Free Republic

MONTEREY — In the days leading up to Halloween, a rare all-white dolphin named “Casper” has been frequenting the Monterey Bay. But sighting the perplexing creature isn’t a trick of the eyes, or just a spooky Halloween treat. The dolphin actually visits the region quite often, according to Nancy Black, a marine biologist with Monterey Bay Whale Watch.... ..Black and other scientists think the dolphin is around 9 years old — still a juvenile since Risso’s can live up to 35 years. Casper frequently travels with his mother and has been seen as far north as Davenport, with pods of...

HMS Challenger spent three-and-a-half years peering into some of the remotest parts of our world’s oceans. Its groundbreaking voyage still has an impact today. It was once a private house, but now the imposing stone structure on Boswall Road, on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh, is part of a palliative care hospice. The building shares its name with the one of the deepest parts of the ocean and two Nasa spacecraft. One was the command module for the Apollo 17 Moon mission while the other was part of the Space Shuttle fleet, and the first...

——Why We Wrote This—— How to counter invasive species, a common, and often intractable, problem? One entrepreneur’s clever approach offers lessons in finding solutions in the unlikeliest of places. If you can’t beat them, eat them. That is the common wisdom of many scientists, conservationists, and fishermen who dream of ridding the western Atlantic of invasive lionfish, a stunning aquarium fish that, when introduced in the wild, dominates and destroys reef ecosystems. However, catching lionfish has never been simple; they are not easily targeted by line or net fishing. Now, a surprising new invention may bring lionfish hunting to the...

URI Oceanography Professors John King (second from right) and Arthur Spivack (right) watch as core samples are collected at Salty Brine State Beach following the explosion in July. Credit: Chris Deacutis ============================================================================================================================================= When an explosion beneath the sand at Salty Brine State Beach in Narragansett injured a visiting vacationer, state and local police and the bomb squad found no evidence of what may have caused the blast. So state officials turned to scientists at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography for answers. It didn't take long before they had solved the mystery. Janet Coit, director of the...

COLLEGE STATION - Record rainfall totals in many parts of Texas the past few weeks means a record amount of freshwater pouring into the Gulf of Mexico – as high as 10 times the normal rate – and that could lead to huge problems for marine life and commercial fishermen very soon, warns a Texas A&M University oceanographer. Steve DiMarco, professor of oceanography, says the huge rainfall amounts in the last month mean that such rivers as the Brazos, Trinity, Colorado and others currently are carrying record amounts of water flowing southward to the Gulf, similar to a situation that...

Oceanographers have a saying: Scientists know more about the surface of Mars than they do about the landscape at the bottom of our oceans. But that may soon change. Using data from satellites that measure variations in Earth’s gravitational field, researchers have found a new and more accurate way to map the sea floor. The improved resolution has already allowed them to identify previously hidden features—including thousands of extinct volcanoes more than 1000 meters tall—as well as piece together some lingering uncertainties in Earth’s ancient history. Roughly 90% of the deep-ocean sea floor remains unmapped, a fact that’s been thrown...

On the seafloor just off of the U.S. East Coast lies a barely known world, explorations of which bring continual surprises. As recently as the mid-2000s, practically zero methane seeps — spots on the seafloor where gas leaks from the Earth's crust — were thought to exist off the East Coast; while one had been reported more than a decade ago, it was thought to be one of a kind. But in the past two years, additional studies have revealed a host of new areas of seafloor rich in seeps, said Laura Brothers, a research geologist at the U.S. Geological...

Enlarge Image Credit: UNOLS As many as three new coastal research vessels are slated to join the United States' oceanographic research fleet—and Oregon State University will take the lead in designing and building them, OSU President Edward Ray announced yesterday. The National Science Foundation (NSF) will give OSU an initial $3 million to coordinate the concept design; the total expected cost will be $290 million, assuming the U.S. Congress comes up with the money for the new ships. The vessels are part of a long-term plan to replace some of the vessels in the rapidly aging U.S. scientific fleet....

How an 1870s marine expedition changed oceanography and drove eight sailors insane When was the first voyage of the Challenger? No, not the Space Shuttle — the original Challenger, a sea ship that sailed in 1872. The HMS Challenger traversed the world's oceans for four years, drove some of its sailors completely insane, caused about a quarter of the crew to jump ship, and forever changed the face of ocean science. Is there a way to scroll past the nature channels without seeing one that describes the richness of the ocean and the life that teems in its depth? In...

We have been hearing a lot about what the oil spill is doing to the ocean. But something else which is also concerning is the condition the ocean was in, even prior to the spill. We live in a finite world. Our continued mistreatment of the ocean, the reduced fish population, and the disappearance of large fish in the last 50 years are all serious concerns. Jeremy Jackson is the Ritter Professor of Oceanography and Director of the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In this talk, Professor Jackson lays out the shocking state...

