Year: 2011
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The Earth continues to build up heat
An updated version of the scariest graph in science (by John Cook from Skeptical Science). Download a high res version here.
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Home Sweet Antarctica
We made it! Greetings from the pier at Palmer Station, Antarctica. The last few days have consisted mostly of sitting around in the ship’s lounge (my eyeballs are going to explode if I watch another movie) punctuated by one action-packed morning at Copacabana. Copa is a tiny two-room beachfront hut, whose only neighbors are several…
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The Dead Sea isn’t so dead
Life as we know it doesn’t exactly thrive in the Dead Sea. No fish have evolved to put up with the notoriously salty waters. But weird new forms of microbial life have been discovered inhabiting a network of massive craters at the bottom of the Dead Sea. A diverse mixture of sun-worshipping and sulphide-munching bacteria have…
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A disappearing underwater world
From the NYT Scientists at Work feature, by Dr. Mark Hay of Georgia Tech: Despite my growing up in Kentucky, not having a passport until my early 20s and not seeing a tropical coral reef until I was in graduate school, whenever I step off a plane in the tropics, I feel like I’ve come…
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Think different
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX9GTUMh490&[/youtube]
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London seahorses venture west
There’s been another seahorse discovery in the River Thames and it seems they are heading west. A couple of years ago seahorses were found in Dagenham, a suburb in east London. It came as something of a shock to find these delicate creatures living…
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Rising seas – coming to get ya
Strictly speaking, we don’t know to what extent this dramatic cliff failure can be traced to climate change and rising sea levels. But we can be reasonably confident that we’re looking forward to more of the same in the coming decades. SeaMonster’s own Helen surfs in this vicinity from time to time — good thing…
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Ice in sight
We just crossed over 60 degrees South latitude, and are seeing ice for the first time! I don’t care how many times I come down here… sea ice never gets boring. It’s hypnotic, watching it rise and fall with the waves, listening to it scrape and slush against the ship’s hull. For now it’s just…
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Shark fins banned in world’s 2nd largest market — California
Yes, America, the California market for shark-fin soup is the largest outside Asia. Which means that much of the carnage John has documented in previous SeaMonster posts (see here, here, and here) is washing up right here in your backyard. Read it and weep. But the sun also rises. The California legislature passed the shark-fin…
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Flying South for the Winter: I’m Going to Antarctica!
I write to you from a ship in the middle of the ocean, somewhere off the tip of Chile. Later tonight, my boat will be in the Drake Passage: notoriously the roughest seas on Earth. I left my home in North Carolina on Tuesday, and some 30 hours later I was standing on a pier…