To ScienceBlogs, thank you for inviting us and nurturing us here. This is a unique gathering. The community taught me alot about science, and scientists, and community itself, and I am thankful. I learned about the battle we face, and about our new place in society, and how we need to be ready to fight for science, and frame things. Seriously, we’re redefining a new medium together. ScienceBlogs is a great place to be.

Before we sail I want to give a shout out to the awesome staff. They really are the best at what they do, pioneering a new, more informed media with the power to change and to grow. Thank you Ginny, Katherine, Tim, and Adam. You keep the lights on. It was wonderful to be a part of this. Thanks to DSN readers and co-bloggers. You lift us up. Craig and Kevin, you drive us deeper. Rock on. I’ll see you on the other side.

Please, everyone, join us as we seek a new adventure at Discovery Earth.

If art is the universal language, how do you say “don’t eat orange roughy”? We’ll have to ask electronic artist Don Relyea, who generated the image above. “Orange Roughy” was inspired by his wife’s cooking, which, unfortunately, includes the fish formerly known as “slimehead”.

Orange roughy are long lived and quickly depleted. They come from seamounts around New Zealand, generally. The fishery works like a clear cutting operation. Take it all and move on. It’s not sustainable. On the bright side, the New Zealand government is one of 69 countries to take part in a new international agreement on high-seas and deep-sea fisheries.

As the agreement states, deep-sea areas need to be rigorously managed to identify and protect vulnerable ecosystems.

I trolled a “maori-style” sailfish image that could make a nice tattoo. It’s shown here on a t-shirt from Google images.

Sailfish are “oceanodromous”, which means they occur widely throughout the world’s oceans, live and migrate wholly in the sea. As opposed to anadromous fish, like salmon, which migrate to freshwater to spawn; or catadromous eels, like Anguilla sp., which migrate to saltwater to spawn.

Naturally, one of the favorite pastimes here in the Cone of Probability is to monitor as many websites as possible for different forecasts and projections of Hurricane Ike. The more the models stray away from Corpus Christi the less anxious you feel. Currently three models veer to the north before landfall, so CC has a small chance of escaping the storm.

The image above is from my favorite hurricane web interface so far, called Stormpulse. It’s full screen, and very interactive, almost like a video game. If you’re looking for in-depth analysis, grab a cup a’ joe and dig in to Jeff Masters WunderBlog. It’s a great resource from a PhD storm chaser. Jeff predicted a chain of atmospheric disturbances following Gustav two weeks ago. For Ike, he overlays the trajectory on maps of heat potential, which is very cool.

Corpus Christi is in the center of Hurricane Ike’s projected trajectory. He’s coming at us like a fastball over home plate. This is a bit scarier than being on the periphery of the strike zone. TAMU-CC started issuing updates yesterday. One scientific expedition is recalled.

If there’s anything good that came out of Katrina it’s better hurricane preparedness in the Gulf of Mexico. Should the storm bear down on us, we’ll shutter up the house, pack up the car, and head for hill country in Austin, TX. My wife can drive while I crunch data and the kids fall asleep in the back. Right. I wonder what happened to Kevin and his family?

Image from Free Geography Tools

There is a nice write-up on the latest and greatest thought-exercise on global warming and sea level rise (SLR) at Scientific American online, complete with links to stunning pictures of glacier flows. The basic premise of the story is that Greenland, the world’s largest island, holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 7 meters. That’s enough to sink parts of Manhattan. Try it yourself. But the thrust of the research is that Greenland’s ice melt won’t sink Manhattan because the glaciers are moving too slowly for a global SLR of more than 2 little ol’ meters. Low range scenarios predict SLR < 1 m by year 2100, including thermal expansion.

Global warming denialists may claim that the results of the study downplay the effects of sea level rise, but they do not. One to two meters is a significant rise for low-lying coastal communities. Furthermore, the new estimate is higher than the high-end IPCC estimate of 0.16- 0.60 m SLR by 2100. Coastal communities, beware of this state of denial. Seawalls will not help you. They’ll just drain your municipal budget. Focus instead on outbound highways and bridges.

Now, I am no expert on global warming. I am skeptical of Doomsday scenarios (the world was supposed end 25 years ago). But, I study oceanography, listen to my professors, and choose to defer to experts when possible. Now that so many climate scientists agree that Earth is warming and the ice is melting, the pressing question for coastal communities like mine becomes not “if or if not” but “how, when, and where” will sea level rise?

At its core, the research by Pfeffer et al. (2008) studies the question “what is a glacial pace?”, finding it’s not enough raise global sea level more than 2m. However, the global warming model is complicated. Subarctic glaciers in Alaska, Argentina, Canada and Russia contribute 60 percent of sea level rise from glacial melt. And, sudden movements of large Antarctic ice sheets could, shall we say, overcompensate for Greenland’s glacial pace. If the relatively fresh meltwater is buoyant, it will travel in a wave, with peaks and troughs, in the surface layer across the ocean basin until the energy balance is restored. So, as I see it, “average sea level rise” is less important than wave amplitude. One 7 m wave will flood Manhattan, as illustrated above.

