Carlos Moffat
University of Delaware, DE·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Polar oceans are changing as climate shifts. Glacial meltwater is pouring onto Antarctic shelves, and large climate patterns ripple through food webs from krill (small shrimp-like crustaceans) up to seabirds.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
physical oceanography
Antarctica
Antarctic Peninsula
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Measure the meltwater-driven Antarctic Peninsula Coastal Current through field deployments to determine what controls how fresh, buoyant coastal currents spread across and along the shelf.
- Determine how freshwater entering along long stretches of coast, rather than from point sources like rivers, contributes to water mass transformation and heat transfer on the Antarctic continental shelf.
- Harmonize 30+ years of ocean, krill and at-sea seabird survey data from the California Current, Northern Gulf of Alaska and Antarctic Peninsula LTER sites into comparable datasets.
- Test how climate modes such as El Niño affect seabird abundance and community composition through local ocean conditions and krill, using generalized additive mixed models and hierarchical community models.
More about the research
The lab's projects examine how freshwater and ocean physics shape coastal Antarctic waters, and how ocean conditions and prey affect seabird communities across regions from the subarctic to Antarctica.
Why it matters
Knowing how glacial meltwater moves heat and freshwater on Antarctic shelves, and whether distant marine ecosystems respond alike to climate swings, could help scientists and marine managers anticipate changes in ocean food webs. This cross-ecosystem knowledge is intended to inform management and conservation of productive marine ecosystems.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: ULTRA-Data: Harmonizing at-sea seabird surveys at three marine LTER sites to uncover community responses from the subarctic to Antarctic
NSF · Sep 2025 – Aug 2028
CAREER: The Transformation, Cross-shore Export, and along-shore Transport of Freshwater on Antarctic Shelves
NSF · Jun 2020 – May 2027
Closest labs
Jodi Young
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Measure how different sympagic algal species adapt their growth and cell properties to seasonal sea ice formation and melt, using a laboratory ice tank modeled on Antarctic Peninsula conditions.
Lorenzo Ciannelli
Oregon State University, OR·Ecology & Evolution
Collect fish eggs and larvae in two Greenland glacial fjords and use particle-tracking models to simulate how fjord currents transport them.
Carl Lamborg
University of California-Santa Cruz, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Characterize zooplankton communities along the central and western Aleutian Islands at sites with known differences in mercury levels in marine life, combining oceanography and genomics.
The school
University of Delaware: 22 labs on PI Pages, $466M a year on research, 298 research doctorates a year.
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