"In winter, the air temperature above the sea ice can be below -20C, whereas the sea water is only about -1.9C. Heat flows from the warmer sea up to the very cold air, forming new ice from the bottom. The salt in this newly formed ice is concentrated and pushed into the brine channels. And because it is very cold and salty, it is denser than the water beneath. The result is the brine sinks in a descending plume. But as this extremely cold brine leaves the sea ice, it freezes the relatively fresh seawater it comes in contact with. This forms a fragile tube of ice around the descending plume, which grows into what has been called a
brinicle." A BBC film crew has recorded one of these
freezing life on the sea floor.
posted by cosmac
on Nov 23, 2011 -
47 comments
Like a "modern-day pirate," 75-year-old Ray Ives has been diving for sunken treasure for decades. Wearing an ancient, bronze-helmeted diving suit, he searches the ocean floor and keeps a huge collection of marine salvage (including antique cannon balls, 'bottles, bells, swords, portholes and diving gear') in a shipping container "museum" at a British marina.
Ray: A Life Underwater:
Vimeo /
YouTube. (A short film documentary.)
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Sep 23, 2011 -
5 comments
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that a rubbish dump being created would, in the space of a century, become a protected area. Yet that is exactly what happened to what has come to be known as
Glass Beach, just outside Fort Bragg in California."
[more inside]
posted by codacorolla
on Sep 1, 2011 -
20 comments
The official Google Earth plugin is one free download that makes all sorts of cool stuff possible in your browser. There's
a full screen version of the program (complete with underwater views and 3D buildings) which can be searched by entering queries at the end of the URL. There's
a framed version with support for layers, historical imagery, day/night cycles, and the Google Sky starmap.
Less useful but more fun are Google's collection of "experiments" demonstrating the possibilities of the Earth API, including
a "Geo Whiz" geography quiz,
an antipode locater,
a 3D first-person view of San Francisco,
a virtual route-follower, and
MONSTER MILKTRUCK!, a crazy fun driving simulator that lets you careen a virtual milk truck through the Googleplex campus, ricochet off the Himalayas, or explore any other place you care to name.
Lots more can be found in the
Google Earth Gallery -- highlights include
a look at mountaintop removal mining,
a real-time flight tracker,
a guide to trails and outdoor recreation,
a 360 panorama catalog,
geotagged Panoramio photos,
and the comprehensive crowdsourced
Google Earth Community Layer.
And while it's too large to view online, don't miss loading
the Metafilter user location map into a desktop version of Google Earth!
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Jun 9, 2011 -
15 comments
"The world’s oceans have been experiencing
enormous blooms of jellyfish, apparently caused by overfishing, declining water quality, and rising sea temperatures. Now, scientists are trying to determine if these outbreaks could represent a “new normal” in which jellyfish increasingly supplant fish.. Total jelly domination would be like turning back the clock to the Precambrian world, more than 550 million years ago."
posted by stbalbach
on Jan 13, 2011 -
69 comments
Obituaries editors probably belong by the sea. The cries of seagulls are their music, fading into infinity, and the light-filled sky bursts open like a gateway out of the world. The elderly gravitate there, shuffling in cheerful pairs along Marine Parade or jogging in slow motion past the Sea Gull Café, intent on some distant goal. Their skin is weathered and tanned, as if they have fossilised themselves in ozone to keep death at bay. They wear bright trainers, young clothes. But they have shifted to the shore here, or in Bexhill, or in Eastbourne, as if to the edge of life, and each flapping deck-chair reserves a waiting-place.
Ann Wroe, obituaries editor of The Economist, muses on mortality and the sea in the latest
correspondent's diary, a series of articles by various Economist writers. You can read the magazine's obituaries
here, including a recent one of former obituaries editor
Keith Colquhoun.
[Ann Wroe previously]
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 24, 2010 -
8 comments
"I don't see any future for whale species except extinction." A
report (pdf) released Thursday by
Ocean Alliance noted high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales over five years. Concentrations of chromium found in some whales was several times higher than the level required to kill healthy cells in a Petri dish. Mercury in some whales was 16 times higher than a typical shark or swordfish, both known for their high mercury levels.
Beyond whales, "You could make a fairly tight argument to say that it is the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species."
posted by stbalbach
on Jun 24, 2010 -
68 comments
There are mysterious noises in the sea. NOAA has
six unidentified underwater sounds (and their kinda creepy spectrographs) on their website, recorded by the sonar arrays that used to hunt submarines, but which are now are used for research. The most famous of these is
The Bloop, a sound of
seemingly biological origin, yet many times louder than the loudest biolocial noise. With an origin in an empty stretch of the the Pacific Ocean, it
gives Cthulhu watchers something to think about. Another once-mysterious sound,
The Boing has been identified as
coming from minke whales. Yet the sounds known as
Slow Down,
Julia, Train, and others remain intriguing mysteries.
[prev.]
posted by blahblahblah
on Apr 19, 2010 -
40 comments
Long before Chelsea Piers was a sporting complex and the South Street Seaport a mall, the city was lined with active piers. The city's residents were amply employed by the shipping trade, but containerization needed more land than would ever be available in the city: Massive ports sprouted in Elizabeth and Newark, and ships disappeared from the city. Efficient cranes replaced longshoremen, and the time in port for ships shrank from about a week to about a day.