However, if the meltwater is cold and relatively dense, it will sink or “downwell” to become part of the North Atlantic bottom water, and begin to travel along the global conveyor belt of thermohaline circulation. In this scenario, the effect of meltwater would be delayed as bottom water travels the globe to upwellings zones in other parts of the world. But warm water expands, too, and there are feedback mechanisms, so really, it all just makes my head hurt.

To me, the real problem is that the trend in SLR estimates is increasing, and the uncertainty, aka the known unknowns are also increasing. One big question remains. What is the glacial pace where it matters the most?

Reference:

Pfeffer, W.T., J. T. Harper, S. O’Neel. 2008. Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-Century Sea-Level Rise. Science Vol. 321. no. 5894, pp. 1340 – 1343. DOI: 10.1126/science.1159099

Diane’s best known for sinking her own shrimp boat in protest of toxic discharge at a Formosa Plastic industrial plant here in South Texas, but she’s taken on Union Carbide and others like a One Woman Army. She is the author of An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas . Environmental organizations like Truthout.org call her an American hero. Read her book. It’ll make your mercury rise.

Speaking of which, Diane says mercury contamination in seafood is widely under reported in the Coastal Bend region. She spoke of 1,000,000 pounds of mercury that “went missing” from an Alcoa aluminum plant near LaVaca Bay, Texas. Local fish, crabs, and people were contaminated. This is now a Superfund site, but in her day toxic discharge was business as usual. I wonder, how much have things improved?

Methyl-mercury in seafood is in the news a lot lately, particularly at Mother Jones, which covers the story of canned tuna in some detail, asking “Why is mercury tuna still legal”? Mercury in seafood. You just can’t avoid it anymore.

You can’t say farewell to Summer 2008 without a loving look back at… the Italian Spiderman. This viral video came on the scene like a Jersey girl on the boardwalk, sweeping Philly boys off their feet. We’re showing Episode 6, in which our hero seeks remnants of the the asteroid that formed the Chicxulub Crater off the coast of the Yucatan Penninsula.

Check out YouTube for the full series from Alrugo Entertainment if you haven’t seen it. Special shout out to the 2-1-5. Miss you guys. Congrats Bill and Kika, welcome baby Alexa Capozzoli!

The deep-sea gorgonian genus Iridogorgia sp. is characterized by a partially calcareous axis with an open, upright spiral or helix arrangement (Verrill, 1883) used to strain food from the water column. Three new species were described last year (Watling 2007). According to Dr. Steve Cairns at Smithsonian NMNH, this is Iridogorgia pourtalesii Verrill, 1883. It’s the type species for the genus. Picture from 1410 m depth in Green Canyon 854 on the 2007 Expedition to the Deep Slope in the Gulf of Mexico.

AE Verrill (1883) described the family Chrysogorgidae to which Iridogorgia belongs, calling them “the most beautiful and interesting of all the known gorgonians”. He compares the iridescent colors of the axis to burnished gold, mother-of-pearl, and the “most brilliant tropical beetles”. Shrimp like these colonies, too. How many do you count living in the branches?

References:

Verill, AE. 1883. Report on the Anthozoa, and on some additional species dredged by the “Blake” in 1877-1879, and by the U.S. Fish Commission steamer “Fish Hawk” in 1880-82. Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool. Harvard 11:1-72, pls. 1-8.

Watling, L. 2007. A review of the genus Iridogorgia (Octocorallia: Chrysogorgiidae) and its relatives, chiefly from the North Atlantic Ocean. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the UK. 87: 393-402. doi:10.1017/S002531540705535X

The adjacent firebush (Fig. 1) buzzes every morning with dozens of bees of a few different species. Two species are bumblebees, big, black, and loud; the other is small, like a honeybee, yellow and black. Hummingbirds also frequent the bush. I like it because it reminds me of a deep-sea coral colony, covered with invertebrates.

I am concerned about the bees because populations are in great decline throughout North America. So I take special care of this firebush, hoping to make a small contribution to their eventual recovery.

After scant consideration, I performed a rather dangerous and risky maneuver. The bees were preoccupied, and I was barefoot with a hammer looking for something to do. So I performed a rotting wood transplant. The technique maintains the wood’s character, height, and orientation (Fig. 3). Basically, the piece was (gingerly) removed from the garage and nailed to the fence.

I think its going to be a money maker. I am calling it “ornamental rotting wood”. The bees love it. No sooner than the last nail was pounded, two came scouting their new home. Isn’t that wonderful? A sailor saved a bumblebee today. You can, too. Keep your eyes open for rotting wood in your hood. Don’t throw it away. Make it “ornamental”.

Now, if I could only find a rotting plank full of lightning bugs….