Elena Reyes studies what happens at the shelf break — the boundary where the shallow water over the continental shelf meets the deep ocean beyond it. Water crosses that boundary in both directions, carrying heat, nutrients and larvae, and the crossing is neither steady nor easy to observe. Most of her career has been spent trying to measure it.
The work is instrument-heavy. Moorings left in place for a year, gliders flying repeat sections, shipboard surveys timed to catch a particular set of conditions. Her group's contribution over the last decade has been to show that a large share of the total exchange happens in short, intense events that a monthly survey would miss entirely — and that the events are getting more frequent.
Reyes chairs the Department of Ocean and Earth Sciences. She teaches OCEA 220 Physical Oceanography and OCEA 340 Ocean Circulation and Climate, and she is the reason the undergraduate program requires a data analysis course; she argued for it on the grounds that a student who cannot handle a messy time series cannot do the science.
She has led fourteen cruises aboard R/V Cascadia Strait, including nine of the annual Arctic transits. Students describe her watch-standing standards as demanding, and then sign up again.