Season’s Greetings from us all at Plymouth Marine Laboratory and PML Applications Ltd.

25 December 2022

The above Christmas animation was kindly created by Dr James Clark from our Marine Systems Modelling Group. The ‘snowflakes’ you see, that arrange themselves to create our acronym PML, are actually an image taken of a ‘mystery sea creature’ we found a few years ago within sediment samples, which were collected during an experiment looking into the response of seabed organisms to ocean de-oxygenation. We established that the creature was a ‘naked foraminifera’ that we believe has only ever been recorded in Scotland and Norway. Foraminifera are single-cell organisms, this particular one was caught in a benthic sample in the waters off the Plymouth Sound by PML scientists.

The animation was made using CMEMS Global Ocean Physics Reanalysis surface ocean velocity fields. “Snowflake” trajectories were computed using a particle tracking software package called PyLag, which has been developed by Dr Clark.