Upwelling Systems of the World: A Scientific Journey to the Most Productive Marine Ecosystems

Upwelling systems are special places in the oceans where nutrient-enriched water is brought into the euphotic zone to fuel phytoplankton blooms that, via marine food-web interactions, create the world’s richest fish resources. This book introduces the reader to the interdisciplinary science of upwelling and provides a comprehensive overview of the world’s most productive marine ecosystems in the context of climate variability, climate change and human exploitation. This material presented is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate study or just for anyone interested to learn about the creation of life in the oceans and how this is compromised by human activities.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. Preliminaries.- Chapter 2. The Functioning of Coastal Upwelling Systems.- Chapter 3. Large-Scale Setting, Natural Variability and Human Influences.- Chapter 4. The California Current Upwelling System.- Chapter 5 The Peru-Chile Coastal Upwelling System.- Chapter 6. The Canary/Iberia Current Upwelling System.- Chapter 7. The Benguela Current Upwelling System.- Chapter 8. Seasonal Wind-driven Coastal Upwelling Systems.- Chapter 9. Other Important Upwelling Systems.- Chapter 10. Comparison, Enigmas and Future Research.

About the Author :

Jochen Kämpf is an Associate Professor of Oceanography at the School of the Environment at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. Including the discovery of several important coastal upwelling regions, his previous research covered a broad range of subjects from small-scale convective mixing in polar regions, the circulation of inverse estuaries, suspended sediment dynamics and turbidity currents to canyon-flow interactions. He also published two textbooks on hydrodynamic modelling at Springer.

Piers Chapman is a Professor in the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University, where he currently works on the physics and chemistry of the Gulf of Mexico, concentrating on the low oxygen environment that forms each year in summer. He worked for many years in South Africa, has published widely on the Benguela upwelling system, and has been on over 50 research cruises totalling almost three years at sea.