Much of my research has centered around the questions of how waves and currents move stuff around in the coastal ocean. This "stuff" can include sediment, nutrients, oxygen, water of varying pH, you name it. Most often on a continental shelf, the currents are caused by a combination of winds, tides, surface waves, and internal waves, but there can also be some lovely physics involving turbulent mixing involved, and the problems get a bit harder to solve in that case. Surface waves are the kind you see rolling around on the surface ocean and that you can surf on when they break (we wrote one paper about how surface waves gently shoving plankton into a coastal boundary can cause some plankton blooms). Internal waves are subsurface waves supported by a fluid of stratified density (kind of like oil and water, but not quite as extreme). They are are ubiquitous in the ocean as well as in the atmosphere, and are an important way of moving wind and tidal energy around our planet. They do interesting things when they run into continental margins. Wind-driven and buoyancy-driven flows are important in coastal and lake environments and will provide plenty of interesting transport questions in applied environmental fluid dynamics studies in the future.
