How El Niño and La Niña reach across the globe to impact fish populations thousands of kilometres away?

Abstract This talk shares SOCCO’s journey from a small South African research effort to a leading Southern Ocean carbon–climate programme. Through pioneering glider campaigns, remote sensing and high-resolution modelling, we show how fine-scale ocean dynamics shape the seasonal cycle, carbon flux variability and climate sensitivity—offering new insights and challenges for next-generation climate models. Speaker information Sandy Thomalla is a Chief Researcher at the CSIR and Research Group Leader of the Southern Ocean Carbon-Climate Observatory (SOCCO), a national programme advancing understanding of the Southern Ocean’s role in a changing climate. Her work focuses on how physical drivers shape event-scale to inter-annual variability in ecosystem and biogeochemical processes, with the aim of better constraining carbon cycling in the Southern Ocean. Her combined expertise in observations, autonomous technologies, and remote sensing provides a strong foundation for improving assessing the climate sensitivity of the Southern Ocean biological carbon pump.

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