Last week was the Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM) 2026 held at the Scottish Event Campus, in Glasgow, this year. It is a biennial event which was first held in February 1982 in San Antonio, Texas. OSM aims to bring together ocean science researchers and scientists to foster collaboration within the ocean-connected community, developing new partnerships and solutions.
It was a large conference with over 6,000 attendees in 2024, and the organisers expected a similar number last week. OSM is co-organised and co-sponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO), and The Oceanography Society (TOS).
Despite the UK having a rather wet opening to 2026, with places in Scotland having had almost 30 consecutive days of rain, the weather wasn’t too bad, and I managed to get back and forth from my hotel in Central Glasgow to the meeting venue, with only the occasional use of my umbrella.
My attendance began on the Sunday, as we are part of the ARIA-funded Aerial Experimental Remote sensing of Ocean Salinity, heaT, Advection and Thermohaline Shifts (AEROSTATS) project, and there was a pre-meeting workshop, an evening discussion, a poster session, and we contributed relevant/project talks across oral sessions.
The plenary talk and ice-breaker reception followed our workshop. The plenary was given by Dr Britney Schmidt, a Professor at Cornell University. She outlined how, together with her team, they’ve developed robotic tools and instruments to study Earth’s poles and other planets. This included dropping Underwater Autonomous Vehicles (AUVs) into holes drilled in the ice and navigating to where ice sheets are calving – dangerous journeys, but providing critical information.
Ocean Sciences Talks & Presentations
Given the number of attendees, there were numerous talks to attend and thousands of posters to view, so I tried to plan my visits using the conference app. On Monday morning, I dipped into the Modelling Approaches for Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR) sessions, picking up some interesting details on how coastal modelling is progressing. I then managed to find a colleague, Dr Edwina Tanner, with whom I’ve collaborated for several years but never met in person! We are both directors of the Australian WhaleX Foundation that’s considering the role of whale poo and how we could enhance its impacts on ocean productivity.
I also put up a great poster for the Near-coast And Inland Aquatic Impact Data (NAIAD) satellite missions on behalf of Harriet Wilson, University of Stirling, to showcase what this proposed ESA Scout mission, led by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, can contribute to water quality – she then handled the questions at the poster session. On Tuesday morning, I was up very eary for The Oceanography Society breakfast, where it was great to see several colleagues recognised. Then I had my AEROSTATS poster at the end of the day, so by Wednesday, I needed a little lie-in.
Later in the week, I attended an ESA Town Hall, ‘Advances in Earth Observation at the Midpoint of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science’. This considered both advances in Earth Observation (EO) at the midpoint of the UN Decade of the Ocean, and the next few years. Of note for recent achievements were the development of ocean lidar, zooplankton as well as phytoplankton dynamics, and the fact that satellite records may now be long enough to provide a baseline observation. Future areas of focus include marine ecosystems and biodiversity, including improvements and spatial and spectral resolution; in addition, although several missions contribute to physical oceanography, there is a need for a dedicated mission to study ocean currents, to further our understanding of stratification by combining satellite data with models.
Additional challenges are the changing coastal zones, extreme winds, and marine heatwaves, and a need for constellations of small satellites alongside space-agency missions to provide data on these areas. Overall, there is an overarching need for data continuity and stability through multi-mission climate-quality data records, and for better-integrated data to support decision-making.
Ocean Science Tartan!
Away from the scientific side, it was fun to discover that as the meeting was in Scotland, fittingly OSM 2026 has now got its own tartan! The design was based on the well-known Thomson Tartan and contains the colours from the logos of thee partner societies of TOS, ASLO, and AGU. The deep ocean is represented by the darkest blue, gradually lightening into the photic zone, ringed by the white of breaking waves — a surf that links all the oceans of the world. The green is for the Earth, and red for the Sun. The broader green band has 23 threads, the adjacent blue has 12, and in the large blue centrepiece, the small dark blue has 18 and the broader adjacent blue 72, representing the launch data of the original HMS Challenger voyage, considered the first global going exhibition and laying down the foundations for oceanography, on the 23 December 1872. The tartan has been registered with the Scottish Register of Tartans.
Summary
It was a great event and so wonderful to see so many colleagues in the ocean science community – including meeting people for the first time! There is certainly a lot happening in the Ocean Sciences community!
