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Communities of swimming microorganisms often thrive near liquid-airinterfaces. We study how such `active carpets' shape their aquatic environmentby driving biogenic transport in the water column beneath the active carpet.The collective flows that these organisms generate lead to diffusive upwardfluxes of nutrients from deeper water layers, and downward fluxes of oxygen andcarbon. Combining analytical theory and simulations, we examine the keytransport metrics including the single and pair diffusivity, the first passagetime for particle pair encounters, and the rate of particle aggregation. Ourfindings reveal that the hydrodynamic fluctuations driven by active carpetshave a region of influence that reaches orders of magnitude further in distancethan the size of the organisms. These non-equilibrium fluctuations lead to astrongly enhanced diffusion of particles, which is anisotropic andspace-dependent. The fluctuations also facilitate encounters of particle pairs,which we quantify by analyzing their velocity pair correlation functions as afunction of distance between the particles. We found that the size of theparticles plays a crucial role in their encounter rates, with larger particlessituated near the active carpet being more favourable for aggregation. Overall,this research has broadened our comprehension of aquatic systems out ofequilibrium, particularly how biologically driven fluctuations contribute tothe transport of fundamental elements in biogeochemical cycles.

Floating active carpets drive transport and aggregation in aquatic ecosystems