  Cosmological perturbation theory relies on the decomposition of perturbations
into so-called scalar, vector and tensor modes. This decomposition is non-local
and depends on unknowable boundary conditions. The non-locality is particularly
important at second- and higher-order because perturbative modes are sourced by
products of lower-oder modes, which must be integrated over all space in order
to isolate each mode. However, given a trace-free rank-2 tensor, a locally
defined scalar mode may be trivially derived by taking two divergences, which
knocks out the vector and tensor degrees of freedom. A similar local
differential operation will return a pure vector mode. This means that scalar
and vector degrees of freedom have local descriptions. The corresponding local
extraction of the tensor mode is unknown however. We give it here. The
operators we define are useful for defining gauge-invariant quantities at
second-order. We perform much of our analysis using an index-free
`vector-calculus' approach which makes manipulating tensor equations
considerably simpler.
