New research shows that great white sharks power their non-stop journeys of more than 2,500 miles with energy stored as fat and oil in their massive livers. The findings provide novel insights into the biology of these ocean predators. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
In the summer of 2007, Tropical Storm Erin stumped meteorologists. Most tropical cyclones dissipate after making landfall, weakened by everything from friction and wind shear to loss of the ocean as a source of heat energy. Not Erin. The storm intensified as it tracked through Texas. It formed an eye over Oklahoma. As it spun over the southern plains, Erin grew stronger than it ever had been over the ocean. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
Evidence continues to mount that a huge ocean covered much of the surface of Mars billions of years ago. Scientists have spotted what appears to be an ancient river delta, which may have emptied into a vast ocean that inundated up to one-third of the Red …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Space.com
By Emily Crum
This summer, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Ocean Exploration and Research invites YOU to get involved in ocean exploration through two unique opportunities.
Follow Ocean Exploration LIVE: Northeast U.S. Canyons Expedition 2013
Between now and August 17, NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer, America’s ship for ocean exploration, will be exploring deep coral communities, undersea canyons, cold gas seeps, landslide features, and a seamount. Sound interesting? Good news: You can watch the action live right here.
Using satellite and high-speed Internet pathways, live video from cameras on the Deep Discoverer remotely operated vehicle and Seirios camera sled and lighting platform located thousands of meters deep on the seafloor is streamed to scientists and the public around the world. Scientists follow along online, providing input and helping to guide the expedition from shore. These same live video feeds are available online 24/7, so that anyone, anywhere can follow the exploration.
To learn more about the expedition, you can access daily updates, mission logs, photos and video clips, maps, and educational materials. You can also follow the expedition on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to keep up-to-date on the latest dive plans, operations, and discoveries.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at The White House
By Esther Sung Where food comes from, how it impacts the environment, and ultimately, our health, all make for a very intricate and complex topic. Sometimes, trying to make the best choices for you and the environment can make one’s head spin. I have often felt that way about seafood. I know about farmed salmon but what about other fish and seafood? Is farmed shrimp ok? So it was refreshing to read The Perfect Protein: The Fish Lover’s Guide to Saving the Oceans and Feeding the World (Rodale) by Andy Sharpless, CEO of Oceana. In this slim book, you’ll find a clear and succinct message that implores you to look to the sea for food, not just for health reasons but for environmental ones, too. And when faced with indecision, Sharpless guides you toward making the best choices. He took some time to explain why the outlook for some of the world’s largest fisheries isn’t so grim, why you really shouldn’t eat shrimp, and why eating a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish is making a statement. Epicurious: You write that seafood–fish, crustaceans, mollusks–is the perfect protein. Other than omega-3’s, which is probably the reason so many people eat fish, what other nutrients does seafood offer? Andy Sharpless: Your doctor will refer to the fish because of the omega-3 and omega-6. But if you’re swapping red meat out and putting fish in, medical studies show that you’ll get a reduction in obesity and cancer and heart disease, so there’s a bunch of other benefits that come along with eating fish. And then of course, we’re emphasizing that eating seafood is good because doing so is good for the planet. This is a way to get animal protein into your diet that–if it comes from an abundant ocean–is really the best, least-stressful way for the planet. Epi: You write about trying to find that balance between the growing populations and their needs to make a living and to feed their families, and the need to preserve the ocean’s ecology and allowing fish populations to grow. But with climate change, unstable economies, and political instability all around the world, how much harder will it be, if at all, to achieve harmony between humans and ocean life? AS: We’re very optimistic about this. One of the reasons is that people are used to thinking that food production is at war with protecting biodiversity, because that’s the way it is on land. Expanding agriculture is the primary driver of biodiversity loss on the land. But that framework misleads you when you think about the ocean because in the ocean, we’re eating a wild creature. We’re eating wild fish! So the things that we would do to make sure there are a lot of wild fish to eat as food would also serve to protect the ocean’s fundamental biodiversity. You need the natural system to be strong, abundant, and diverse in order to have lots of food to eat. So I think message number one is that what used to be enemies…<div …read more
Source: Epicurious
By monitoring the color changes in the ocean, such as those caused by photosynthetic pigments in phytoplankton, scientists learn more about the overall health and functioning of our planet. Such studies also could help future missions better observe and understand alien oceans. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
A Long Island town is honoring the spot where a bottle was found after Superstorm Sandy containing a message from a girl who died in 2010.
