Category: Ocean Science
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Paul Greenberg on GM salmon
Paul “four fish” Greenberg testified before congress yesterday about the dangers of genetically modified (GM) salmon. I am generally not nearly as concerned about GM crops and food as most enviros, but I’d rather not see people modifying wild organisms and then releasing them back into the wild. Below are a few exerpts from Paul’s…
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Climate change driven seaweed range shifts
There is a really neat new paper on species range shifts in response to global warming in Current Biology (Wernberg et al 2011). The authors used an exquisite online database of >20,000 herbarium records of macroalgae collected in Australia since the 1940s to assess changes in the northern range limits of seaweed. On both Australia’s west and east…
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Correction to Grist/TNC piece on coral bleaching
In a Grist repost of a TNC interview with Joanne Wilson, Robert Lalasz asks: You found less coral bleaching on this expedition than you’d thought you would. How significant is that finding? Should we be less worried about coral bleaching than we were before? Joanne Wilson: Coral bleaching occurs when water temperatures are warmer than normal…
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The mass extinction of scientists who study species
A great article in Wired by Dr. Craig McClain of Deep Sea News fame. Craig is the Assistant Director of Science for the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, a deep sea ecologist and widely regarded as the first (and most successful) ocean blogger. We are currently in a biodiversity crisis. A quarter of all mammals face extinction,…
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What do polar bears eat?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss89X0GrqvM[/youtube]
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Play orca snap at Whale FM
Like listening to whale sounds? Want make a contribution to science? Then tune into Whale FM. Also known as the Whale Song Project, Whale FM is a new citizen science outfit based at Scientific American asking for your help to figure out what whales are saying and if pilot whales – like killer whales –…
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Of polar bears and tipping points
This is a guest post by Dr. Gregory Thiemann, an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Greg is a polar bear expert that I met in Canada recently when we both worked with Polar Bears International on their Tundra Connections project. As I write this, I’m on a Calm Air flight enroute…
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800,000 years of CO2 (NOAA)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Roa73Q8qZtA&[/youtube]
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Arctic sea ice hockey stick
A new paper in Science (Kinnard et al 2011) reports that the recent loss in arctic sea ice is likely to be unique over the last 15 centuries and caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Here we use a network of high-resolution terrestrial proxies from the circum-Arctic region to reconstruct past extents of summer sea ice,…
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Layer Cake
When the glacier’s face calves, we get a new look at the inside. To give you an idea of scale here, the cliff face is several hundred feet tall. Twenty-foot ice javelins? Yes please! (I was almost a quarter mile away when I took this photograph, and you’d be an idiot to get much closer.)…