Her early contributions to oceanography are described in the textbook "Ocean Circulation in Three Dimensions[6]" by Barry Klinger ("What Wrong Looks Like from the Inside"):
The Nordic Seas provide another example of conventional wisdom being replaced by a new idea. On global scales, warm water becomes colder and denser as it flows to polar regions, where the densest water sinks as part of the process of deep water formation. Therefore it was easy to accept a conceptual model of deep water formation in the Nordic Seas in which surface water enters from the Atlantic and cools as it flows into central regions of the basin, and part of the resulting water mass returns to the Atlantic in the dense overflows at the Greenland-Iceland-Scotland Ridge. Some of the densest surface water in the basin occurs in that area, which undergoes intense winter heat loss to the atmosphere and dramatic convection. Numerical models of convection[7]show how an isolated region of cooling creates a subsurface tower of dense water which carries water downward when it slumps due to eddy generation.This model of Nordic Seas circulation was overturned by Norwegian oceanographer Cecilie Mauritzen in her PhD dissertation[8][9]. She showed that the water took a longer route from the inflow to the outflow, with most of the cooling occurring in boundary currents around the periphery of the Nordic Seas and in the Arctic Ocean. Much of the large heat loss in the central basin was merely part of the seasonal cycle of temperature change of a thick layer of water, with relatively small volume transports exchanged with incoming or outgoing water. Later, numerical experiments such as[10] showed that a fluid exchange between cooling basin and the rest of the ocean mostly occurred around the basin boundaries, with cold but relatively quiescent water in the middle "
In 2004, Mauritzen was included in the lead author team to write IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (2007),[11] and since then she has focussed her work primarily on climate change. Nevertheless, in 2007–2009, during the International Polar Year, she led one of the Norwegian flagship projects: IAOOS Norway: Closing the loop.[12]
Mauritzen's wide range of interests can best be described by the variety of her portfolio of research projects: only post 2020 she has led a project on machine learning on turbulence (Machine Ocean), a project on forecasting water quality (MARTINI) and an EU Horizon project on Integrated Assessment Modelling ( WorldTrans - Transparent Assessments for Real People).
^Mauritzen, C. (1996). "Production of dense overflow waters feeding the North Atlantic across the Greenland-Scotland Ridge. Part 1: Evidence for a revised circulation scheme". Deep-Sea Research Part I. 43 (6): 769–806. Bibcode:1996DSRI...43..769M. doi:10.1016/0967-0637(96)00037-4.
^Mauritzen, Cecilie (1996). "Production of dense overflow waters feeding the North Atlantic across the Greenland-Scotland Ridge. Part 2: An inverse model". Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers. 43 (6): 807–835. Bibcode:1996DSRI...43..807M. doi:10.1016/0967-0637(96)00038-6. ISSN0967-0637.
^Le Treut, H.; Somerville, R.; Cubasch, U.; Ding, Y.; Mauritzen, C.; Mokssit, A.; Peterson, T.; Prather, M. (2007). Solomon, S.; Qin, D.; Manning, M.; Chen, Z.; Marquis, M.; Averyt, K.B.; Tignor, M.; Miller, H.M. (eds.). "Historical Overview of Climate Change. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change". Journal of the American Planning Association. Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press.
