- Election of ISA Secretary-General mired by accusations of bribery and corruption
- International Seabed Authority gears up for a leadership challenge at the July meeting.
- No, the ship didn’t steer towards the pylon: A brief fact check on the MV Dali collision with Baltimore’s Key Bridge
- New Deep-sea Mining Bill Introduced in Congress
- NOAA confirms North Atlantic Right Whale killed by commercial lobster gear
- Norway moves one step closer to deep-sea mining
[This article originally appeared yesterday in the Deep-sea Mining Observer. ~Ed.]
The Rio Grande Rise is an almost completely unstudied, geologically intriguing, ecologically mysterious, potential lost continent in the deep south Atlantic. And it also hosts dense cobalt-rich crusts.
The Rio Grande Rise is a region of deep-ocean seamounts roughly the area of Iceland in the southwestern Atlantic. It lies west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge off the coast of South America and near Brazil’s island territories. As the largest oceanic feature on the South American plate, it straddles two microplates. And yet, like much of the southern Atlantic deep sea, it is relatively under sampled.
Almost nothing is known about the ecology or biodiversity of the Rio Grande Rise.
Foghorn (A Call to Action!)
- The US Government enters it’s third week of shutdown over Trump’s Border Wall. Democrats in the House passing funding bills identical to the one unanimously passed by the Senate. Despite that, McConnell won’t let those funding bills come to a vote in his Senate. The Republicans own this travesty.
- ‘Appalling’ toilets and rule-breaking as US shutdown hits national parks.
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- How a Seaweed-Eating Microbe Could Help Fight Plastic Pollution
- Apple finally admits what we basically all knew: being able to repair electronics is bad for the iPhone’s bottom line and that’s really bad news for the environments. Tim Cook to Investors: People Bought Fewer New iPhones Because They Repaired Their Old Ones.
- Snow at sea is lovely.
The future of fitness tracking is here! reStepper is an open-source, arduino-powered machine to walk your fitness tracker after those unfortunate workouts when your steps didn’t get logged. Did you have the audacity to take you child for a walk in a stroller? Get those steps back! Were you foolish enough to go swimming when you could have walked in aimless circles around the pool? Don’t let the credit drift away! Reckless enough to do something, anything, that might require you to take off your jewelry before working up a sweat? Let the reStepper sweat it all back! Maybe you just don’t want third parties to know where you run, or where your secret morel patch is, or how fast they need to make the people harvesting machines in order to catch Charlton Heston.
Ummm.
It’s funny.
So what is it?
The reStepper is an open-source machine that “walks” a fitness tracker for you.
Hagfish. You love them. I love them. Of all the fish in all the seas, none are more magnificent than the hagfish. Across the world, children celebrate the hagfish by making slime from Elmer’s glue, their own mucous, or just, like, something. Seriously, how is is that toddler hands are always coated in some strange, unidentifiable slime?
And never, ever forget:
Your car has just been crushed by hagfish: Frequently Asked Questions.
2018 was a big year in hagfish science. Below are just a few of my favorite studies.
Biogeography
A hagfish in the high Antarctic? Hagfish have previously never been observed in the shallow waters around Antarctic, but a photograph from 1988 was determined this year to be a hagfish feeding on a large pile of clam sperm in shallow water. Neat!
Incidentally, the reason the photo languished for so long is that it was originally though to be a Nemertean. Because Antarctic Nemertean worms are huge and horrifying.
- Dayton and Hammerstrom (2018) A hagfish at Salmon Bay, McMurdo Sound, Antarctica? DOI: 10.1017/S0954102018000202.
Read More “All the slime that sticks, we print: 2018 in Hagfish Research” »
The Aquarius Project: The First Student-Driven Underwater Meteorite Hunt
Pirates! Robots! Meteors! A team of plucky teenage explorers! If this doesn’t end up as a feature film, I’ll eat my red watch cap.
On Monday, February 6, 2017 a meteorite dropped out of space and dropped right into Lake Michigan. Since then, a team of young explorers sponsored by the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium have been combing the lake for the lost meteorite. Catch up with this epic adventure through their podcast and on OpenExplorer. The search continues into 2019.
Iceland’s Shallow Hydrothermal Vents
Not all hydrothermal vents emerge in the deep sea. Of the coast of Iceland, shallow water vent spew forth their hydrothermal plumes in the shallows, where small underwater robots can easy access. You’d think we’d know more about them than their deep ocean counterparts but we actually know less.
Iceland’s Shallow Hydrothermal Vents hopes to fill in some of our understanding of these weird and wonderful ecosystems.
Search for Slave Shipwrecks
On a hot summer day in the murky waters of the man-made Millbrook Quarry in Northern Virginia, a group of about 25 people outfitted in scuba gear take turns going down to a depth of 30 feet, testing their compass reading skills, flooding their masks and practicing emergency ascents without air. The sight is not so unusual since Millbrook is the main training and certification site for scuba divers in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area and often hosts such groups. What might give folks pause, however, is that upon closer look they may notice that all 25 of the divers are African American. And if they chat with this unexpected bunch, they might also find that a majority are certified and qualified to search for, document and help excavate slave trade shipwrecks.
Search for Slave Shipwrecks
Divers with Purpose and the Slave Wrecks Project will be traveling across Africa and the Caribbean documenting the stories of underwater archaeologists working to preserve the history of the Atlantic slave trade buried at sea.
Read More “Get into the spirit of Adventure: 10 Expeditions to follow in 2019” »
Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- ‘We Are Not Prepared to Die’: Island Nations Push Ambitious Plan at UN Climate Talks.
- This is beautiful: What the ocean floor can tell us about climate change.
We have written a lot about Aquaman over the last 10 years. With our favorite ocean master is finally getting his big screen debut, we’ve collected everything Aquaman and Southern Fried Science in one place. Enjoy!
First, the brutal takedown that started it all and its follow-ups:
- The horrifying physiological and psychological consequences of being Aquaman
- The importance of being Aquaman, or how to save the Atlantean from his briny fate
- Epilogue to the Return of the Science of Aquaman: Costume Palettes at Depth
Read More “The Science of Aquaman: The Complete Anthology” »
Cuttings (short and sweet): Follow YouTube science communicator Kurtis Baute on twitter! Ottawa designates two new areas as critical habitat for killer whales in B.C. waters. CHEK news. Spoils (long reads and deep dives): Arctic lakes are vanishing by the hundreds. By Chelsea Harvey, for Scientific American. Even fish get the bends. By Anna Saleh, … Read More “Orca protection and vanishing Arctic lakes: Thursday Afternoon Dredging, December 20th, 2018” »
“Logic is a tweeting bird” – Spock, Star Trek
Social media can be a great tool for spreading and disseminating published science. Potentially it can reach a wide audience and for free !
Most platforms allow you to insert links to direct readers to the original paper or publication. If you are working in an area that is relevant to conservation or policy, social media can be a great way of getting papers to the right audience that may need that information (Parsons et al., 2014). Moreover, there is now increasing data that using social media can increase download and citation rates of scientific papers, which in turn is good for the careers of scientists in an academic setting.
Read More “To tweet to whom – a tweeting guide for marine scientists” »
Cuttings (short and sweet): Follow UBC’s wildlife conservation economics lab on twitter! The Deep-Sea Fish with the Telescopic Tubular Eyes. By Craig McClain, for Deep Sea News. How to take action to help endangered species near you. A Revelator News Podcast by John Platt. Spoils (long reads and deep dives): Why does halibut cost so … Read More “Amazing fish eyes, the real cost of halibut, and protecting local species: Thursday Afternoon Dredging, December 13, 2018” »