likely as 4 or 10).

Or make fair dice in any shape—e.g., dragons rather than cubes?

That's exactly what we do! 1/n
May 21, 2025 at 4:29 PM
single 🧪
May 3, 2025 at 2:59 AM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
We have two articles (both by first-time scientific authors) in GRL! First up, led by PhD student Lulabel Ruiz Seitz, we find a simple interaction between lateral stirring and biology that has implications for modeling and observing cross-shore fluxes.
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Joint Effects of Submesoscale Lateral Dispersion and Biological Reactions on Biogeochemical Flux
Lateral stirring, which is parameterized as dispersion, has a near-linear relationship with cross-shore phytoplankton flux Dispersion has the greatest impact on phytoplankton flux when the reacti...
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
April 15, 2025 at 9:32 PM
Reposted by Nick Pizzo
We often use discretization to approximate continuous laws of physics, but it also goes the other way:

You can use continuous equations to approximate the behavior of discrete systems!

Here we'll see how electrical circuits can be modeled using the Laplace equation Δφ=0. [1/n]
April 7, 2025 at 1:41 PM
🧪 SWOT, a recently launched NASA satellite, is about to teach us a lot about the heterogeneity of ocean wave fields
April 3, 2025 at 7:10 PM
🌊🧪
April 2, 2025 at 10:46 PM
Greg Wagner and I just published a paper (link.springer.com/article/10.1...) on wave momentum. It is well known that waves packets in deep water have no momentum, yet it takes momentum to generate them in the first place. Where does that initial momentum go?
Deep Flows Transmitted by Forced Surface Gravity Waves - Water Waves
We examine a two-dimensional deep-water surface gravity wave packet generated by a pressure disturbance in the Lagrangian reference frame. The pressure disturbance has the form of a narrow-banded weak...
link.springer.com
April 2, 2025 at 8:04 PM