Inaugural Lecture of Prof AJ Smit | Natural Sciences скачать в хорошем качестве

Inaugural Lecture of Prof AJ Smit | Natural Sciences

Professor Albertus J (AJ) Smit has been with the Department of Biodiversity & Conservation Biology at the University of the Western Cape since 2014. Trained as an ecophysiologist, he began with laboratory studies of nitrogen acquisition in algae and broadened this into investigations of trophic dependencies in marine systems. That orientation expanded further when climate science demanded attention to the physical processes of dynamic coasts and the power of large open datasets. Today, his research centres on the ways extreme climatic events in the ocean shape the functioning of coastal ecosystems. Topic: Between Two Oceans: Currents, Climate, And The Future Of South Africa’s Coasts Abstract South Africa is a natural laboratory between two oceans. On the one side, the Agulhas Current brings warm, subtropical waters down the east coast, carrying heat and moisture that shape the region’s humid climate. On the west, the Benguela Current drives cold, nutrient-rich upwelling that fuels one of the most productive marine ecosystems on Earth. Nowhere else does such stark geographical compression of oceanic contrasts occur across so narrow a continental margin. These boundary currents generate extraordinary biodiversity and exerts influence at planetary scales: as Agulhas leakage feeds the Atlantic circulation central to climate regulation, the Benguela’s fertility underpins industrial-scale fisheries that sustain livelihoods, food security, and coastal economies. But the world is changing. The Agulhas Current is intensifying heat transport, shifting regimes along the subtropical–temperate boundary. In the Benguela, the southern reaches are cooling even as offshore and northern sectors trend warmer, a divergence driven by reconfigured wind systems. These atmospheric shifts cascade through the marine domain, reshaping nutrient delivery, biological productivity, and the ecological underpinnings of our coasts. The consequences are real and form the subject of this lecture. I will examine evidence for change in the physical ocean and explore how the ecosystems that sustain biodiversity, the people whose food security depends on fisheries, and the industries whose fortunes rise and fall with the sea are being forced into new, uncertain