Tag Archives: oceanography

REVIEW — The Georgia Aquarium

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wow wall at Georgia Aquarium

As much as I love visiting museums on the down-low, seeing what the typical visitor (who doesn’t write blog posts about the experience) sees, there’s something to be said for behind-the-scenes tours. And holy balls what a tour it was at the Georgia Aquarium.

First of all, a big thanks goes out to Jen Richards, our unofficial tour guide. The Georgia Aquarium has some pretty great behind-the-scenes tours — want to SCUBA dive in the whale shark tank? you can! — but I doubt any of them are as intimate as Jen’s tour was for just me and Ryan. Plus, ours was free.

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Census Day

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Putting the party back in "Deep Sea Research Party" by Daichi Fujita

The census results are in!  Now we know exactly how many seats in congress are needed to fairly represent Bikini Bottom.  OK, you got me.  It wasn’t that kind of census.  I’m talking about the Census of Marine Life, the first attempt to systematically quantify all denizens of the inky deep.  Three main questions guided the direction and scope of this global collaboration: what did live in the oceans, what does live in the oceans, and what will live in the oceans?  Diversity, distribution, and abundance of life have been painstakingly observed, recorded, and now triumphantly reported. Continue reading Census Day →

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Roses are red, oceans are blue…

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OK, I don’t know much about flowers, but lively oceans aren’t typically blue, they’re green-ish.

Green Machine!!!!

Primary producers (in normal marine environments) need to photosynthesize, which involves a healthy dollop of chlorophyll.  Trivial fun fact suitable for printing on the side of a tube of Gogurt this is not.  “The fact that [the oceans] are not blue has a [direct] impact on the distribution of tropical cyclones,” says Anand Gnanadesikan, PI for a new NOAA study slated for release sometime in the near future in the Journal of Geophysical Research Letters.

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Tracers in the Sea

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nc lottery

Exotic mysteries that flow underneath a seemingly familiar surface teem with opportunities for the inquisitive mind.  A most literal and timely example is the topic of ocean circulation.  As the erudite listeners of Science… sort of may already know; not only is the earth quite a bit rounder than once thought, the oceans that dance on its surface are not mere mixing bowls of uniformly salty fluids churned by a flick of King Neptune’s trident.  Ocean water is stratified into layers that separate because of differential densities controlled by temperature and salinity.  As water moves, it travels along planes of constant density (isopycnals); which means that on average, water is more likely to flow laterally rather than vertically.


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