A plaque was placed on Saturday on a rock near the bridge at Patchogue Long Island Beach Club, where the bottle was discovered in December. It reads: “Be excellent to yourself, dude,” the same message inside the bottle.
The line is a quote from “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” The note was written a dozen years ago by 10-year-old Sidonie Fery and tossed into the ocean.
The girl died in an accident when she was 18. Her mother Mimi said Saturday she was amazed by the town’s kindness. She says her daughter brought joy to everyone.
The plaque also has a photo of Sidonie.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox US News
The guardians of Antarctica’s marine wealth gather in Germany on Sunday for a fresh round of talks on creating the world’s largest ocean sanctuary. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
Ocean acidification is damaging some marine species while others thrive, say scientists. An international team studied the effect of ocean acidification on plankton in the North Sea over the past forty years, to see what impact future changes may have. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
About 55.5 million years ago, geologically rapid emission of a large volume of greenhouse gases at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary (PETM) led to global warming of about 5oC, severe ocean acidification, and widespread extinction of microscopic organisms living on the deep-sea floor (foraminifera). …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
By Rich Smith, The Motley Fool
Filed under: Investing
On Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013, the Green Bay Packers lost their chance at the Super Bowl. Playing before a sellout crowd at Candlestick Park against the San Francisco 49ers, the Packers gave up a playoff record 579 total yards, succumbing to a team that went on to claim the NFC Championship but eventually lost the Super Bowl to the Baltimore Ravens at an eventful game in New Orleans.
Three months later and an ocean away, another “football” team, British soccer club Manchester United , had a different story to tell. On Monday, April 22, 2013, Man Utd claimed their 20th league title, beating Aston Villa 3-0 to win the English Premier League Championship .
Man Utd now enters the hunt for a place in next season’s European Champions League, while the Packers must go back to the drawing board, and start again at 0-0 in the race for Super Bowl XLVIII. That fact alone tells you why Man Utd is probably a better “football” team than the Packers.
But here’s the real revelation: Manchester United is also a better investment than the Packers.
Football fans vs. profits fanatics
That’s right. Manchester United and the Green Bay Packers aren’t just “football teams” that you can cheer for. They’re also “companies” that you can invest in. But they’re very different kinds of companies.
You may recall how, Green Bay announced in December of 2011 that it was opening up its team to new buyers, offering to sell up to 880,000 Packers shares to the public for $250 apiece. Well, less than a year later, Man Utd decided to open itself up to public ownership as well, holding an initial public offering of its stock at an offer price of $14 a share.
Eight months later, those Manchester United shares sell for nearly $18 apiece — a 28% gain. Not bad … but get a load of how Packers shares have performed. Since their third public offering back in 1950, shares of the Packers have increased in price 10,000 times, from a split-adjusted price of $0.025 per share, to the 2011 asking price of $250. That looks like a pretty hefty profit. It looks like the Packers are outperforming Man Utd.
But looks can be deceiving.
The problem with Packers, according to its prospectus, is that despite the rise in value of the team, and of its stock, investors in Green Bay “should not purchase [GB] stock with the purpose of making a profit.” Why not? Because each share of the Green Bay Packers comes burdened with “transfer restrictions and redemption rights.”
The effect of these rights is to prevent anyone who bought a Green Bay share back in 1950 from ever realizing a dime of profit on the 10,000% appreciation of that share’s value today. Any time a Green Bay shareholder tries to sell a share today, “the Corporation has a right of first refusal to repurchase [GB] Stock at a price of $0.025 per share.”
