Category: Ocean Science
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Still no ice on Hudson Bay
Update: The maps from the Environment Canada site indicate some freezing up along the shore which matches up with what I saw on my last day in Churchill (last Thursday) when the air temp. dropped to 0F (it is currently -9F! but forecasted to warm up substantially later in the week):
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Arctic sea ice update
No matter how you look at it, Arctic sea ice trends this fall are grim. Arctic sea ice extent (spatial coverage) this fall is still tied with 2007 as the lowest on record (upper left) and the extent anomalies (values compared with the 1979-2000 mean) continue to decline (upper right): Minimum sea ice area is also…
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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…
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Life Beneath the Mangroves
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/31662472[/vimeo]
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Kelly Slater wins 11th world title
Yesterday at Ocean Beach, San Francisco. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X_UMGQfzsY&feature=share[/youtube]
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Ocean salinity from space!
From the new NASA Aquarius satellite. According to RealClimate: The patterns are not particularly surprising, there is higher salinity in the sub-tropical evaporative regions, lower salinity near the equator (because of the rain!), and particularly low salinity near big river outflows (the Amazon plume stands out clearly). However, as we noted earlier, the main interest…
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Good news and bad news
Every day in marine conservation, you hear both. How about the bad news first. The Guardian is reporting another shark masacure in the Malpelo sanctuary off Columbia (but note I have not heard independent confirmation about this and the Guardian botched part of the article by suggesting whale sharks had been harvested for their fins). Like Scott…
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Watch out tasty reef critters
Coral reefs are dangerous places to hang out if you’re small and tasty. There are many mouths out to get you and now there’s one more thing to worry about: mobs of fish rampaging the reef in search of dinner. Recently here at Seamonster we’ve had fish brandishing tools and now we have cunning fish…
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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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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…