Orateur
Description
Oceans are stratified environments, featuring important and sometimes localised gradients of salinity and temperature, that in turn can profoundly affect their mechanical properties (i.e. density and viscosity). These water bodies host a significant part of the Earth’s biomass in the form of microorganisms that swim, feed, and reproduce in such inhomogeneous environments, meanwhile participating in the global food chain but also chemical and nutrient exchanges critical to the ecosystem or climate. Understanding the impact of physical gradients and stratification on their dynamics is therefore critical. To this end, our work focuses on the influence of spatially varying distributions of viscosity on the hydrodynamic signature of small bodies, active or not, and on the modification of their swimming trajectories.