SeaMonster blog

  • Oceanic whitetip sharks!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKR_I3hDUIE By the amazing Austin Gallagher

  • Global imprint of climate change on marine life

    An NCEAS working group I was a minor participant in has an important new paper out in Nature Climate Change (Poloczanska et al 2013 PDF). Summary: We synthesized all available studies of the consistency of marine ecological observations with expectations under climate change. This yielded a metadatabase of 1,735 marine biological responses for which either regional or global climate…

  • Fiji fish – the Drew Crew go gathering fish

    You’ll know if you’ve been browsing through Seamonster this past month or so that I’ve been in Fiji with Dr Joshua Drew and four research students from Columbia University. We’re all back home now but I still have heaps to share with you from our trip. Here’s the first of my latest batch of videos…

  • Saying goodbye to village life

    This evening we said a sad goodbye to our wonderful hosts in Nagigi village here in Fiji. Everyone has been incredibly welcoming and warm to us and it honestly felt like a great privilege to spend time in their company – more on that later. But for now, since it’s already late and we have another 4am…

  • When the diving gets tough

    My plan for today in Fiji was to get up early, go out fishing with the women of Nagigi to record a piece for BBC Radio, then join the rest of the Drew Crew for diving to sample more fish. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Last night the metal roof of the house…

  • Moving on from Savusavu

    The research team here in Fiji has been in the small town of Savusavu on Viti Levu for a few days now and we’ve all decided this is one of the most perfect spots in the world. The town lies along a tranquil stretch of water with dense mangrove forests and craggy, cloud-tipped mountains as…

  • Studying Fijian fish

    Here’s Dr Joshua Drew just up from our first dive here in Fiji talking about the science we’re doing, studying the fish diversity on the coral reefs around the village of Naigigi (prounounced Nai – ni). [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgg2RN4dwsM[/youtube] #CUinFiji

  • Mapping projected ocean acidification

  • Meet the new Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs)

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has replaced their older climate change scenarios with ‘Representative Concentration Pathways’ (RCPs) developed for IPCC AR5 report, scheduled to be published in 2014. Unlike the scenarios they replace (A1, B1, A1F1, etc.), the RCPs are not based on social, technological, and economic storylines. Instead, they are simply plausible…

  • Continued coral reef accretion requires vastly reduced CO2 emissions

    An important new modeling study (Kennedy et al 2013  download PDF) forecasts the structural decay of Caribbean reefs based on emission scenarios from the new ‘representative concentration pathways’ (RCPs). Excerpted  Authors Summary: Coral reefs face multiple anthropogenic threats, from pollution and overfishing to the dual effects of greenhouse gas emissions: rising sea temperature and ocean…

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