Sea Monster

Category: Blog

  • Biodiversity and the battle for Planet Earth: The graphic novel

    [Editor’s note: It’s been a big month for the science of biodiversity and an exciting time to be a part of it. Last week, Nature came out with its issue commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Rio meeting that first put biodiversity on the world’s radar screen and spawned the Convention on Biological Diversity. The…

  • The NC sea level rise saga: mid-week update

    This story is moving rapidly – sadly mostly in the wrong direction. • The NC senate passed a slightly modified version of the houses bill Tuesday. The senates version states “rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of sea-level rise may be…

  • Marine reserves gather steam

    This is a nice piece in the WaPost by the wonderful Juliet Eilperin about two new Marine Protected Area networks. One inaccuracy is that the piece conflates marine reserves and Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). Marine reserves are a sub-category of MPA in which no extraction or other harmful activities are allowed. I also remain very concerned about…

  • Sea level rise 101

    Based on the NC legislature’s decree about the science of sea level rise projections and some of the related propaganda we have seen from climate change deniers, I get the sense there is a lot of confusion about sea level rise. So here is a primer on what we know about sea level and climate…

  • Coral microbes – the movie!

    [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJPva6ZLuDc[/youtube]

  • The state’s sea level retreat

    This op-ed piece about the politics and reality of sea level rise in North Carolina was published on February 23, 2012 in the News&Observer. The author, Dr. Orrin H. Pilkey, is James B. Duke professor emeritus of earth sciences at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He is one of the regions most respected coastal…

  • The human fingerprint on ocean warming

    New research published in Nature Climate Change (Gleckler  et al. 2012) increases our certainty about the patterns and causes of ocean warming. Abstract: Large-scale increases in upper-ocean temperatures are evident in observational records1. Several studies have used well-established detection and attribution methods to demonstrate that the observed basin-scale temperature changes are consistent with model responses to anthropogenic…

  • Virginia legislature also in denial about “left-wing” sea level rise

    Back at you Emmett. (You really wanna debate who lives in the state more unfriendly to climate science?) From Climate Progress: Virginia’s legislature commissioned a $50,000 study to determine the impacts of climate change on the state’s shores.To greenlight the project, they omitted words like “climate change” and “sea level rise” from the study’s description itself. According to…

  • Giant bull shark surprises team Hammerschlag

    Check out the piece by Andrea Mustain for Our Amazing Planet about my colleague, shark expert Dr. Neil Hammerschlag’s encounter with a big bull shark. Funny, but I was SUPing at the Cape Hatteras lighthouse yesterday and a fishing boat pulled up and the captain yelled “look out – we just saw a ten foot bull shark”. I…

  • Epic swell hits Cloudbreak

    An epic code-red swell hit Cloudbreak, Fiji yesterday right in the middle of the Volcom Fiji Pro surf contest. After two heats, contest organizers called it quits and opened up one of the world’s great reef breaks for the free surfers to shred. Read more about it here and here and here to watch footage of…