Author: Emmett Duffy
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Jackson the elephant seal takes an 18000 mile stroll
Legend has it that back in ancient Greece, some guy named Pheidippides ran 27 miles (technically 26 miles and 385 yards) to alert his general that the Persians had been defeated at the battle of Marathon. Then he dropped dead from the exertion. He was of course considered a hero and the run is immortalized…
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What a wonderful world
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8WHKRzkCOY[/youtube] Happy Holidays — from Planet Earth
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How to lie with statistics
Alright, I’m on this science thing again. Having spent my entire adult life applying rigorous logic to find out how things happen in the real world of cause and effect, I have this annoyance issue about people (Presidential candidates, for example) just making stuff up out of thin air. Now, at last, I understand how…
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Underwater “Paper Parks”?
From this week’s Nature: “The easiest way to create a nature reserve from a car park is simply to declare it as such. The land is then designated as protected, and counts towards the relevant government’s targets to set aside a certain amount of its territory from development. That is a ridiculous example, of course,…
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Ignoramus Nation
All of us here at SeaMonster are scientists of one stripe or another. Science is largely responsible for revealing the world of wonders we celebrate, illuminating the weighty issues we debate, heck even for designing the surfboards we ride. But science — which is nothing more or less than applied, rationale thinking — is under…
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Ocean Sour: The new millenium’s acid rain
Remember acid rain? In the 1970s, observations of dying lakes and great swaths of browning northern forest successfully spurred action to clean up emissions from power plants that were primarily responsible. Now CO2 from human fossil fuel combustion is dissolving into the ocean on a global scale, making them more acidic. A new paper synthesizes…
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Behold the icy finger of death
It’s rough enough trying to eke out a living rooting around the seafloor in water that’s perennially hovering just around the freezing mark. But then, just when you let your guard down . . . well, check out this amazing video from the BBC, narrated with his inimitable understated drama by one of my heroes,…
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Silky seabugs
As a long-time afficianado of the amphipod crustaceans I’ve come to terms with being alone in a crowd, having as it were a more rarified taste in biophilia than the average whale-hugger lover of sea life. Sure, they’re submicroscopic, sometimes pesky (crawling into your ears while working underwater, for example), and often devilishly difficult to…
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Marine biodiversity: The tip of the iceberg
Who doesn’t love whales, beautiful fishes, octopuses, corals — even sharks? You know that we do here at SeaMonster. But those charismatic megafauna, as they are rather cumbersomely known in the conservation science-geek community, are only the tip of the biodiversity iceberg. Down in the jumbled rubble on the floor of the reef, among the…
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Underwater robot time machine: SeaMonster interviews Dr. Mark Patterson
In the sultry late summer of 1781, General Cornwallis, Commander of British forces in Virginia, was holed up in Yorktown building fortifications to secure a deep-water port for the Royals, and thus control of the strategically critical Chesapeake Bay. General Washington, in consultation with French allies, dispatched a French fleet to stop them, a…