There is an obvious leitmotif to Annalisa Bracco’s office in the Ford Environmental Science & Technology Building, beginning with the shelves of books and journals on oceanography and extending to the photos of sailing trips and painted wooden fish. Bracco, an associate professor of oceanography in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, has led a life revolving around water. She has taken students on research cruises and has one planned for this fall in the Gulf of Mexico. Because of the underwater oil spill, the new topic of research will be water and oil.

Hometown: I’m from Torino, where they had the Winter Olympics. I went back for it. It was cool because it’s not a tourist’s kind of place, but there were lots of tourists there. I watched the finals of the women’s skating.

Winter sports: It’s a big skating area — and skiing. The mountains are an hour away, and the ocean is an hour and a half away. I skied growing up. But everyone does there.

To the sea: I liked the ocean, and I learned how to sail. I started out studying geophysics [at the University of Torino]. There were two options, atmospheric science and oceanography. I liked the ocean more, so I chose that.

Sailing photo: It’s actually from when I sailed across the Atlantic in a week and a half. There were five of us. We only had a ham radio, the kind that’s just all of those crazy people talking. We heard that Hurricane Nicole was coming through. It was late in the season, so that was very strange. We turned south, but we still went through the tail of it. It was a difficult 18 hours.

Sleeping through the storm: I actually did for a few hours. No one else did. I can sleep through just about anything. They were teasing me that, once the storm was over, they were all going to sleep and I could sail for a while.

Secret trip: My parents don’t know that I did it! I didn’t tell them. I put in e-mails and had them send out on delay. And I had a friend who was sending messages for me. If they’d known? It would’ve been problematic.

Illustrated map: It’s from Woods Hole on Cape Cod [where Bracco worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution]. It was drawn before my time, I think from 1989. It’s a drawing of the town, and you can see how everything is connected to the ocean.

Office jungle: When plants are dead, people bring them here. I usually can bring them back. I left one [plant] to my students while I was gone. I think it’s dead. They overwatered it. [Later, Bracco wrote to say she’d revived the plant.]

Painted fish: I bought those on a research cruise in Brazil. We were studying arctic bottom water. It’s the densest water on the planet and some of the coldest. It moves along on the bottom, 4,000 meters down. We were looking for any signature of warming, but there was none. But this water travels for decades. So the water we measured might’ve been from the 1980s or 1970s.

Climate change: We do know the ocean is warming. And because it’s so much water, the amount of warming is huge. We’re putting a lot of CO2 into the ocean, and it’s changing the environment a lot. One of the things people don’t realize is that the oceans cover 70 percent of Earth. It’s extremely important we take that into account. It’s a huge player.

BP oil spill: It’s very difficult to assess the impact. It looks bad for the coastline … but we can’t do anything about it. Why that valve failed, we don’t know. It’s a mechanical problem. It’s not impossible for devices to work that far down.

Teaching style: I get complaints about the amount of work. I don’t get complaints about grades. I tend to be nice. It’s mostly graduate students that I teach. They need to study for themselves, not for a grade.

Monkey photo: That was from a colleague in Malaysia. And the [wooden pen holder] was from a student in Madagascar. The photo of all of the students is from a UNESCO project. Most of the impact of climate change is in the tropics, and we brought students from different countries together to examine that.

Eating Italian in Atlanta: Atlanta has great food. That’s one of the reasons I came here. But I cook a lot, and it’s mainly Italian. If I go out, I want a change. I am taking students to Fritti though. [The pizzeria is owned by Riccardo Ullio, CE 90, MS EnvE 93.] They have good pizza.