Floating Instrument Platform (FLIP) Considering we live on a planet who's surface is 71% water, it only makes sense that we should understand as much about the oceans as we do dry land. So throughout the years there has been countless expeditions who's main purpose was to collect information about the vast bodies of water throughout the world. The men and women who have dedicated their lives to the specific purpose of unlocking the secrets of the vast waterworld that resides within our planet, have benefited from various vessels designed specifically to meet that challenge. Calypso In 1950, French explorer...

  Considering we live on a planet who's surface is 71% water, it only makes sense that we should understand as much about the oceans as we do dry land.  So throughout the years there has been countless expeditions who's main purpose was to collect information about the vast bodies of water throughout the world.  The men and women who have dedicated their lives to the specific purpose of unlocking the secrets of the vast waterworld that resides within our planet, have benefited from various vessels designed specifically to meet that challenge.  In 1950, French explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau acquired the...

Chile has sacked the head of the navy's Oceanography Service (SHOA), saying he failed to provide a clear warning of the killer tsunami that followed a huge earthquake. SHOA chief Mariano Rojas was immediately removed from the post, while the head of the Navy was opening an investigation "on the circumstances of the decision process after the natural catastrophe hit the country", an official statement said on Friday. Along with the emergency response agency ONEMI and the president's office, SHOA headed the official response to Saturday's massive 8.8-magnitude tremor and ensuing tsunami waves, which killed more than 800 people and...

BARCELONA, Spain — Terrified passengers told Thursday how three giant rogue waves smashed through the front windows of a Mediterranean cruise ship killing two people and causing mass panic on the liner. The eight-metre (26-foot) high waves injured another 14 people, including one woman in "very serious condition" in hospital. Most of the 1,300 tourists were being repatriated from the Mv Louis Majesty to their home countries on Thursday. "It was a monster wave... it smashed all the windows. Everything happened so quickly," German passenger Margrit Woffe-Ternes told Spanish public television. Images filmed by a passenger showed screaming people fleeing...

Beware of the blob—this time, it's for real. As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says. Up to 124 miles (200 kilometers) long, the mucilages appear naturally, usually near Mediterranean coasts in summer. The season's warm weather makes seawater more stable, which facilitates the bonding of the organic matter that makes up the blobs. Now, due to warmer temperatures, the mucilages are forming in winter too—and lasting for months. Until now, the light-brown "mucus" was seen...

As millions of people watched Hurricane Bill batter the Dominican Republic via satellite last week, Drake sought a different view: from 3,000 feet beneath the pounding seas. Going where no man could, Drake, a 7-foot yellow robotic submarine from Rutgers University, proved there is yet another application for a fleet that university oceanographers hope will one day populate the globe. Already, Drake's sister ship, Scarlet, is two-thirds of the way toward completing the world's first trans-Atlantic crossing. Another Slocum glider, as oceanographers prefer to call the robo-subs, was launched off Sandy Hook Thursday on a ground-breaking mission to patrol the...

A robotic sub called Nereus has reached the deepest-known part of the ocean. The dive to 10,902m (6.8 miles) took place on 31 May, at the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, located in the western Pacific Ocean. This makes Nereus the deepest-diving vehicle currently in service and the first vehicle to explore the Marianas Trench since 1998. The unmanned vehicle is remotely operated by pilots aboard a surface ship via a lightweight tether. Its thin, fibre-optic tether to the research vessel Kilo Moana allows the submersible to make deep dives and be highly manoeuvrable. THE NEREUS SUBMERSIBLE Weight on...

If it looks like a fish and swims like a fish, it usually is a fish. But not this new, lifelike robot fish developed by U.K. scientists. (Raw video below.) The prototype robot fish, modeled after carp, have been swimming around the London Aquarium as they await their release off northern Spain in 2011. Equipped with tiny chemical sensors, the fish will collect data on pollution in the port of Gijón and wirelessly transmit the information back to the port's control center.

February 2, 2009 4:00 AM PST The next frontier: 'Seasteading' the oceans Posted by Declan McCullagh Patri Friedman, executive director of the Seasteading Institute, previously worked in Google's Mountain View headquarters as a software engineer.(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News) PALO ALTO, Calif.--This chic, tree-lined California town might seem an unlikely place to begin the colonization of Earth's oceans. Palo Alto is known for expensive modernism, Stanford University, al fresco dining, and land prices so high a modest cottage still sells for well over $1 million. If Patri Friedman gets his way, the area will also be remembered for birthing a political...

The world's marine ecosystems risk being severely damaged by ocean acidification unless there are dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions, warn scientists. More than 150 top marine researchers have voiced their concerns through the "Monaco Declaration", which warns that changes in acidity are accelerating. The declaration, supported by Prince Albert II of Monaco, builds on findings from an earlier international summit. It says pH levels are changing 100 times faster than natural variability. Based on the research priorities identified at The Ocean in a High CO2 World symposium, held in October 2008, the declaration states: "We scientists who met in Monaco...