Moonlit Ocean
The delicate moon´s reflection over the ocean at night. — Sergio Montúfar
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Ocean Comet
Comet PanSTARRS (C/2011 L4) soars above the Indian Ocean in the evening twilight of the Australia western coastline near Perth. — John Goldsmith
NORTHEAST PACIFIC SEA NETTLE
Chrysaora fuscescens
Size: Up to 30 inches in diameter with mouth arms trailing up to 16 feet.
Habitat: Coastal waters of the northeast Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea.
Fun Fact: These distinctive golden-brown jellies swim against ocean currents with their oral arms and tentacles extended to capture planktonic prey floating by, including crustaceans, snails, fish eggs and larvae, and other species of jellies.
Imagine being this pretty - but never seen. “The jewelled squid, Histioteuthis bonellii, swims at freezing depths and passes its life in total darkness”.
GALLERY; Seventeen amazing sea creatures you’ve never heard of.
Oceans in 2100 May ‘Sound’ Like Dinosaur-Era Seas
Scuba divers in the year 2100 might hear what the dinosaurs did, new research suggests.
Rising acidity in the oceans could set underwater acoustic conditions back to the Cretaceous period, scientists say, allowing some low-frequency sounds like whale songs to travel perhaps twice as far as they do now.
“We call it the Cretaceous acoustic effect, because ocean acidification forced by global warming appears to be leading us back to the similar ocean acoustic conditions as those that existed 110 million years ago, during the Age of Dinosaurs,” David G. Browning, an acoustician at the University of Rhode Island, said in a statement.
Scientists have discovered an unusual symbiosis between tiny single-celled algae and highly specialized bacteria in the ocean.
Every Single Recorded Hurricane (since 1851) in One Map
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a tropical storm and hurricane data archive that stretches back to 1851.
But looking at each storm individually doesn’t have nearly as much impact as seeing them all projected onto a map at once. Data visualization expert John Nelson combined data on historical storms’ paths and intensities to create this stunning image, where the color of a dot represents that storm’s intensity.
How Octopuses Make Themselves Invisible
Small pigment-filled cells, called chromatophores, and reflective ones called iridophores and leucophores, in the skin of most octopuses allow them to create nuanced patterns of color, luminosity and even harness polarized light to fool other ocean life.
But the information they use to craft the overall effect has been debated. Do they survey the whole area in their proximity and incorporate the general hues and patterns into their skin display, or do they pick out just a few nearby landmarks for a more precise match?
A new paper, published online last month in PLoS ONE, suggests that octopuses do focus on a limited selection of nearby objects in order to determine their disguise.
What is being seen is a fogbow, a reflection of sunlight by water drops similar to a rainbow but without the colors.
Triton: The Outer Most Ocean in The Solar System
A new day dawns on Triton. It’s going to be a cold one, much like the last. And the one before that… and every day since the moon settled into its present orbit around Neptune. Even the volcanoes here spew out cold gases and liquid water rather than hot magma. But below the frigid surface, which registers a temperature of -235 °C, there’s something more clement: a liquid ocean.
At first glance, Triton seems to be just another icy moon – a featureless, barren world spinning around Neptune, the outermost planet of our solar system. But Triton is different.
For one thing, it orbits Neptune backwards, moving in the opposite direction to Neptune’s rotation. It’s the only large moon in the solar system to do so. Satellites can’t form in these “retrograde” orbits, so Triton must have begun life elsewhere before being captured by the gas giant. It looks a lot like Pluto, and probably came from the same place – the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt, close to Neptune.
The Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past Triton in 1989, sending back images of the moon’s frozen surface. They revealed signs of cryovolcanism – the eruption of subsurface liquids which quickly freeze when exposed to the cold of the outer solar system. As such, Triton joins a short list of worlds in the solar system known to be geologically active.
Its surface ice is unique, too: largely composed of nitrogen, with some cantaloupe-textured terrain, and a polar cap of frozen methane.
by Tony Heff
Surfer Coco Ho is momentarily suspended weightless between the ocean’s surface and the shallow reef.
Tracking Ocean Sulfur Could Help Test Gaia Hypothesis
A few months ago I posted an article on the cwl blog explaining the Gaia theory, it’s essentially a theory that states there could be an underlying system of control covering the Earth, a system that acts to the survival of the planet. Here’s a nice accompanying article by Wired delving into a new research published which attempts to prove or disprove the Gaia theory:
Geologists at the University of Maryland have published research that could help prove or disprove Gaia theory — the notion that the Earth is one single self-regulating system.
The concept dates from the 70s and was initially formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. It proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings comprise a single system that maintains the conditions for life on Earth. It was initially met with skepticism from the scientific community, and remains somewhat controversial, but is now an important area of research in Earth systems science and biogeochemistry.
If the Gaia hypothesis is correct, then a number of signals should be observable in the Earth’s natural cycles and systems. One of those is that a sulfur compound made by organisms in the ocean should be stable enough in water to allow its transfer into the air, so it can then be returned to land. A team of geologists, geochemists and marine biologists led by Harry Oduro has developed a method of tracking the movement of sulfur through ocean organisms, the atmosphere and the land, potentially yielding evidence as to how strong this cycle is.
Oduro and his colleagues tracked two compounds — dimethylsulfoniopropionate (or DMSP), which is produced by plant plankton and seaweed in the ocean, and dimethylsulphide, which has a distinctive cabbage-like smell, and is produced when marine microbes break down DMSP.
By examining the differences in the isotope ratios between the compounds over time, the researchers were able to trace unique combinations of an element’s radioactive isotopes, keeping track of them to determine the rate at which the microbes metabolize DMSP into dimethylsulfide, and therefore get clues as to how fast it’s transferred from the ocean into the atmosphere.