"The technology changed the geography," says William Fensterer, a chaplain who has been with SIH almost since its new building opened in 1964. "It doesn't look like On the Waterfront anymore," he adds. When he started out, he says, he would wander on foot from pier to pier in Manhattan and Brooklyn and board ships, with nary a guard in site. But those piers have largely vanished.
And along with them, the seafarer, once ubiquitous in New York, has become invisible.
posted by jason's_planet
on Dec 18, 2009 -
14 comments
If you're like me, you're in the market to buy yourself an island-sized boat, but you're not satisfied with the world's current inventory of formulaic, fuel-guzzling, cruise-ship-like
mega-yachts. You might want to consider picking up a
WHY 58x38, which offers 36,000 square feet of living space, a 120-foot "beach," three decks, and an 80-foot interior pool, topped by a vast solar panel array. It won't break your budget -- at a mere $151 million, it doesn't even crack the top four
most expensive yachts in the world!
[more inside]
posted by brain_drain
on Nov 13, 2009 -
68 comments
The Polar Discovery team has documented science in action from pole to pole during the historic 2007-2009 International Polar Year, and
covered five scientific expeditions. The science projects explored a range of topics from climate change and glaciers, to Earth’s geology, biology, ocean chemistry, circulation, and technology at the icy ends of the earth. Through
photo essays and
other multimedia, they explain how scientists collected data and what they discovered about the rapidly changing polar regions. From the awesome folks at
WHOI.
posted by netbros
on Nov 9, 2009 -
4 comments
The amazing story of the
coelacanth is one of the wonders of the living world that inspires marine biologists such myself. Coelacanths, part of the offshoot lineage of fishes known as "lobed finned ", are very different from typical "ray finned" fishes that you usually think of. Their bizarre
lobed fins are thought to be an intermediate step between fish fins and amphibian legs. Scientists had known that these weird fish existed because of fossils for over a century, but we believed that they went extinct 65 million years ago... until a South African fisherman caught one in 1938.
[more inside]
posted by WhySharksMatter
on Sep 7, 2009 -
49 comments
Most people have heard about how rising CO2 levels are resulting in a
changing global climate. Fewer have heard about the other consequence of rising CO2 levels- when the CO2 is absorbed into the oceans, it disassociates into carbonic acid. This alters the pH of our world's oceans, and it's called "
Ocean Acidification". This changing ocean chemistry has many important and devastating consequences.
[more inside]
posted by WhySharksMatter
on Sep 5, 2009 -
21 comments
By popular demand, your new resident marine biology nerd has compiled some cool information about the Giant Pacific Octopus.The Giant Pacific Octopus (
Octopus dofleini) is one of the strangest animals in the sea- and one of the smartest. Though it is commonly believed that vertebrates are always "smarter" than invertebrates, these guys defy that convention.
As this video shows, they are able to easily open jars and retrieve food from inside. They are also, as the "Giant" implies,
enormous- the biggest one on record was 30 feet across (
according to National Geographic)
[more inside]
posted by WhySharksMatter
on Jul 6, 2009 -
140 comments
"To pedal the 3700 kilometres of open water from Cape Verde off the west coast of Africa to Barbados in the Caribbean should take around 50 days..." Engineer and machinist Ted Ciamillo has built a human powered
mini-submarine, designed around a larger version of his Lunocet carbon-fibre "tail" for
divers, for an
Atlantic Ocean crossing.... The "
SubHuman project".
posted by Kronos_to_Earth
on Jan 29, 2009 -
23 comments
In 2009,
a remarkably gifted politician, confronting a remarkably difficult set of challenges, will
have to learn to say "No we can't",
Guantánamo will prove a moral minefield,
economic recovery will be invisible to the naked eye,
governments must prepare for the day they stop financial guarantees,
we will judge our commitment to sustainability,
scientists should research the causes of religion,
we will all be potential online paparazzi,
English will have more words than any other language (but it's meaningless),
Afghanistan will see a surge of Western (read: American) troops,
Iran will continue its nuclear quest while
diplomacy lies in shambles,
the sea floor is the new frontier,
we should rethink aging,
(non-)voters will continue to thwart the European project --
but cheap travel will continue to buoy it --
though it has some unfinished business to attend to, and
a Nordic defence bond will blossom.
The Economist: The World in 2009.
[more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Nov 27, 2008 -
31 comments
Melting Greenland glacier water forms a "slow wave" that stays in the Atlantic for at least 50 years before reaching the Pacific, according to a new study. The water piles up in the Atlantic. "It is often assumed that sea levels will rise instantaneously, but that is unlikely, given what we know about ocean dynamics." Fifty years after the meltwater is released from Greenland, sea-level rise could be 30 times greater around Greenland and down the eastern side of North America, including the Gulf of Mexico, than in the Pacific Ocean. Sea-level rises in Europe are around six times that of the Pacific, but only a fifth as great as on the opposite shore of the Atlantic.
posted by stbalbach
on Jul 8, 2008 -
43 comments