In
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
In its final assessment, the European project Trident has submerged its I-AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle for intervention) in the Port of Sóller (Mallorca). The vehicle has been able to find and retrieve independently an object in an unknown seabed facing the adverse conditions presented by the open ocean.
When superstorm Sandy turned and took aim at New York City and Long Island last October, ocean waves hitting each other and the shore rattled the seafloor and much of the United States – shaking detected by seismometers across the country, University of Utah researchers found.
Superstorm Sandy didn’t just rattle the East Coast, it also jiggled the ground across the country ever so slightly, scientists reported Thursday.
Earthquake sensors located as far away as the Pacific Northwest detected the storm’s energy as it surged toward the New York metropolitan region last year. The network typically records the sudden release of energy in the Earth’s crust, but it can pick up shaking triggered by ocean waves, mine cave-ins and tornadoes.
As Sandy lashed at New York City and New Jersey, the force of waves slamming into other waves shook the seafloor, which was recorded by the system of 500 sensors.
The energy generated by Sandy was similar to small earthquakes between magnitudes 2 and 3, seismologists at the University of Utah estimated.
While they did not track Sandy’s strength last October, they went back and analyzed seismic data before and after the storm churned ashore. The findings were presented at a meeting of the Seismological Society of America in Salt Lake City.
Sandy, which started off as a hurricane that later merged with another storm system, caused widespread property damage, swamping homes and businesses along the jersey shore and parts of New York City.
Sandy wasn’t the first storm to be sensed by quake stations. When Hurricane Katrina took aim at New Orleans in 2005, instruments in California tracked the path of the punishing waves.
Other events also have been captured by seismic sensors in recent years. A deadly coal mine collapse in Utah in 2007 registered as a magnitude-3.9 quake. Earlier this year, a meteor that exploded over Siberia’s Ural Mountains sent rippling shock waves that were detected by ground instruments.
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Online:
Seismological Society of America: http://www.seismosoc.org/
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/national/~3/fmJ-LFwTKTI/
By Mark Russell In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, many of the uber-rich who have multimillion-dollar beach homes in the tony town of Southampton, NY, are seeking to keep the ocean from their mansions. They’ve been spending big bucks ($50,000, in one case, and that could be on the low end) to…
From: http://www.newser.com/story/166442/rich-defend-beach-homes-but-put-beach-at-risk.html
(Phys.org) —Geology professor Dan Schulze calls this singular gem from the remote Guaniamo region of Venezuela the “Picasso” diamond. The blue luminescent, high-resolution image of a diamond formed over a billion years ago reminds him of some paintings from Picasso’s Blue Period. Like a cubist masterpiece, its striking irregular and anomalous features carry timeless secrets and yield new perspectives on life and the Earth’s early history.
A new study of Antarctic clams reveals that age matters when it comes to adapting to the effects of climate change. The research provides new insight and understanding of the likely impact of predicted environmental change on future ocean biodiversity.
A sudden switch from herring to sardines in the English Channel in the 1930s was due to a long-term ocean cycle called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), an international study shows. This is the first evidence linking the AMO to trends in important European fisheries.
By CarosCleanup
(Phys.org) —Back in 2004, German scientists discovered traces of supernova ejecta that had been deposited in the deep-sea ferromanganese crust of the pacific ocean. They dated the supernova event to 2.8 million years ago (Mya), using estimates from the decay of iron-60 radioisotope. They were also able to estimate the distance of the supernova event to 10 parsecs (pc) from our sun, based on the amount of iron-60 deposited. At the April 14th meeting of the American Physical Society, another German scientist, Shawn Bishop, reported finding traces of iron-60 of supernova origin in the fossilized remains of a common bacteria. By accurately dating the sediment cores in which the samples were found, Bishop appears to have discovered the first biological signature of an ancient supernova event, and may even be able to link it to a specific exploding star.
