Category: Uncategorized
-
Galapagos Tubastrea
I took this image last week on an amazing wall on the northern side of Santiago island in the Galapagos. Such clear water and so many fish!
-
New worries about slumping thermokarst
That’s right. Slumping thermokarst. Essentially thawing coastal permafrost in the arctic: A new paper in PNAS describing work by my UNC colleague Dr Rose Cory in Alaska on thermokarst slumping is shaking up the world of thermokarst experts and alarming thermokarst conservationists and collectors. But seriously, this is just one more sign of a positive feedback of global warming; the more…
-
Penguin bloopers
-
Christmas tree worm
Christmas tree worms are polychaetes (marine segmented worms) that live in the skeletons of corals. They retract their feeding appendage (seen above) when threatened. You can see the little trap door that closes behind them on the upper right I took this close up photo off the central Pacific island of Raiatea while on a cruise on the SSV Robert C…
-
Scallopocalypse
Hurricane Sandy passed southwest of Nantucket, but the superstorm lashed the island with high winds, and caused significant coastal flooding & beach erosion. For a time, the island was effectively cut off from the mainland, with all flights and ferry service cancelled, and Nantucket Harbor closed.
-
Drew Harvell at work in the coral triangle
My friend, collaborator and post-doc advisor Dr Drew Harvell of Cornell University has published three articles in the New York Times Scientists at Work series about her current trip to the coral triangle. In her Feb 1 post Drew describes her visit to the reefs of Papua, some pristine and diverse, some ravaged by dynamite fishing:…
-
State of the union: climate change edition
To my and many people’s surprise, Prez Obama talked quite a lot about climate change in the State of The Union address tonight. Below is the climate change related text (from here). Lets hope these nice words are followed with action. Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen…
-
Coolification of scientists – live!
[Editor’s note: This is the second guest post from our intrepid graduate student teachers and heroes of scientific awesomeness Lindsey Kraatz, Sam Lake, Daniel Maxey, and Stephanie Salisbury. This post is a companion to their interview on NPR, which you can listen to here: With Good Reason. Thanks for making us all seem cooler. Y’all rock!]…
-
How high will the oceans rise?
There is a nice article in the NYT today by Justin Gillis about new research designed to answer this question. The team is identifying fossil beaches from the pliocene (~ 3 millions years ago) that were formed when the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was (naturally) what it is now (not naturally). Then, as now, the…
-
Goodbye naked oceans
This is a repost from Helen’s blog (ed). It’s the last day of 2012 and I’ve just finished making the last episode of the Naked Oceans podcast. In it, I catch up with a bunch of the folks who’ve appeared on the show over the last two series, and chat with them about the future of…