Category: Blog
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Unhappy Birthday to Deepwater Horizon
One year ago today we woke up to one of the worst environmental disasters in American history. Eleven people and countless animals dead, five million barrels of crude released, and the potential long-term transformation of the ocean on a regional scale. Only time will reveal the full consequences of the event but the picture is…
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Top Ten Sea Monsters (OK, make it a dozen)
We couldn’t have done this better ourselves. Meet the “12 most bizarre and frightening sea creatures“, courtesy of Asylum UK. This is so good I had to reproduce it: The planet Earth is full of scary stuff. Not just like the threat of bird-flu and unemployment, but even scarier things like angry bears and bity…
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Global change, big animals, and how marine ecosystems work
[Here’s my review, recently published in the Quarterly Review of Biology, of an excellent new book on the complex structure and dynamics of marine ecosystems and their responses to ongoing climate change. ] The scarcity of large vertebrates in graduate oceanography curricula has long perplexed new students and other naifs, given the centrality of fishing…
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The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism
Scientific skepticism is healthy. In fact, science by its very nature is skeptical. Genuine skepticism means considering the full body of evidence before coming to a conclusion. However, when you take a close look at arguments expressing climate ‘skepticism’, what you often observe is cherry picking of pieces of evidence while rejecting any data that…
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Insane Indo barreling tidal bore
Crocodiles, half hour + rides, chocolate brown water, secret spot; sounds like an adventure. [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/22248520[/vimeo] See more footage here
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The search for intelligent life
[Thoughts inspired by an hour spent with a wild dolphin in the Whale Rider country of North Island, New Zealand. The terrain is very beautiful – dramatic craggy coastlines, gorges through the mountains cloaked in Paleozoic vegetation, tree ferns everywhere, in the dim shade everything covered with mosses, liverworts, brilliant little coral-colored fungi, delicate creepers,…
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Squid cloaking device
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6068853[/vimeo] An animation of the two mechanisms for squid iridescence and invisibility, based on work at the Morse lab at UC Santa Barbara. It’s my favorite of the delightful, quirky videos from Creature Cast, produced by Casey Dunn’s students at Brown.
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It’s not climate change, it’s ocean change!
Redrawn by John Cook with data from Murphy et al 2009. The oceans are choking on greenhouse gases. Our emissions are changing ocean temperature, pH and circulation with wide-ranging effects on biological productivity and ecosystem health. These are among the conclusions of five review articles published in a special feature on the oceans in…
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Life and death of a real sea monster
No, this is not Nessie, or any of the other dubious beasts reported by sailors who got a bit too deep into the grog. This is a real live Sea Monster — well, OK it’s a real dead one. And has been for 150 million years. But it may be the biggest marine predator that…
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The Dirty South: Ben Wilson in Oz
This is one of my favorite kiting movies. Filmed largely by Ben’s father, Ben and Ian explore some of Australia’s killer kitesurf spots. [vimeo]http://vimeo.com/15655596[/vimeo]